A Toast for those Remembered and those Forgotten

Whatever...

Where moments ago had been chaos all was suddenly still. The pre-silence of presumed death had assumed the crowded saloon, a murky silence bathed in the pallid smoke of canned whale oil which burned on the card tables and bartops in the place of candlelight, some from glass lamps while others had been set straight a-light in peeled open cans, these contrived lanterns somehow glowing as smoothly and evenly as the trimmed-wick lamps, such is the magical cleanliness of whale oil.

And through that dim obscurity gleamed the youthful countenance of a fucker, his face as juvenescent as my own, with wooly hair spilling out from it’s dirty bowler that was as fine and white as was the foolish dalliance of it that curled down around the corners of his upper lip, vanities achieved both of wishful desperation and of laziness, as it was unfathomable to imagine that anyone would purposely add such a pre-pubescent greasiness to themselves otherwise?

It had taken the merest comment, spoken off-handedly, a slight of character concerning the volume of his cursing. That was all that was needed to set the entire room cold to include him, he who had turned at that spoken comment to face me, a willingness in the hand which hovered impatiently atop the butt-end of his holstered Patterson’s Colt, it’s walnut grips not very dis-similar from my own. That willingness was revealing, as were the notches carved into those wooden grips. A small thing, notches carved into a gun’s butt, but telltale about the owner’s character. The notches told me that this very moment was his reason for his being here; not the gambling, not the booze, nor the whores… well, maybe the whores too, as whores (the same as any woman) enjoy a dangerous man. This was a fact I was well aware of. So much did they enjoy him, I had learned, that the whore sometimes forgot to ask the dangerous man for her rent at night’s end. This alone was ample reason for that fucker’s willingness, and for my own.

And feel assured that as we glared each other down through the sooty smoke we both saw the light. Sure, one of us would die tonight, his blood briefly soiling the sawdust floor.

But the other would live gloriously… his drinks and women free.

And in the impatience of youth, is that not enough?