Let Them Wait

I am a man with sorrows behind me, and battles too. I have regrets of which I seldom speak, nor too often think. For me, danger became a way of life—an accepted facet in the natural order of things. There is no bravado in wearing a gun—it was, at the time, a necessity of life. A man could no more survive without a weapon than he could live without a horse or food.

I was fourteen years old when they attacked me under the cover of darkness, and while I was in my own home. The only weapon I owned was a big, double-barreled eight-gauge shotgun that we used for small game and varmints; so the night they came, I killed my first two men with a borrowed pistol. That started my crusade.

My search for justice, or maybe it was only for justification, led to more men joining the first two. Soon after, I began to acquire an unwanted and—I felt—undeserved reputation as a gunman. I did not want to shoot people, except one; I truly wanted to shoot him. But the others kept coming for me, and I had wrongs to right.

In the end, I hunted them.