Now You’re Naming the Damn Thing?
Chapter 5 of The Ballad of Abigail Lambert
The next morning, Esperanza awakened when she felt a forceful jolt to her leg. Her eyes shot open wide to identify the threat. She feared having attracted the attention of a hungry animal, or worse, being spotted by the animals they left behind on the train the night before but when she saw it was Abigail that’d kicked her awake, she quickly relaxed.
“Let’s go.” Abigail demanded, wasting no time at all as she started her march to Ridgewood, whether the girl was ready to join her or not. Esperanza took to her feet and followed Abigail in silence for some time until the quiet was broken by a faint whimper hidden within the trees.
“Do you hear that?” Esperanza asked. The closer they got to the sound, the clearer it became that there was a wounded something nearby. Esperanza suffered from a virulent case of a bleeding heart, and the prospect of a creature in trouble carried her like a wind over the small hill beyond them. There at its base, they spotted a dog with its leg caught in a bear trap.
“Poor thing!” She cried as she approached the dog. Abigail walked up behind her and drew her gun.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Esperanza shouted.
“Putting it out of its misery?” Was it not obvious?
“We’re not killing her!” Esperanza took a knee between Abigail’s gun and the dog.
“It’d be crueler to leave it.”
“We’re not doing that either.” Esperanza gripped the jaws of the trap with as much strength as she could muster, but no matter how hard she tried to force it apart, the tension was too strong.
“You’re wasting your time, girl.” Abigail’s attempt at dissuasion proved fruitless as Esperanza refused to quit, rusty metal digging into her fingers as she tried to free the poor dog. “I’m just talking to myself, it seems,” Abigail muttered under her breath.
“Are you gonna help me or not?” Abigail holstered her gun and took a knee beside the trap. She gripped the jaws and they managed to force it open enough for the dog to slip out and hobble away behind a nearby tree. Esperanza tried to soothe the creature, calling out to it. “It’s okay, girl. Come here.” She extended a hand, and the dog limped toward her. She gave it a pat on the head. “Good girl, Jules!” The dog barked and she laughed.
“Now you’re naming the damn thing?”
“And?”
“I ain’t wasting a second of my time trying to keep that thing fed.”
“No one asked you to.”
“So long’s we understand each other.” Abigail rose to her feet and continued onward.
“Come on, Jules!” Esperanza shouted at the dog, seemingly receptive to its new name. It limped along beside her as they continued through the woods.
The day melted away as they headed east for Ridgewood, finally arriving at the town as the sun was beginning to set. For most towns this far west of the Mississippi, Ridgewood was among one of the more affluent. A local connection to the railroad was mostly to thank for that, providing a healthy clip of people passing through and bringing their business. The town was attractive enough to even get some of those once travelers to become permanent residents, hoping to stake their claim to a piece of the town’s potential economic spoils.
On this evening, Abigail, Esperanza and Jules would pass through its paved stone roads in search of a way to expedite their journey to Tennessee. As they walked down main street, Abigail did the one thing she did most often when she wandered into a new town: hit the saloon. This time, as opposed to a more typical blackout inebriation, she would instead be searching for information on tap. The three of them entered the saloon, a label hardly befitting of the place compared to the creaky watering hole Abigail found herself in back in Valentine.
The brick walls towered high, with ornate railing lining the second floor. Upstairs, this establishment played host to various tables at which one could partake in card games of chance. There were at least a dozen people playing at these tables, and that’s just the ones they could see from the ground floor. If drinking was all you were after, then the first floor presented plenty of space for one to indulge in their chosen poison. Live piano echoed throughout from the back of the room, providing entertainment for those who needed an aural stimulant to mix with the alcohol. The three of them were taking in the sight as they entered, but they took not so much as a step before they were berated by the barkeep.
“She’s gotta stay outside!” He yelled.
“That dog’s cleaner than most of the people in here!” Abigail replied.
“The dog, too!” He shouted.
“Let’s go, Jules.” Esperanza said as she exited, the dog following suit. She took a seat on the curb and spoke to Jules directly. ‘How’s your leg, girl?” The wound had begun to scab over, it wasn’t deep enough to be fatal, but she was still hobbling around with a limp. “How’d you end up in that trap, huh?” She asked as she rubbed Jules all over. The dog barked. “Guess we all find ourselves trapped at one point or another.” Abigail exited the saloon, and Esperanza stood as soon as she saw her.
“So?” Esperanza asked.
“Stable’s this way.” She pointed down the street to a wooden building that looked just about ready to be condemned. It was hard to believe a business of any kind ran out of there, and its state of disrepair stood out between the sturdier buildings and livelier businesses that were its neighbors. What they couldn’t know was that the owner chose to spend most of his revenue on keeping pace with his taste for alcohol. So long as there wasn’t a problem with the roof, he was content to keep contributing to the impending problem with his liver.
“This is the place?” Esperanza asked as they approached the building.
“That’s what the man said.” Abigail pushed open the double doors at the front and entered. “Hello?” No reply. Esperanza kept her distance and stayed outside by the door. Abigail looked around, but it was hard to make out much of anything with the little light let in from outside. She could just barely see three horses across the different pens, but no sign of human life. “Anybody here?” she called out. Out of the shadows behind her, emerged a cocked and loaded six shooter pointed at the back of Abigail’s head.
“Is this how you greet all your prospective customers?” She asked.
“Only the ones that deserve it,” a gravelly voice replied. There was something unmistakably familiar about his voice to Abigail, and she turned to find an answer to her suspicions.
“Bill Decker!” She shouted as she disregarded the loaded gun in her face. She pushed it to the side and gave him a hug.
“Get off me, woman!” He yelled, dumbfounded with her cavalier attitude toward having a gun pointed at her. He pushed her off. She pointed to his eye patch.
“That’s new.” She said.
“You know this man?” Esperanza took a few careful steps past the door, but still close enough to the exit to duck out in case things got hairy.
“We used to ride together.” Abigail said.
“That was a long time ago.” Bill holstered his gun. He crossed over to one of the horses. “How did you find me?”
“Not on purpose, that’s for sure.”
“Little Abigail Lambert stumbles back into my life needing something from me. Glad to see some things never change.” He said with a wry smile.
“Can’t say the same for you. You finally got that stable you were after!”
“I don’t know if this piece of shit’s what I pictured—but it’s something.” He took some horse feed in hand and fed one of the horses.
“What would you charge me for two horses?” Abigail asked.
“For you? Nothing.” He continued to the next horse.
“You’d give them to me for free?”
“You misunderstand.” Bill clarified. “They’ll cost you nothing, because I ain’t selling you no horses.”
“Why not?”
“Cause you wouldn’t be able to afford what they cost.”
“Try me.”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“That’s ridiculous! There ain’t no pair of horses on this Earth worth no five thousand dollars!”
“You’re right. Cause it’s five thousand per.”
“Ain’t no wonder this place is falling to shit if that’s what you’re charging.”
“It’s what I’m charging you.” He said.
“Because I’m so special?”
“Because it’s what you owe me.”
“I owe you?” Would he really be so petty? Over something so long ago?
“You promised me ten grand in that coffin, and there wadn’t so much as a dime.”
“That ain’t my fault!” Abigail shouted. He threw the horse feed on the ground and stomped over to her.
“You’re lucky I don’t shoot you where you stand for leading me into that ambush!”
“I didn’t know Sid was gonna follow us!”
“Don’t give me that load of shit!”
“I’ll just buy my horses elsewhere.”
“Good luck with that darling. This may be the shittiest game in town, but it’s also the only one.”
“You’d really leave me hanging dry like this?” Abigail asked him.
“Like you left me holding the bag at Reedy Creek? It’s cause of me you even made it out of there alive, you ingrate! I ain’t so much as heard one thank you out your mouth since you got here!” Abigail stormed out of the stable. “Same old Abigail, always running from shit she started!”
“Fuck you, Bill!” Abigail stomped past Esperanza. “Let’s go.”
Esperanza looked back at Bill.
“You heard her, girl.” He spit. “Git.”
To her, the only thing more fascinating than how miserly this man behaved was the warmth with which Abigail greeted him. Esperanza was under the impression whatever faculty allowed Abigail to feel anything positive had long since broken down, but it was still in there, lying dormant and awaiting the right stimuli to awaken. The point being that beneath the tough exterior, there was an Abigail she’d yet to meet—one that Bill may or may not have known at one point in the past, and maybe, just maybe—there’d be an opportunity to meet her in the future.
“What do we do now?” Esperanza asked her.
“He can’t be the only game in town,” Abigail replied. She looked up the street to a general store and figured she could pop in for a potential lead. Much to her dismay, the shop keeper informed her Bill was, in fact, the only proprietor of horses in Ridgewood, and it would be some hundred miles to the next town if she intended on attempting to buy some there. She thanked him for his time and returned to the street.
“We’re not walking a hundred miles on foot, are we?” Esperanza asked her.
“It’s either that, or we wait for ten thousand dollars to fall from the sky.”
“Where would we even find money like that?” Esperanza asked.
Abigail pondered the thought. It might be years of work to accumulate such a sum under any business in town. It was anyone’s guess as to how long it would take Colin and his gang to roll into town before that ever happened, so she quickly abandoned the possibility. The most expedient way to make such a sum would also likely be the most dangerous, but time was not a currency they could afford to spend much of.
Abigail walked up the street, Esperanza and Jules behind her, to the sheriff station. What she sought wasn’t out front so she crossed over to the side of the building and found the board there. Posted on the wall were more than a dozen wanted posters.
“Tell me what you see.” Abigail asked her.
Esperanza scanned the board for the poster with the most zeroes, but after tallying the bounties across every poster she could see, it wouldn’t be nearly enough for both horses.
“If we caught all of these guys,” she explained, “and then it turned out each of them had a kid with separate bounties on their heads, we still wouldn’t have enough for just one.”
“Well that won’t do at all.” Abigail sighed. “Guess we’re walking.” As Abigail began the hundred mile journey, Esperanza stayed behind at the board; one poster buried beneath the others had caught her attention. She uncovered the handbill.
“Abigail!” She shouted.
Abigail stopped in her tracks and spotted Esperanza back at the board with the poster in hand. She returned to the board, and Esperanza handed it to her. There she saw a drawing of a man with a thick handlebar mustache, but that’s about all she could divine from the poster. She shoved the poster into Esperanza’s chest.
“Read it.” Abigail commanded.
“Joseph Bacall and the Joseph Bacall gang, wanted for murder and stagecoach robbery.” She scanned the rest of the handbill. “They’re offering $2500 for Joseph and $300 for each member of his gang.”
“What’s that all together?” Abigail asked.
“About a hundred bucks short of five thousand.”
“I suppose one horse is better than none.”
“If you can talk him down. He seemed pretty firm on price.”
“You leave that to me. Handbill say anything about where we might find Joseph and his gang?”
Esperanza scanned the handbill once again.
“Last known location,” she said, “Pikes Basin.”
Click here to continue to Chapter 6.
You can buy a print copy of this novel by clicking here. The audiobook is also available wherever you get your audiobooks.