Happy monday. It is going to be a busy week. On top of the normal work-a-day stuff there are pies to bake and sides to prepare. While we are staying home and not joining the rest of the family this year, we are still having our own small thanksgiving feast. which only sounds small until you look at the fridge and pantry. Then some how it looks enormous. I’m hoping it will look less so once i start breaking things down into their actual components. The finished items tend to take up less space. So in between working this week there will be grocery break down and Thursday feast. The house will smell delicious and lunch will probably be cold cereal since I can find both the box and milk with relative ease. Fun stuff. But before then is the morning writing prompt. So everyone ready. Take a minute to stretch your brain. Do a quick run of your multiplication tables. (or just the five times section if you want to keep it simple) conjugate a few verbs.
They say warm ups are important before exercising. And I would so hate for you to get a mental cramp. So brains nice and warm? Good, then set the timer ant let’s go for fifteen.
Interesting. I’ve done historical bits before but never western fiction. It’s not a genre I am particularly partial to. Odd. But interesting. Now I want to know how Big Tom gets taken down.
Monday, November 23rd: Somehow he was branded an outlaw.
Somehow he was branded an outlaw. The thought astounded him in his quieter moments of reflection. He had such a quiet childhood. It was privileged with none of the hardships one would expect from an outlaw. He was expected to either follow his father in the study of the law, defending rich men from the legal actions of other rich men or join his uncle in the bank.
Somehow it all went wrong. He and Hank had never seen eye to eye. It wasn’t one thing either of them could name just an instant and complete dislike from the first time they were in the same room together. He remembered turning and seeing him at the same time Hank saw him. Their eyes met across a crowded room and each one knew he had found his enemy.
That was all it had been. At least at first. They started as rivals that day. Later there were concrete causes to despise one another, things the law and the court of public opinion could point to, but it started out as instant dislike.
It was, in the end, the court of public appeals that got him. Hank ended up dead, the substantial amount of cash and jewelry he was transporting went missing. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, but there hadn’t been any physical evidence linking anyone else to the crime. In the absence of evidence, he was blamed. A scape goat was needed.
He was shunned by his family and fled prosecution. As Hank’s father was the local judge and his brother the town sheriff, it seemed the smartest course of action. It also confirmed his guilt, at least in the minds of his friends and neighbors.
The irony is that by running, he closed most of the doors that were open to him all his life and by necessity became the outlaw they all thought he was on that fateful day when Hank was killed. In his many outlaw adventures, it was the one reason he never killed anyone. He made certain that every stagecoach her robbed, every train he relieved of its cargo, every bank he emptied, lost only valuable objects, never lives. It was a point of pride and his final act against Hank.
Hank may have forced him into becoming an outlaw, but he would not make him a murderer. It was only when he met Big Tom that he began to doubt if this was the best course of action.
His hatred of Tom was not like it was with Hank. There was no instant and deeply visceral hatred sweeping over him. But when he saw Hank’s watch, one of the items that went missing on that fateful day, hanging from the Chain attached to Big Tom. He knew he found the man who set him on this course and his general outlook on life began to subtly alter as a plan began to form in the back of his mind.
Plans these days were limited to the committing of a single heist. He planned for events. He planned ways to take down a secure vault or a moving train. He never planned further than that anymore. Looking too far down the road was never good for an outlaw. It never had a happy ending so no one wanted to skip the currently exciting elements for the inevitable end. But when he saw Hanks’s watch, for the first time in years, he stopped thinking like just an outlaw.
Ten til Midnight 