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The Last Shootist
Read the first pages of Miles Swarthout's new Western novel,
The Last Shootist,
a sequel to his late father Glendon's classic Western novel,
The Shootist, which became in 1976, John Wayne's final film.
“The young lions roar after their prey,
and seek their meat from God.”
Psalms 104:19-27
Prologue
(the final scene from Glendon Swarthout’s Western novel,
The Shootist)
Gillom Rogers inched through the doors of the Constantinople. Eyes watering from the smoke, he gaped at Jay Cobb and Serrano and Koopmann, and at Jack Pulford, seated against the wall.
Skirting the three bodies near the bar, avoiding the blood and brains as best he could, he looked over the bar, then scuffled in wonder through the carnage of glass behind it. A dollar bill stopped him. He put it in his pants pocket which held the other money. A black-handled Remington lay in the walkway. He picked it up and holding his breath approached the prone man, who seemed small to him now, even puny.
“Mister Books?”
He saw the torn coat and the blood on it and the right arm extended stiffly, gun aimed. He moved slowly to Books’ side, bending.
“It’s me, Gillom,” he said.
He got down on his knees. Books was incapable of speech. His chin was clamped upon his left wrist. Gillom did not care to look into the face, but the eyes arrested him. They considered. They considered not only the archway, as though something implacable waited on the other side, but something transcendent beyond that as well, far beyond.
“Mister Books, it’s me, Gillom.”
The mouth opened. Nothing inaudible issued from it, but the lips formed two words: “kill” and “me.”
“Kill you?”
Gillom chewed his lips.
“Sure thing,” he said, then stood, moved behind the man, straddled him, and put the muzzle of the revolver he had picked up to the back of the head. He turned his own head away; shut his eyes tight, gritted his teeth -- pulled the trigger.
The hammer clicked.
“Shit,” he groaned.
He despaired, aware on the rim of his consciousness of the smoke and the reek of the air and the solemnity of the fans. He got down on his knees again beside the prone man and worked at the fingers clenching the pearl handle of the second Remington, prying them free until he possessed that weapon, too.
He stood again, straddled the prone man, and put the muzzle of the revolver to the back of John Bernard Books’s head a second time, into the hair. He turned his own head away; shut his eyes tight; gritted his teeth; and pulled the trigger.
He walked out of the Constantinople into chaste air. A crowd of men and boys had gathered across the street. Waiting for a buggy to pass, then a buckboard, he crossed the street to the crowd.
“What happened in there?” At least six asked.
“They’re all dead,” said Gillom.
“Who?”
“J.B. Books. Jay Cobb. Jack Pulford. A Mex name of Serrano, a rustler. And some guy I don’t know who. A big guy. He killed ‘em all.”
“Who?”
“Books.”
Someone had counted. “Five! Whooeee!”
“Jesus Christ, boys, he killed every hard case around!” someone exulted. “Jesus, boys, we fin’ly got us a clean town!”
“Oughta put up a statue of the murderin’ bastard!” someone else enthused.
“These are his guns.” Gillom held them up for all to covet.
“He gave ‘em to me before he died.”
“Look at that!”
“Short barrel, no sight, specials by God -- hey, kid, wanna sell ‘em?”
“Hell, no,” said Gillom. He grinned and waved at the Constantinople. “O.K., folks, step right over and see the show! Drinks on the house!”
As the crowd tided across the street, Gillom Rogers strode away down it, swinging a gun in each hand. An alchemy of false spring sunlight turned the nickel of the Remingtons to silver. He strode head up, shoulders back, taller to himself, having sensations he had never known before. One gun was still warm in his hand, the bite of the smoke was in his nose and the taste of death on his tongue. His heart was high in his gullet, the danger past -- and now the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.
One
One thing he knew for fact: Gillom had to get these pistols hidden quick or his mother might murder him, too. They were much too valuable to flash around town. Sweet bearded Jesus! He now owned J. B. Books’ matched Remingtons!
Gillom Rogers slowed his walk, wondering where he would get a double-holster rig to house these legendary nickel-plated .44s. Or should he have a silk vest made like Books’, with leather holster pockets sewn on either side of the chest, angled forty-five degrees inward for a cross-handed draw? Too late to get J. B.’s own now. That special vest was all shot up and bloody on his corpse. Books was too heavy anyway to clothe Gillom’s skinny frame. If I can just learn to handle these guns as well as he did, quick draw, spinning tricks, a sharpshooter, I can be as famous a shootist as that old man was! With a little gambler’s luck, he realized, if nobody fills me fulla lead, makes me look like a human colander. Famous and feared. That’s the ticket!”
Gillom chewed his lip again in dazed thought, his pulse still elevated from the fatal roundelay. That custom-made vest was Books’ trademark anyway. He would have to practice his own gunfighting style, cut his own mustard, he muttered to himself. “But I will cherish these great guns. Any pistolero tries to steal these .44’s, swear to God, he’ll have to pry ‘em from my cold dead fingers. Hellfire, I’m the man who shot the most famous shootist ever lived, J. B. Books, and I ain’t lettin’ anybody forget it!”
“Hey, kid! Kid! Wait up!”
Gillom halted in the dust of El Paso Street, turned round and stepped back from the steel trolley tracks to see who was hulloing him. Shading his eyes against an afternoon sun, he squinted at the hullabaloo stirring around the Constantinople, spectators shouting, hurrying in and out of the opened front doors. A spindle-shanked fellow in a striped suit and derby hat, galloped out of the crowd milling in front of the now infamous Constantinople, El Paso’s newest saloon. The yellow-shoed journalist waved at Gillom as he loped up.
“Dan Dobkins! Daily Herald!”
Gillom Rogers smiled as the young reporter caught his breath. “You interviewed Mr. Books at our house.”
“Well, almost. Before that cranky old bastard booted me out.” Dobkins pointed at one of the shiny revolvers Gillom held. “His pistol?”
Gillom straightened proudly, displaying a nickel-plated Remington in either hand.
“J. B. Books gave ‘em to me the moment before he died.”
Dobkins didn’t resist running an index finger along the five and a half inch, sightless barrel of the made-to-order Remington. After a moment, Gillom pulled the single-action revolver away, unwilling to let anyone fondle his new prize too long.
“You stole ‘em off a dead man.”
“I did not! It was our deal. If I told Cobb, Pulford, and Serrano over in Juarez to meet Mr. Books in the Connie today at four, when the shooting was over, Mr. Books said I could have these specials.”
Dan Dobkins only had about ten years on this callow youth, but he surveyed the teenager with a cynical eye. “So you took ‘em off a dead man?”
Gillom reddened. “No! He asked me to finish him off. Hell, he was all shot up anyway, almost dead. So I pried this loaded one from his fingers and did what he asked.”
Dobkins’ mouth fell open. “You issued the coup de grâce?”
“The what?”
“Executed him?”
“Yup.” Gillom Rogers raised his narrow chin defiantly, risked twirling the revolver in his right hand by its finger guard, just once. “I’m the man who shot America’s most famous shootist. Right behind the ear.”
The star reporter of the El Paso Daily Herald noticed bystanders halting to overhear. He grabbed the teenager by the shoulder, turned him round and marched them both toward the swinging doors of the Pass of the North’s most famous saloon, the Gem.
“Let’s get a drink. I’ll make you famous, kid, but I need your whole story.”
The Gem Theatre opened in the fall of 1885 on South El Paso Street and rapidly established itself in wild and wooly downtown El Paso, known as the Monte Carlo of the Southwest. The Gem was a full service establishment with a restaurant and saloon in front, and its gaming rooms moved upstairs by order of a reformist town council. A stage at one end of the barroom hosted variety musical shows with singers and dancing girls, sometimes even dog fights and boxing matches. These violent competitions were well-attended weekends and heavily bet.
“My name’s not kid. It’s Gillom Rogers.”
“Fine. But hide those guns, Gillom, or somebody will shoot you to steal ‘em.”
Gillom stuck the Remingtons carefully in the waistband of his woolen trousers, covered by his light wool coat. The newsman propelled him through the nearly empty saloon. Its day drinkers had stampeded outside to see the bloodletting just down the street. Dobkins steered him into one of the red leather wine booths in a back corner and yelled at a bartender.
“Two beers, Jimmy! Big ones! McGintys!” Pulling a small notebook and pencil from his coat pocket, the ace reporter got right down to business. “So at J. B. Books’ behest, you summoned Jay Cobb, Jack Pulford, and that Mex, what was his name?”
“Serrano. El Tuerto. Cross-Eye, they call him. He’s one bad bandido from Juarez. Or was.”
“So you summoned all three of these gunslingers to the Connie at four p.m. today. Why?”
“’Cause they were all good with guns. Mister Books was dying of cancer and expected at least one of those gunmen would save him the trouble of doing himself in.”
“Cancer? Books?”
“Yup. Doc Hostetler told him he didn’t have much time to live and J.B. Books told my ma. That’s why she let him stay on in our bottom guest room even after all our other boarders fled, after those two jaspers tried to shoot him in bed. He had nowhere else to go.”
Dobkins chewed his pencil. “Fits. I did hear a rumor Books was dying, but after what he did to me….” The journalist made a face at the sour memory of the great gunman booting him ignominiously in the rear off of Mrs. Rogers’ front porch.
The rotund barkeep put one huge mug of warm beer down in front of Mr. Dobkins, but gave the young customer the fisheye. “Kid’s too young to drink in here, Dan.”
The reporter shook his head. “Today he isn’t, Jimmy. This is the young man who just shot John Bernard Books.”
The barkeep gave Gillom a long stare, then grunted. “On the house then. For helpin’ rid El Paso of our last pistolero.” Jimmy vacated to go draw another big beer. Dobkins slid his untouched stein of ale across the table to young Rogers, who grinned as he sucked it down. The teenager found that killing worked up a thirst. Dan gave him a smile oily enough to grease a train.
“Okay, Gillom, give me all the bloody details. From the moment you walked into the Constantinople. Who shot who first?” Young Rogers beamed back, reveling in the alcohol and attention.
“Well sir, most of the blood had been spilled by the time I snuck in there. Books shot ‘em all – Cobb, Pulford, that Mex, and some other joker I don’t even know. All the hard cases he invited to his funeral.”
Gillom gulped more beer as Jimmy approached with another huge mug, named after the McGinty Band, El Paso’s famous musical drinking society. The journalist’s eyes drifted to the ceiling.
“Invitation to a funeral…or, or, a gunfight. What a newspaper headline….Or the title of a book….”
Gillom nodded, remembering. “Yeah, the gunsmoke and canister fire echoing off those tile floors, burned my nostrils and deadened my hearing. Heavy….”
Dobkins nodded, too, transported. “A vibrating, eerie mantle…of death. Like something out of Poe.”
Gillom slugged his draft. “Who?”
“Edgar Allen Poe. Dissipated Baltimore poet you might like.”
“Listen, Dan,” said Gillom. “It’s after five. Gotta get home for supper.”
The reporter snapped out of his wonderment. “Me, too. Gotta see if that photographer’s getting those death photos. Crucial for a headliner. So Books actually asked you to shoot him?”
“Heck yes. He was bleedin’, wounded bad, dyin’ anyway. Whispered ‘kill…me.’ So I blessed him with a bullet.”
Dan Dobkins listened transfixed. “A bullet’s blessing….”
His chair scraped as Gillom got up, remembered his manners.
“Thanks for the beer.”
Dobkins hastily rose, too. “Sure, kid, uh, Gillom. Gonna make you famous. Tomorrow’s paper.”
They shook hands, a little awkwardly under the circumstances.
“Thanks, Dan. Maybe this’ll lead to a good job. Something exciting involving firearms is what I fancy.”
“Might. But finish your schooling first. You’re a game young man, Gillom Rogers. More education, you’ll go far.”
“Already on my way, thanks just the same.” With a spring in his step, Gillom was off, checking the weighty guns in his waistband again as he bounced through the Gem’s swinging front doors. Dobkins smiled as he dropped four bits on the table, leaving an uncharacteristically decent tip. Headline story this hot might make him famous, too.
Gillom disappeared into the crowds still milling about El Paso’s main street. The McGinty Coronet Band, its brass blasting and drums rattling, came up the street to its free Saturday night concert in the Gem Saloon. The loud, fun-loving McGinty Club had over two hundred members organized into eight different musical groups, and they played regular concerts in the parks and music halls all over town. Dobkins elbowed his way through the marching throng. Reaching the bottleneck outside the Constantinople’s front door, he took journalistic advantage of the lowbrows gabbing about what had happened inside, just a half hour ago.
“Make way for the press! Please! Daily Herald coming through!” A hand pushed back his chest. The rawboned, red-necked big man was one of the smaller Marshal’s muscles. Turning to catch Walter Thibido’s eye, the deputy got the nod to let the press in.
Dobkins stepped carefully into the saloon’s mess. He noted the bullet holes in the carved mahogany bar, the jagged glass teeth left in the long, shattered mirror behind it. Amazingly only one glass light fixture, designed like a cluster of grapes, was broken. Light from the others shone in the late spring afternoon’s gloom. He could still smell the gunsmoke, though. All that burnt gunpowder filled his nostrils with an acrid scent of sulphur, like the devil’s vapor trail. Moving around the big stranger’s body near the front door, Dobkins gave a kick to a shorthaired mongrel who had slipped in and was licking brain slime off the green and white floor tiles next to the gaping hole in Jay Cobb’s head above his ear. The dog let out a yelp, but circled out of boot range to go lap blood from the viscous pool around the other stranger’s torso, who appeared to have bled to death.
Marshal Thibido had his Stetson on the bar counter and was mopping his brow with a blue silk handkerchief. “Books hasn’t any relatives around I know of, so I’ll handle his personals until this shooting investigation’s finished. Where are his guns?”
The lawman was addressing Skelly, the photographer, who was arranging Books’ body behind the bar, pulling his bloody shoulder from beneath its wreath of glass shards, propping the upper body against the bar’s mahogany front, closing eyelids over vacant orbs, arranging the corpse in a position more suitable for infamy. The gunman’s skeletal features, emaciated by his prostate cancer, were ghastly grey to look at, but aside from wiping away blood splatters, there was nothing much Skelly could do to improve Books’ gaunt death mask. No time now to get any face powder, makeup from his studio. Skelly had to tilt the gunfighter’s Stetson to cover up the hole on one side of his head, too. Luckily the bullet hadn’t exited through the face, or he couldn’t get a saleable photograph.
“No weapons on him, no sir. No watch, no wallet, no money. Strange, Marshal.”
“Goddammit, he used those guns! Deputies! I want these shooters’ guns confiscated, especially Books’! They’re valuable… evidence!”
Dan Dobkins curried favor. “Kid’s got those pistols, Marshal. Gillom Rogers took ‘em before finishing Books off, that shot to the head there.”
A sharp look at the journalist. “You saw those Remingtons?”
Dan nodded. “Ten minutes ago, talked to Gillom. He’s gone home.”
Thibido blew relieved air. “Well, least we know where they are.”
Mr. Skelly positioned his equipment, angling the maple wood Conley eight-by-ten camera on its tripod down on Books, before ducking under green baize cloth to adjust the focus on its twelve-inch rectilinear lens.
Pushing his opening, the skinny reporter began to drill. “So, Marshal, what have you concluded from this gory mess?”
Thibido surveyed the big room. “Not much. Except that all of El Paso’s hard cases seem to have convened to gun each other down. I’ll propose to the city council we pay for these burials, since they’ve done us such a civic favor. No innocents lost here today.”
“Any idea who shot first, or why?”
“Nope. Except to burnish their bad reputations maybe. Pulford and Serrano were known mankillers. Jay Cobb was just a pimple-faced punk, a sharpshooter only with his mouth. Jerk didn’t stand a chinaman’s chance against these gunslingers. And Books, well, his reputation rode into town before he did.” The Marshal sighed, exhausted at just the thought of how much trouble cleaning up this big mess was going to be.
“I’ll tell you straight, Dobkins. We’ve had bloody hell here these past ten years, since John Selman blew Wes Hardin’s brains out in the Acme in ’95. Then Scarborough killed Selman. Then some tough killed him. Before that Marshal Stoudenmire shot Hale Manning and his brother Frank retaliated, killing the Marshal.” The short, well-dressed lawman gestured around the barroom with some vigor.
“Now I’m standing here at six-shooter junction! If these shootists don’t stop invading our fair city to assassinate each other, there’s going to be nothing left of El Paso but burnt dirt!”
Both men were distracted by the sight of two young boys playing with Jack Pulford. The cardsharp was slumped against the back wall of the Constantinople. J. B. Books had killed him from sixteen feet, both men standing and firing at each other. One shot, right in the heart. But the bullet, stopped by the fibrous heart muscle, hadn’t exited, and now two boys, who must have snuck in the rear door, were bent over Pulford’s corpse, playfully lifting his slack left arm up and down. With each lever action of his pump handle arm, blood swelled out of the wound in the deceased’s chest. These mischievous boys were literally pumping a dead man dry.
Appalled, the city Marshal yelled to another deputy. “Jackson! Get those damned kids outta here! Messin’ with the corpses. Christ!”
Dobkins shook his head at such tomfoolery. “So Marshal, you have no idea how five noted gunslingers managed to show up in the same saloon at the same time in broad daylight for the shootout of the century, right under your nose?”
Walter Thibido had had enough.
“No, by ginger, I don’t! And I’ve had quite enough of you today, too!” His face flushed red, one neck vein began to pulse as he shouted. “I want everyone not involved in this police investigation out of this saloon right now!” The Marshal pulled his own pistol to wave above his head. “That includes children, dogs, and journalists!”
At that moment, Skelly puffed hard into the brass pipe in his mouth, squeezed the bulb, and his exhalation blew the alcohol flame through the rear of the tin trough he was holding and ignited the magnesium powder in the trough. For a twenty-fifth of a second the barroom lit up like the Fourth of July.
Everyone -- children, dog, deputies, the Marshal, and frightened bystanders -- jumped! They might all have been standing in Hell’s waiting room. The photographer quickly extinguished the flame, put down his flashpan and began fanning away the cloud of smoke. Five corpses never moved a muscle.
Gillom avoided details over his mother’s supper that night, saying only that people had been shot in the Constantinople that afternoon, probably Books, too. Bond Rogers had decided to move her son out of his smaller upstairs bedroom and open that one up to another boarder, if any roomers ever showed up on her doorstep again after all this bloody mayhem. She wanted Gillom staying in J. B. Books’ larger downstairs room. The shootist had left nothing behind but his notorious reputation; the fact that he’d shot two country cousins who’d tried to kill him in that very corner room only a week ago. No respectable person would rent a room housing those murderous ghosts, not till long forgot. She also thought it would be easier to keep track of her delinquent son in a main floor room, right below hers.
Gillom was happy to help his mother move his clothes downstairs to Books’ suddenly vacant quarters. He regarded it as the best room in the house. His nostrils still caught scent of the faint mix of flaming gunpowder and urine from when Books had doused the burning bedsheets with the contents of his pisspot after those two jaspers had tried to murder him right here. His mother had bought new bedding and a mattress, to which he quickly gave a bounce test. “I’m lying in a gunman’s bed! The gunfighting legend I killed this very afternoon!” That exhultant thought stiffened his pecker. Gillom rose from the refurbished bed and went to the west and then the south windows, sliding their wood sashes higher to let in more cool night air. These glassed downstairs windows will make my comings and goings easier, he realized.
He returned to bed, pulled his bedspread up higher against the spring chill. But Gillom was restless, squirming under stiff, new sheets, nerves still taut from the events of this momentous day. The seventeen-year-old jerked again from bed, padded in nightshirt and bare feet to the curtained closet. He groped the top shelf inside where he had dumped his cowboy hat and leather baseball glove and pulled Books’ whiskey bottle from a cubbyhole his watchful mother had somehow missed. He was pleased to see a corner of redeye remained.
Hurling himself back into bed, Gillom made the wooden frame sway and creak. Nestling with his prize, he pulled the cork with his teeth, grimaced as the whiskey seared his palate. He mused: Men drink whiskey, tough men like J. B. Books. I’ll just have to get used to the harsh taste. My sarsaprilla days are over.
The burning alcohol slid down his teenaged gullet and mixed with the warm beer he’d gulped six hours earlier. Gillom Rogers relaxed, remembering the first time he’d encountered the famous gunman, just a week ago. Books had spotted him spying, grabbed him by the throat and yanked him right up to this very room’s window. Nearly choked him out before the sick old man had collapsed on the windowsill, exhausted.
Gillom nursed a last fiery sip. Gosh, I’ve been dumb!, he realized. So awestruck in the great gunslinger’s presence, I even offered to shine J. B. Books’ boots. For free! From now on, kids will be making that same sweet offer to me.
He awoke to whispers on the wind. Curtains in the west window to the side of his headboard moved in the morning freshet. Bright sunlight. A giggle and a loud sssshh. I’m not dreaming, somebody is spying on me! he was startled to realize. Eyes wide, Gillom leapt out of bed, jumped to the open window, thrust his head outside.
“Hey!” The gigglers jerked back in fear, surprised by the teenager’s quickness. “Don’t you spy on me! I’ll whup your setters so hard, you’ll be standing for a week!”
Then he launched right through the open window to do it. Scared by this angry young man right in their small faces, the two peepers turned tail and skedaddled across the grassy yard. A skinny tyke with black hair and big ears and a taller, blonde towhead. Both boys flew over his mother’s picket fence on the bounce.
Must have talked to someone, heard what I did, Gillom thought. If I could’ve just grabbed one, given him a swat on the rear to improve his manners. Gol-lee! I’m notorious even before breakfast!
His mother sat at the head of the dining table, Daily Herald in hand. The other boarders had fled her lodging right after Books’ bedroom shootout with the two midnight intruders a short week ago. So, except for her wayward son, the landlady was now alone, revenueless. Her breakfast of eggs and biscuits lay untouched, her coffee unsipped. The other giveaway of bad nerves – her right hand quivered as she turned the front page to continue reading about El Paso’s bloodbath. Her intake of breath startled the silence. She’d read her son’s name again in the newspaper.
Gillom slunk into the dining room. He’d heard her crank telephone in the front parlor ring several times, but had dozed until little boys whispering outside his window had pulled him from conflicted sleep. He could see from the Herald’s headline how deep he was in –
“Invitation To A Gunfight! J. B. Books Killed In El Paso Bloodbath!”
His mother lowered the paper to search him with haunted eyes. She shoved her untouched plate and cup of coffee along the tabletop.
“You eat my breakfast. I have no appetite.”
“Ma, please.”
“Please. That’s a funny word, isn’t it? How one can twist its meaning, to something entirely different. You displease me greatly. My son, the only child I have born, is now a killer.”
“Did him a favor, mother. Books asked me to. It was… merciful.”
Her face was drawn, skin taut, but her voice was remarkably level, sharp but composed.
“It was a bloody slaughter. Which you evidently helped arrange. For some kind of recompense. Oh yes, I read you took his guns.”
“It was our deal. His pistols for my help, my service. Mister Books didn’t wish to die in bed, so he committed suicide.”
“In public. And by assisting him in this public slaughter, you’ve brought shame upon us. Disgraced our family’s proud name… around all of Texas. Forever.”
Her son waved his hands to stop. “Mother! Folks are saying Mr. Books did El Paso a public service. Rid this town of all its hard cases. And I helped him do it.”
Her eyes flared. “I didn’t read that in here.” She tapped the inky newsprint with a sharp fingernail. “You were named the assassin’s assistant…. Where are they?”
“What?”
“His guns.”
“Oh. They’re out of sight.”
“We’ll have to turn them in. To the Marshal. I’m sure they’ll be wanted.”
“Be damned if I will.”
“Gillom!”
“Look, I’m not breaking any law. Thibido will just sell ‘em, after the legal work is cleaned up. He’s a shyster, a peacock. His deputies do all his dirty work.”
“Well you’re already infamous, taking those guns and using them on poor Mister Books, who was dying. If you’re seen on the streets with those pistols, somebody will try to shoot you, to steal them. Until we’re rid of those bad luck weapons, wash our hands thoroughly of this awful business, trouble will follow us. I feel pain in my bones already.”
Gillom rose from the table, his loaned breakfast untouched, too. “Be goddamned if I give up those guns. To anybody. I earned ‘em.”
His threat hanging heavy, the young man stomped back down the hall to his room. His disobedience, again, finally cracked his mother. Bond burst into tears, slamming both her palms onto the hard wooden table.
“Damn you, John Bernard Books!”
If anybody but the Lord had been listening, they’d have been shocked. It was the first time Mrs. Rogers had ever sworn.
Gillom left by a side window in his back bedroom, a new convenience keeping his mother from interrogating him coming and going from the house. He stopped to pull his new guns from their hiding hole in the woodpile next to the storage shed. He fondled his prizes again. These two were 1890 Remingtons, basically the 1875 model with the webbed underbarrel assembly cut away. They were chambered for a centerfire .44-.40 cartridge blasted through 5 1/2” barrels. With a sly grin he stuck them inside his leather belt, butts forward, out of sight under his blue wool sack coat. Gillom stepped over the yard’s white picket fence and hurried off downtown.
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