The Hunt for Lazarus Boules

Sun-baked earth, dry and cracked from poor hydration discipline, was all that passed for a road. On either side of it were buildings with plenty of water to call their own; saloons, residences, the sheriff's office, the blacksmith, the experimental tailor, and even the town's federal dental inspection chamber. None of them were willing to share their liquid wealth with the road, however. Not even a drop. The parched ground would have its revenge on the boots and wheels of those moved from one water-hoarding establishment to another, cracking into manifold trip hazards and sharp lips to wear them down over the years, but the cycle of neglect would never cease. Rain was the only friend of the dry earth, and it rarely came to visit these days.
                Three sets of hooves clopped against the hard surface. It was enough of an insult for someone to step on the road's face, but to train another animal to do it in their stead was just unnecessary. It was also all too common.
                Ignorant to the road's misery, the three riders allowed their mounts to keep going, plodding at a steady pace into the town of Jonah's Jolly. Years ago it had been founded as Jonah's Folly, but a unanimous vote among the town's council had decided that associating their home with foolishness was rather derogatory. Associating it with happiness instead, especially considering the general bleakness of the supposedly rather wild west, would be a welcome tonic to all visitors.
                In many other towns, the arrival of the riders had been met with a town-wide effort to be cold and mistrusting. A spotter at the outskirts would yell that strangers approached, and the folk of the settlement would peer out at them through shuttered windows, watching them closely as they rode past and never making a word of greeting or welcome. It had been all well and good to do that at first, so that Jonah's Folly would fit in with the cultural traditions of its neighbourhood, but in the years that followed it began to grow wearisome. If you happened to be at home and not preoccupied with the washing up, or the laundry, or a preparing a meal when strangers arrived, then sure, it was easy enough to hurry over to your window for a good old fashioned scowl. In cold reality, however, many professionals found themselves losing valuable days of work to lingering by the front of the house, just because someone new had arrived. The people of Jonah's Jolly, recognising this inefficiency, had therefore abandoned that part of their heritage, and so it was that no-one kept a vigil over the three riders. They clopped up the road unwatched, hitched their horses without supervision, and went unjudged as they deliberated among themselves as to who entered the saloon first.
                "If he's there then I'm going to be the one to call him out. I'm going to be the face he sees, the one that makes him afraid." insisted the first rider, a woman in the middle years of life named Elana Stubb. She was shaking the dust off her layers of long, frilly skirts as she spoke, getting ready to cut a striking impression on their quarry.
                "Y'all went in first last time." argued one of her companions. Where Elana was clad in the respectable garb of a schoolmistress, a dress buttoned all the way up to the throat and running all the way down to the ground, Teresa De Firenze looked like she'd been dragged away from shoeing a rowdy horse during a fist-fight. This wasn't, as it turned out, terribly far from the truth. "He's wronged me as much as anyone and I deserve the satisfaction of wronging him right back." Teresa declared, patting the revolver that rested against her denim-clad leg.
                "Two wrongs don't make a right, Teresa." Elana said, reflexively. A lifetime of preventing conflict escalation among schoolchildren had given Mrs Stubbs a whole new set of instinctive reactions. It was more common for the phrase to refer to the theft of drawing equipment, or being hit with a book, but it served just as well for lecturing a farmer about the pitfalls of a quest for revenge, hypocrisy notwithstanding.
                "And remind me why you're intending to instil fear in Lazarus? Out of kindness is it?"
                Elana tried to formulate a response, but came up rather blank. Her own trigger finger itched whenever she thought about their target, and she couldn't have justified her words in any case.
                "It's to bring him to justice." she finally said, leaning heavily on semantic differences to save face.
                "The good book teaches us to turn the other cheek."
                Teresa groaned, while Elana ignored the comment from the third rider entirely. He was standing with a conversational bible clasped in both hands, a leather satchel slung across his back and a white collar around his neck.
                "Turn the other cheek all you like, pastor. I'll shoot him whether or not y'all are looking."
                "We're not going in there guns blazing. We're going to enter like composed, professional bounty hunters, find Lazarus, and take him away with us. If that should happen to end in a duel, or a savage beating with a sack full of bean cans, then so be it," Elana said, thinking about the supply of tinned goods in her horse's saddlebags, "but we're not here to execute a man on first sight."
                Even the fires of Teresa De Firenze's lust for revenge, barely contained within her leather chaps and tattered, chequered shirt, couldn't overcome the demure authority of a schoolmistress' tone. She moved her hand away from the revolver in a show of good faith and compliance.
                "That being said, Pastor Bernaise, are you sure you won't take a gun from me? If this does turn into a firefight, if Boules has a posse or doesn't come easily, then you'll be helpless as a rabbit tied to a lit stick of dynamite."
                "I've got all the protection I need right here." Pastor Billy Bernaise assured, patting a ceremonial bible in his top pocket. "I believe that we can find the good in Lazarus Boules, appeal to his better nature, bring him back to the flock; it's our duty not to give into the wickedness of violence and wrath, whatever he may have done to us and our beautifully carved pews."
                A tear welled in the corner of the pastor's eye as he remembered the crimes against church furnishing that Lazarus had committed. It was only when he wiped it away that he realised Elena and Teresa had already walked away into the saloon.
                Jingling piano music rang out from the corner of the broad, open saloon, courtesy of a man in a bright white shirt with black sleeve garters. He, at least, seemed to be having a wonderful afternoon, lost in the melodies he playfully improvised to the sound of clinking glasses, overlapping conversations, and the occasional, distant blast from the mines.
                Having a less animated but presumably still pleasant time were the patrons of 'The Fifth Chance Saloon'. Lit by a chandelier swinging above the centre of the room, they sipped from whiskey glasses and beer tankards, relieving themselves of the stories that days and weeks of their lives had built up. It was more of a ritual than anything else; Jonah's Jolly was a small town, and anything of note that had happened, more likely than not, would have involved most people in the town and been witnessed by the rest. Still, each witness shared their own, uniquely identical perspective on events, while everyone else agreed that yes, the water tower had creaked a little louder than normal today. Speculation as to why was for the women and men of science and learning, and the mining folk of Jonah's Jolly were contented to report their observations as they were, without presuming to know more than their senses had told.
                Teresa De Firenze gave her fiercest, least negotiable stares around the room, scanning every face, every back-of-the-head, and every partially ensconced body beneath a table, for Lazarus Boule, the scourge of Jonah's Exodus. With her hand held theatrically over her revolver, but strictly not on it thanks to Elana's warning, she cut an impressive and intimidating figure, silhouetted as she was by the dying sun through the doorway, if only anyone had been looking to appreciate it.
                Three strangers, none of whom would have the first idea about how creaky the water normally was, let alone how creaky it had been earlier in the day, stood no chance of adding to the multi-perspective account of the event. If they couldn’t offer any input to the water tower news then they were worthless to the ongoing proceedings and a waste of attention
                "Any sign of him?" asked Elana, having waited a respectfully performative few moments.
                "None. If he's hiding, he's doing it well."
                "Darn it. On your guard, preacher. He might have fled out the back for all we know."
                "I'll keep a watchful eye for our prodigal son around all sides of the saloon." Pastor Bernaise acknowledged, taking himself for a trip to the rear of the building.
                "Time to ask around, I guess." Elana said, a little deflated. It was always an anti-climax when an anticipated exchange of words, chase, and duel turned into a quiet drink with a bartender, but that was rapidly becoming a pattern in their hunt.
                "I reckon I can still get something out of this menacing." Teresa persisted, scowling at the back of a bowler hat as if her gaze might flip it off entirely.
                "Yeah, see how far that gets you." muttered Mrs Stubbs, shaking her head and approaching the bar. Her high-heeled boots clicked against the floorboards, but there were no spurs to give her gait that characteristically threatening jingle that bounty hunters normally favoured. Regardless, any sound she made except 'I saw the water tower from a glancing angle, and the creaking was very loud from there too' would garner no attention.
                Standing behind the bar, the traditional approach for one who wishes to perform their duties and not have their wares stolen, was the bartender. His blonde hair was slicked back and dotted with small, yellow beads of some kind. In dress he was rather like the pianist, but he apparently had dire, crippling issues with unruly sleeves; where the pianist wore a single garter around each bicep, the bartender's arms were more garter than fabric, constrained at every point by as many rings of elastic and metal as could be contrived into place. They creaked and strained as he moved, holding his arms rigid and, judging by the colour of his hands, not allowing through as much blood as they ideally should.
                The sight of this bartender disquieted the schoolmistress, as did his apparent position on the necessity of arm articulation. Halting her approach for the moment, she stood and watched as he grasped a fine whiskey glass in one hand and rubbed it at arm’s length against a cloth lying on the bar. Much like the idle glass dryers of every watering hole, this barkeep was idly dampening cloths using a glass that seemed, to all intents and purposes, never to become any less wet. It would have been unsettling enough even without the straight-armed, stick-insect posture that the man held, and his blue, white and purple hands. Elana shuddered. This was exactly the sort of thing that followed in Lazarus Boule's wake. Swallowing down her revulsion, she finally stepped up to the bar.
                "Hi there, out of towner." said the barman, locking eyes with her and giving the traditional welcoming nod. "Welcome to The Fifth Chance saloon. What I get y'all?"
                "Three whiskeys, please, and a bottle from your nearest jar of pickle vinegar." Elana told him, taking a single-buttocked seat on a barstool. The many skirts of her dress cascaded down her leg like a waterfall of lace and cotton.
                "Sure thing."
                Behind her, Elana could tell that Teresa was still trying nobly to scowl her way into information about Lazarus. Over the babbling of the other patrons and the piano music lilting through the air, she kept a careful ear out for any scream from, or gunshot at, the pastor. It was always worth checking that their prey wasn't squatting behind the building or clinging to the walls like the bloodsucking mosquito he was, but she didn't think it was likely. He'd have fled already. All they could do was stay on the trail and hope they were moving faster than he was.
                "Three whiskeys and..." the barman said, clinking three glasses together on the bar, "... one bottle of our most proximate vinegar for your, er, pleasure?"
                Elena had been so distracted by listening for the pastor that she'd missed the spectacle of a rigid armed barman making drinks. She cursed herself inwardly. They'd have to stay for a second round.
                "Thank you kindly." Elana said, handing him a few coins. Keeping the cash register at one arm's distance, which the lack of articulated elbows forced him to do, the barman managed to open the coin tray and flip Elana's payment deftly into the right places.
                "So what brings y'all to Jonah's Jolly? The promise of good times and empty mines?"
                Elana sipped her whiskey and turned to face the bar more directly. She always taught her pupils to look at whoever they were talking to, and she at least tried to lead by example.
                "No, sir. We're on the hunt for someone we believe passed through here, hopefully very recently. Does the name Lazarus Boules mean anything to y'all?"
                The barman, having gone back to wiping cloth after cloth with his glass, nearly bent one of his arms in shock. A dozen sleeve garters creaked angrily at the attempt.
                "Y'all are looking for Lazarus Boules? That low-life, gutter trash varmint who shot my britches to pieces on the drying rack?" he growled.
                "That sure sounds like Boules alright." Elana confirmed. She turned on her stool and beckoned Teresa over. Ms De Firenze had progressed to danger-close menacing of a sleeping miner, scowling at his stubbly face from less than an inch away, so it was no bad thing to interrupt her.
                "He slithered on in here a few days back, begging for drinks and a place to rest his legs. He'd been on a trail for weeks, he said. Neglected to mention that it was his own trail, having accepted the bounty on his dang self, and been lounging around the county on someone else's dime. Helped himself to a bottle of my finest while I was visiting the commode, whipped my poor apron to ribbons while it was hanging up on the side, and then scarpered."
                With one perfectly straight arm the barman pointed to the tattered shreds of an apron, suspended from a hook above the bar.
                "How long ago was he here?" Demanded Teresa, who’d been too busy scowling between Elana, the apron and the barman in sequence to listen properly.
                "He fled two days ago; got on the wrong side of enough folk that he couldn't rightly hang around any longer."
                "Any notions as to where he went?" Elana asked, placing a calming hand on Teresa's shoulder. The time for menacing was done.
                "I'm afraid not, ma'am. But someone around here might. What's your name, if you don't mind me asking."
                "Elana Stubbs. Schoolmistress from Jonah’s Modesty, out to the East."
                The barman tried to cup one hand to his mouth, but it was a fool's errand unless he found a way to detach his shoulder. Embarrassed, he gave Teresa a guilty look.
                "Uh, would you be so kind, please ma'am?"
                Rolling her eyes, Teresa cupped her hands to the sides of the barman's mouth.
                "Everyone! This here is Elana Stubbs, a teacher from out in Jonah’s Modesty. She's on the hunt for Lazarus Boules. Any help in tracking him would be greatly appreciated by her and her associates, as well as all God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of the West."
                There was no need for promises of gratitude or justice. No sooner had the barman mentioned Boules' name than the saloon erupted into a frenzy of well-remembered wrongs wrought by Lazarus. Chairs scraped backwards, tables were jostled, drinks were spilled and a few cigars were swallowed in the scramble to reach Elana and Teresa.
                "I saw that no-good Boules!" yelled a prospector, wearing the traditional dungarees and long-johns combination of the craft. "He'd just left The Fifth Chance with a head full of drink, and stumbled around towards the bank."
                "Yes, he left through the saloon doors, opening the left one first, from his perspective you understand, and then walked up the road in the direction of the bank." added a young lady, pressing herself through the throng.
                "Was he planning to rob it?" Elana tried to ask, but she was cut off by a woman leaning in from the side.
                "I saw the exit from the window of the hairdresser across the way. He walked with the gait of one who's had too many drinks and too few morals put into him. I can verify young Darlene's assertion that he used the left door first. From my perspective, of course, I would have called it the right door, on account of my facing the opposite direction to Lazarus. His boots were clean from being indoors, but got dusty as he hit the street. Didn't seem to bother him none."
                "I saw from inside here." the pianist called over, still tinkling away merrily. “I've a mirror on my piano for such observations, you see. He used his left hand to push the left door, and his right hand for the right, but the left went first as the ladies have told you. His belt sagged from the guns holstered at his hip. And his whip, of course."
                "OK, thank you, I think we've established that he left the saloon and went to the bank-"
                "I didn't see him go to the bank. The piano and mirror can't see outside."
                "I can vouch for that part of the story." a young man with a deputy's badge declared. "I was arresting Janice here outside of the hairdresser for stabbing old man Watson in the thigh with a hunting knife." he nodded to the second woman, who also nodded to corroborate this detail. "While I was distracted on account of all the blood and such, and Janice's protest that she'd been acting in self-defence, I did see Lazarus Boules heading towards the bank. He was already on my bad side from the accounts of him starching Mr Johnstone's britches rigid, like a rock, when pretending he was qualified to do laundry."
                "I've not been able to bend since!" cried the presumable Mr Johnstone. He was standing with legs as straight as the horizon, a perfect complement to the bartender, atop a table. By way of demonstration he toppled around from one leg to the other, demonstrating the resilience of his britches to any compressive forces, then knocked on them with a glass for good measure. "I'd have chased him to the bank myself, but... you know..." he indicated towards his legs again.
                "Yeah, I follow." Elana confirmed. "But please, can we focus on the bank. What did he do there?"
                "I saw that, too!" the first young lady, who’d been referred to as Darlene, cried again. "I had business with Mr Boules, who'd released a lynx in my living room that morning. It was a relatively docile thing, but it still ate my husband and I really take issue with that, because I might have been saving him for lunch."
                "Are y'all a cannibal, Darlene?" asked the bartender with excited curiosity, as if she’d just claimed to have invented a new form of drinks dispenser.
                "No, of course not! But if I was going to eat any other human it would have been my Arthur, and now I don't have the dang choice! I’ve got to really think about the possibility of chowing down on someone else instead, now!"
                Teresa looked at Elena with a withering impatience. Her hand was covering the revolver at her hip again. The schoolmistress shook her head.
                "Potential cannibalism aside, the bank, please."
                "Well, I followed him along the road. He was kicking up dust as he went with his feet-dragging, and would you know it he marched right up to the bank, bold as anything. It was getting on for sundown by then, so they'd be closing up soon after but I don't suppose that Lazarus cared much for the teller's schedule."
                "Nor does anyone here seem to care much about mine." lamented the schoolmistress. Darlene laughed.
                "You're right there! Lazarus used the door handle to open the door, as is the style here in Jonah's Jolly. We're handle enthusiasts to a fault, and he'd adopted enough of our ways to build false hope. I think he used an anticlockwise wrist turn, rather than a full arm descension or a squat and grip, to get the handle down."
                "Focus, please, Darlene." Elena reminded. She tried to share a weary look with Teresa, but Ms De Firenze was distracted by finally realising that the saloon doors had been fitted with redundant twisting handles as well.
                "Alright, I'll focus." said the young woman, holding her hands up. "It was definitely an anti-clockwise wrist turn-"
                "I meant to focus on what happened at the bank." Elena clarified with a growl.
                "That's exactly what he did at the bank!" protested Darlene. "He used an anticlockwise wrist turn to rotate the handle and open the door!"
                "Say 'anticlockwise wrist turn' one more time, I dare y'all." Teresa snapped, whipping her revolver up and aligning the barrel with Darlene's nose.
                "I... It was an anticlockwise wri-"
Teresa cocked the hammer.
"Alright, so moving on from the door as I'm sure Lazarus himself eventually did," Elena interrupted, gently pushing the gun's barrel down, "what did he do inside the building?"
"I don't know. I couldn't see that on account of the lynx coming back into play. Seems my husband wasn't as filling as he could have been, and it thought to make a second course of me."
"And that's when you ate the lynx?" asked the pastor. All heads turned to face him, silhouetted by the evening sun in the doorway. Teresa's hand itched over her gun again, furious that he'd got away with the entrance that she'd deserved.
"That's right!" confirmed Darlene. "How'd you know?"
                "I had a very thorough account of it from some gentlemen throwing empty bottles onto the roof."
                "Those damned Jenkins boys! Thirty years they've been bottling up my roof!" roared the barman, leaping over the bar with a rigid-armed vault and storming out of the door. After a respectful few seconds to make sure he wasn't immediately coming back in, a few of the bolder patrons started to help themselves to drinks.
                "I'm sure they'll pay for what they take." Elana convinced herself. "So, you didn't chase Boules after setting a lynx on you twice?"
                "Oh, the second time was none of his doing, it just had the taste for human flesh. Besides, I got to eat lynx meat for the first time and, by extension, my husband. Even if I'd still been angry, I was feeling real full and real rotten from a belly of raw meat."
                "She was lying there by the carcass for hours. I was watching through the bank window." said a young man with a pencil moustache and a pencil-sharpener nose.
                "From the bank? You were in there with Boules?"
                "Yep, I'm the bank teller." confirmed the young man.
                "Why didn't y'all start talking sooner?!" demanded Teresa.
"I didn't know anything about his handle technique; Darlene got a better view than I did. I suppose the anticlockwise wrist turn makes sense in hindsight, because it’s what I use too."
                Elana reflexively slapped Teresa's hand from the revolver.
                "And what happened inside the bank?" Elana asked wearily as the pastor shuffled alongside her.
                "He didn't touch any handles. Left the door wide open behind himself."
                "Sounds like a bust on learning anything more about Lazarus' handle preferences," said the pastor, sadly shaking his head. "but we might still learn something about his other habits, plans and intentions.  Accepting that he didn't perform any door handle manoeuvres, what did our lost lamb do in the bank?"
                "Oh, you want the boring stuff? Well, he held the place up of course. Pulled a couple of unusual guns on me and asked for everything in the vault."
                "How much did he get?" gasped Darlene, worried about the bank's ability to pay out her husband's life insurance.
                "Only a few dollars. It was the third time we've been robbed this week, so there wasn't a whole lot left to take." the teller shrugged. There were some discontented murmurs throughout the gathered crowd, largely concerned about their savings and why no-one had been telling tales of the exciting bank robberies.
                "Three times in a week, deputy?" Elana asked the law enforcer, with the raised eyebrows and rising inflection of many years' school teaching.
                "We've got a lot of troubles in Jonah's Jolly," started the deputy. Teresa, Elena, Billy, and the whole gathered crowd waited with great interest. After several seconds, it became clear that the sentence was complete.
                "I see. It would certainly seem that way," Pastor Bernaise replied, diplomatically, "between the barkeep's rigid arms, your friend's starched legs, the cannibals, the lynx attacks and regular bank robberies."
                "Exactly. It's a real doozy. Someone should really do something about it."
                "Someone like, the law?"
                "Oh, yeah! That's probably right." he nodded enthusiastically. A few pointed looks were shot his way. "I'm only deputised to shake my head at crime scenes and say that we have a lot of troubles; the sheriff kept the rest of the judicial powers for himself."
                "So," Teresa said, loudly, her lack of patience showing, "who saw where Boules went with the loot? Which direction am I shooting?"
                "He ran off with his ill-gotten gains towards Jonah's Refinement. At least, that's where he said he was going." said the teller.
                "I saw him head out West from my window, while speculating on how I'd poison the water supply and burn down the general store." said an older man at the back of the crowd.
                "Wh-" Billy started, but Elena placed a hand on his shoulder.
                "We're not getting drawn into this nonsense again." she said, before swallowing her whiskey. "Drink up, we're going West. If we set off now we might catch him up in Jonah's Refinement."
                "Ain't nothing wrong with speculating and hypothesising." defended the man, regardless of Elana's intervention, hoping to bait a reaction from the three riders. Unfortunately for him, they didn't bite. Teresa necked two whiskies, the pastor swallowed down his vinegar with a grimace then dabbed his mouth with a serviette bible, and Elana nodded to them both.
                "Thank you kindly for your help everyone. We'll bring Lazarus to justice."
                "Why not bed here for the night? There are lynxes outside of town." Darlene said as they walked away.
                "There are lynxes inside of town too. And cannibals, poisoners, and barkeeps with no arm articulation." Teresa replied, not turning around. It was impossible to argue with the facts. To the sound of glass bottles shattering on a roof, and a barman's enraged cries, the riders unhitched their horses, mounted up, and moseyed out.
                Three abreast they rode out through the dry, rugged plains West of Jonah's Jolly, towards the falling, reddening sun. Distended shadows of rocks, cacti and fly-tipped furniture reached towards them, beckoning them onwards in pursuit of justice. If Lazarus Boules had indeed come this way then there were no tracks to prove it; hard ground and bare rock didn't readily yield to boot or hoof, nor had their quarry taken the time to carve 'L.B.' into a series of way markers like last time.
                Deepening twilight drove them into the shade and shelter of an earthy overhang. Teresa set about building a fire while the pastor opened some tins of holy beans. In most regards they were a lot like regular beans, but Lazarus Boules had tricked the pastor into consecrating them some weeks beforehand. Artefacts of such rarity and power could not be allowed to fall into foul hands, so the riders were disposing of them responsibly. They were also rich in fibre, and formed part of a balanced diet for them on the trail.
                "How're the bean stocks, pastor?" asked Elana. She'd hitched the horses and was marking their route on a map. It looked disconcertingly like Boules was tracing the shape of an enormous bottom across the West.
                "Enough to get us to Jonah's Refinement and back home four times over." he replied, looking unhappily from his bulging saddlebags to his exhausted horse.
                "Then you've got enough for me too!" said a voice from the shadows beyond the camp. Teresa fired off a few shots into the dark.
                "Who goes there, friend or foe? I'm armed and ready to fire." she then warned.
                "Darlene?" Elana asked afterwards.
                From cover of a bush, looking a little shaken from the gunfire, walked Darlene. Her boots and petticoats were stained from the desert dust, and she had a pack on her back.
                "Hi there. I didn't mean to startle y'all."
                "What are you doing out here? Looking for more lynx meat?" asked the pastor.
                "I was following y'all. I'll bet you've got all sorts of interesting stories about Boules and bounty-hunting, and I wanted to ride along and hear them. See the world. Have an adventure. And if the lynxes did happen to attack... well, I could happily eat for free, and if they got one of you then I could try human flesh directly this time. It's a no-brainer." she said, with surprisingly incriminating honesty.
                The three riders looked at one another. It was never easy to justify bringing a cannibal along for the ride, on account of what or who they might hunt in the event of getting peckish.
                "Do you promise only to eat us if we happen to die anyway, and do you promise to try to keep us alive as best you can?" asked Elana.
                "Of course! I'm no murderer. I just don't like wastage." she smiled.
                Elana looked at Teresa and the pastor, and then shrugged.
                "Take a seat. The beans'll be done soon."
                "Thanks." Darlene accepted, hardly believing her luck at finding one free meal, and potentially getting another if misfortune worked in her favour. "You said they're holy? Consecrated like water, right? You had to stand there and do that on purpose, right?"
                Pastor Bernaise sighed heavily.
                "I did."
                "Boules really did a number on you there, huh?" laughed Teresa, tastefully under-lit by the growing campfire while she reloaded her revolver. "I mean, my insides have never felt so blessed, and I'm farting our prayers left and right, but that's beside the point."
                "He most certainly did, Teresa. This wasn't even the worst of it." he lamented. From his pack he drew out a long wooden ladle. Where the spoon end should have been, however, was a dog-eared and rather stained bible tied to the handle with twine.
                "What did he do to you that was bad enough to make a bounty hunter from a man of the cloth?" asked Darlene directly, as the pastor dipped his stirring bible into the beans.
                "Yeah, Billy. Remind us." smirked Elena. Stories ran dry quickly when you were on the trail with strangers, and it was always worth reminding themselves why they'd committed to a diet of holy beans and hard riding behind a dog like Boules.
                Pastor Bernaise stirred the beans quietly for a moment to compose himself.
                "Lazarus, our eternally lost lamb, came wandering into my flock at Jonah's Gambit, the hometown of our region's most prolific founder. He'd built it up from a trading post to a thriving mining town, speculating on finding gold underneath the river. Left after the floods obviously." recounted the pastor. The others nodded at the well-known local history. "A few of the settlers stuck around and made a go of it, and I joined them many years ago. But this story starts after one of my famous midday Wednesday services, the ones that are real disruptive to the working day. Lazarus Boules came on into my church looking like a dog in need of feeding or shooting."
                "Should've put a bullet in him there and then." grumbled Teresa.
                "No person is beyond redemption if they seek it sincerely." replied Billy, sounding like he was questioning his own words. "Now, it's the Lord's will that we help anyone in need, and this poor soul gave us no reason to deny that kindness. I welcomed him in, gave him a seat on the pews, and fetched him a glass of the communion wine. He took that well enough, better than the bread, but he did choke that down eventually too.
                His jacket and waistcoat were as black as my vestments, and as he sat there taking in the sights of my humble chancel I thought me might take the leap of faith with me, become a preacher of salvation, find a calling to heal his soul like my time and care would heal the wounds on his flesh, you know?" Billy said. The spitting fire lit his face unevenly with flashes of yellow amid the orange, while beans of great sanctity fizzled and spat in the pot. Done with maps and horses, Elana had taken a seat next to Billy, with her own dish ready and waiting.
                "I should've given him more wounds than that. Enough to stop him running." Teresa lamented, not for the first time.
                "We'll get to your part of the story in a minute, Ms De Firenze."
                Teresa shot Elena a look, but it wasn't a bullet so Mrs Stubbs let it slide.
                "Of course, the events of the next day set me straight on the level of derangement, debasement and evil in that boy's heart. He lured me out of my church on claims that there was a well that needed sanctifying; said that one drink from it had filled his belly full of unkind thoughts and temptations and begged me to bless it for the good of all the townsfolk."
                "And from the look of your face I guess that's where he'd stashed the beans?"
                "You should have seen me when I pulled the bucket up to check my handiwork, and saw those tins rising up to me. Hooting and hollering about being tricked, I'm ashamed to say. I'd wasted some of my best and holiest blessings of the day on cans of cheap food! The storm clouds of my vengeance had drifted into place, and I marched my way back up to the church, ready to give him a piece of my mind and The Lord's wrath.
                I threw open the doors and let the light of day fall on his shadowy soul, but it illuminated something far worse, something that shook me to my god-fearing core."
                Teresa took a scoop of beans and settled in for the crescendo of the tale. Elana and their guest followed suit.
                "Every cushion. Every stitch of every cushion, unpicked. Not just a bit pulled. Not just a little frayed; totally unpicked. I walked back into my house of prayer to find all the thread balled up, sarcastically neatly, on top of the altar. As if that wasn't enough he'd unstitched all of my tapestries too! Arranged all the thread by colour, along with all the cushion leavings, all in its little balls and stacks. And behind it all, standing at my pulpit like the anti-Christ for upholstery was Lazarus Boules.
"What in the Lord's name have you done boy?!" I cried to him, the chancel echoing with my fiery fury. I thought it might force out some contrition, make him penitent, when he saw the wages of his sin, but no. He just stood there, giggling at his own handiwork.
                ‘I was just tidying up the place, padre.’ he claimed, but he laughed all the harder after, which went a long way towards undermining his sincerity, as I'm sure you'll understand.
                Now, I'm duty bound to give shelter to those in need, but I was beginning to suspect that Lazarus Boules wasn't much in need at all. He was there as the Devil's plaything, and I had no intention of letting him wreak further havoc on my parish.
                ‘Out! Out with you, Lazarus Boules!’ I roared, my voice booming in those holy walls like the Lord's righteous thunder. Cackling and carrying on the boy walked by me, calm as anything, and left me to pick up and stitch up the pieces."
                Pastor Bernaise sighed and took a mouthful of blessed beans, feeling conflicted at how undeniably holy they tasted.
                "And that was it? The cushion repair got y'all angry enough to start chasing him? Why not stop him then and there if you wanted to bring him to justice?
                 "Because I am a forgiving man, Darlene." chewed Billy. "But I was yet to discover his greatest crime against me and my church; I took myself back to the vestry to find some solitude and regain composure in my favourite leather armchair. It's where I would sit to read scriptures, prepare sermons, re-stitch minor damage to cushions and the like. I loved that armchair like a son of wood and leather, so you can well imagine my distress when I opened the vestry door to find that it was gone; stolen, I thought, by Lazarus. It was at that same moment of dreadful discovery that I heard the commotion outside. Fearing the worst, I rushed out to see what was going on, what Boules had done to his next victim, but there was no sign of the beast. There was, however, smoke. Smoke billowing from a great blaze beneath the water tower, boiling its contents up on high."
                "So he boiled the town's water? Made it sterile?"
                "He boiled my leather armchair! Boiled it in the water tower like it was some great potato!" cried Billy, mashing beans into the bottom of his dish.
                "Goodness me!"
                "Goodness you indeed, Darlene." agreed Elana.
                "It took me a good while to calm down, while the blacksmith, the carpenter and their apprentices heaved my chair from the watery prison into which Lazarus had thrown it. I just couldn't comprehend the depravity required to do something like that, although I ruminated upon it at length while I sobbed over swollen wood, perished leather, and sopping wet horsehair stuffing. Oh, but that chair had legs which curved so elegantly, and arms that had been carved into perfect spirals; now it's like looking at it through choppy waters, all twisted and distorted like the mind of that devil child. It could only be possession or indoctrination by the foulest powers that could turn a man to boil the armchair of another, and by the Lord I will find that boy and exorcise the evil from his heart."
                "Not if I put a bullet in it first." snarled Teresa. "There's a lot of evil to get out of there, pastor. I think a little lead could do a better job."
                "We do not solve our problems with violence, Teresa." said Elana, feeling the weight of her own revolver pressing into her hip. "Not as a first resort, anyways."
                "Tell that to the prospector back outside Jonah's Epiphany!" she argued back.
                "He had his warning!"
                "Poor fella was blast mining all night to make a mighty find." Billy whispered to Darlene. "Which would have been fine in the mines, but he chose to do it in a ring around our camp. Elana didn't take kindly to disrupted sleep."
                "Anyways, we picked up the pastor when we went through his town a day or so later, and he asked to come with us." Elana told Darlene, moving on from any further accusations of practices and preachings being in disagreement.
                "So you two were already hunting him down?"
                "That's right. We'd chased him all the way from Teresa's ranch, out East of here by Jonah's Guess."
                "And what did he do to you, ma'am? Roast up your wardrobe?"
                Teresa spat on the fire, despite the fire doing nothing to deserve it.
                "He made my life a living nightmare, like he does to everyone else." she spat on the fire again. Billy worried that perhaps she wasn't enjoying the beans as much as usual. "I first laid eyes on the sack of crap when he came ambling down the road from Jonah's Guess; weren't nothing strange about folk walking towards my ranch from town, on account of my reputation for good milk, better horses, and no nonsense. See, I used to run with a group of cattle-rustler-rustlers; there was good money to be made in bringing rustlers to justice, and the bounty hunters were cleaning up on the market. My group figured that if we got in there first, we could sell the rustlers on to the bounty hunters, saving them the effort of the chase, and take a share of the earnings."
                "Smart." said Darlene. There was a momentary pause. "No, wait, not smart. Why couldn't y'all just claim the bounty yourselves?"
                "We weren't bounty hunters, Darlene! We were just simple folk with guns, ropes, horses, and a talent for catching wrongdoers. Kept us in the good graces of the hunters themselves, too; if anyone came after us, we'd have protection."
                Darlene frowned. It sounded like the bounty hunters were trading a portion of their money for the pleasure of becoming informal bodyguards, but she chose not to question it; confusing business models wouldn't make Teresa's flesh any less delicious should the situation arise.
                "Anyway, we'd stake out farms in the sticks, ones that seemed poorly guarded or badly maintained, with vulnerable cattle in their pens. Under cover of darkness we'd wait, lurking in the bushes or under great tarps, until a likely group of rustlers came by, looking to make a quick buck by stealing from some hardworking farmer. When they'd committed to the crime, we'd take them by surprise, heading out with lassos twirling and horses screaming, and tie them all together like a sausage of low moral fibre. We could drag those rustlers back to the hunters, take our pay, and be off into the night again." She sighed wistfully, and took another spoonful of beans. "Those were simple, happy days."
                "And then y'all settled down with a farm of your own?"
                "Yep, that I did. The market for rustler rustling was drying up, on account of a bunch of lowlife cattle-rustler-rustler-rustlers taking away all the cattle-rustler-rustlers on the pay of cattle-rustlers so that they could still get to the cattle. When the bounty hunters came to us offering protection against the cattle-rustler-rustler-rustlers we realised that we'd just be handing bags of money back and forward between ourselves for no good reason. The gig was up. So, I remembered one of those vulnerable farms, bought out the owner, and shored the place up for myself. Most unsavouries knew my reputation and stayed clear; the rest gave me a taste of the old days."
                "Sounds wonderful."
                "It was, until Lazarus Boules came walking down that road. I didn't know him from any other poor soul out here, and he made a pretty simple request of me; a horse and two urns of milk for a fair price. I show him the mare, show him the milk, and ask for my money. He tells me he doesn't have it yet, but he will by the next evening. He has enough for a down payment, though, and a promissory note, guaranteed by the bank of Jonah's Guess." Teresa shook her head sadly and kicked at the ground. "I'd got soft from my years settled down. Should never have taken that note."
                Elana, now finished with her serving of beans, began cleaning up her dish by the light of the fire.
                "The next morning I go out to my barn, and I see a sack. Above the sack, there's a note, an invoice of the horse and milk, with 'paid in full' stamped across it. Unit of currency? Clocks."
                Darlene pulled her confused face again.
                "He'd left me a sack of old timepieces in lieu of payment, saying they were worth twice the cash he owed me, the mangy rat! In hindsight, he had been lugging around a large sack when I saw him, and that sack had been ticking and chiming something awful, but I didn't really think about that too hard. Takes all sorts, you know? Oh but I'd never been so angry in all my life when I saw that sack sitting at my barn door; shot my mailbox to pieces to get the red mist to fade away. I needed to find myself a bounty hunter, I thought, to track him down and take care of things, and I needed to get the sheriff involved to authorise the bounty, so I took myself to Jonah's Guess there and then.
So there I am, standing in Jonah's Guess sheriff's office, sack of clocks in one hand and draft bounty in the other. Sheriff looks at me, looks at the bag, and tells me that he'd been investigating a spate of mantle clock thefts for the last few days, around the time that one Lazarus Boules had been in town; it had been a slow crime month. This got me thinking that I'd have some muscle behind me, the force of the law, but no. He tells me that since the stolen goods have been used for payment of a legitimate transaction, they had been effectively clock-laundered. They were clean now, and they were my property; as far as he cared, the case was solved and he had no need to chase down Boules, nor any reason to authorise a bounty. He was not a good sheriff.
                Now, he tells me that I can try to sell the clocks back to their owners, but of course they don't want to pay for their own things, so there I am stuck with the lot of them. My momma always told me that every problem is a blessing in disguise. She was wrong, of course, but I tried to live by that advice as best I could anyway. I took those clocks home, set them up around the place, and reconciled myself to always knowing the exact time, no matter where I was. That reconciliation only lasted until midnight, with the terrible chiming, all out of sync with one another, rattling the walls in the twilight when I should have been sleeping. That's when I really lost my temper. That's when I knew I had to hunt Boules down myself. I got up, I strapped on my irons, and I shot every last one of those damn clocks until they shut up. It took until sun-up, on account of needing to clean all the fragments and cogs and the like up so that I didn't get splinters, by which time Elana Stubbs here comes rolling up to my farm. Says she's hunting Lazarus Boules. I've been by her side since, and I'm going to stay by it until I give Boules one bullet for every bell I had to hear that night."
                "I hope that still leaves enough meat for the pot." said Darlene. "Wouldn't want to waste good eating."
                "He'd give you a bellyache, Darlene. I'm sure of that much."
                "We'll see. Just a taste can't hurt. But anyway, that only leaves Elana, here. You chased Boules to the ranch, right? Whose bounty were y'all honouring?"
                "My own." Elana said. "But now's not the time; we need to get some shut-eye so that we can hit the trail by sunrise. We're closing in on him; tomorrow's the day, friends. We'll get our payback."
Feeble protestations from Darlene about an early bedtime earned her the first watch, keeping an eye trained on the darkness for any sign of coyotes, lynxes or other threats that might stalk in the darkness. She accepted on the basis that she might get an exotic late-night snack out of it.
                Despite the inherent danger of allowing a cannibal to watch over them while they slept, all three of the riders remained alive and well at the changing of the watch, and all four members of the camp were able to pack up their gear and mount their horses at sunrise. Having not brought a horse of her own, Darlene was given the choice of either lying across the rear of Teresa's horse, like a bound cattle-rustler-rustler on the circuitous route to the law, or sitting behind Elana in her broad, flat saddle. Being a woman of dignity and self-determination, Darlene flopped herself behind Teresa and prepared for an unusual journey through the plains.
                "So, Mrs Stubbs," started Darlene, quickly discovering that when one bounces heavily on their diaphragm, speaking becomes more difficult, "now that we have some time to spare, why did y'all start this hunt for Lazarus Boule?"
                "He did wrong, and he needs to be brought to justice."
                "There's something more to it than that, surely."
                "Does there have to be? He's been hounded out of every town in the state after a few days, tops, and with good reason. He's wanted for the casting of a man's boots into a fire, starting a bar brawl by expressing strong opinions on belt buckles, cursing a stove to be haunted by a powerful demon, skipping town while under investigation for moustache enhancing chemicals, and a whole litany of other wrongdoings. Add to that the crimes of booze theft, whipping of an apron with menaces, and lynx abuse that we heard about so extensively in Jonah's Jolly and you've got quite a picture of the kind of outlaw Boules is."
                "But that's a reason for the law to care. Not a reason for you to post a bounty and then hunt it yourself." Darlene observed, although she had far more observations about abdominal bruising and the dry, stony ground.
                "I had my dealings with Lazarus like anyone else, there's nothing more to say."
                "And no time to get changed apparently. Did y'all walk straight out of your classroom and mount up?"
                Elana turned in the saddle, so that she could look at Darlene with sufficient incredulity.
"What do you mean to say by that?"
                "Y'all are dressed in your teaching frock and high heeled boots. Doesn't exactly make y'all think of the quiet contemplation of justice, more of someone who snaps about a lynx attack robbing them of dinner." Darlene explained, choosing a sensible and relatable analogy.
                "How I dress is none of your concern, Darlene. Just like what or who you choose to eat is none of mine. Are we clear?"
                Darlene shrugged. It was strange to shrug horizontally, but she performed it elegantly enough.
                As the sun rose and the riders rode, Jonah's Refinement crept into view almost apologetically. Terribly embarrassed by taking up valuable space on the otherwise untouched landscape, all for the pleasure of hosting yet another unproductive mine, it clung to the shelter of hills and lurked behind rocky outcroppings as if to avoid intruding on anyone's valuable field of view. By the time they'd realised the town was even approaching, they were already in its outskirts, the railway line just about visible between the hills. This was, of course, a facet of every late-stage Jonah settlement. Having founded so many mining towns across the region, every one of them ending in literal, figurative, or both literal and figurative collapse, his town planning had taken a turn for the meek. If the buildings were harder to spot from a distance, and if they looked like the hovels of hermits and other pariahs, then the many settlers with rightful grudges against him would have a harder time of tracking him down. The history books would widely agree that Jonah was not a good prospector, and that he was an even worse man.
                The townsfolk were going about their early morning business of washing, casting out the night's filth, bringing water up from the well, clearing rats from their boots and getting a head start on the day's mining. Although hardly a bustling city, the three riders were able to join what passed for a crowded street of traffic.
                "He's not burned the place to the ground." Darlene said, accurately.
                "It'd be more of a mercy if he did, sometimes." spat Teresa, perhaps laying it on a bit thick for a victim of clock abandonment.
                "Lazarus Boules! Has anyone seen Lazarus Boules?" Elana cried at the crowd. It was a blunt method but, apparently, she was in no mood to beat around the bush.
                A few heads turned to the schoolmistress on her horse, flanked by a rancher with a happy-looking passenger and a preacher on a mule.
                "Are you here to give her the girl? Is the preacher gonna marry them?" asked an aging man with a sack of dynamite over one shoulder. Although the mines of Jonah's Refinement, like his other mines, had yielded no gold or ore, the miners here at least used more modern means to extract so much nothing. "You could do a lot worse than that Boules boy."
                "He's here?!"
                "Well yeah! He's in the post office, I think. Said he wanted to get in there early to pick up some work. You think the post clerk would let you have the ceremony in there? I could be your ring bearer!"
                "No, thank you. There'll be no marriage today, except the marriage of my boot to his behind." snapped Elana.
                "Well, if Lazarus's behind and your boot love each other very much then I'll not stand against it." the miner replied, open-mindedly. "My brother's elbow married a section of the saloon's bar the other year, the section that it had been leaning on for years. Sometimes soulmates are under our noses, or our joints, all the time like that." he chuckled.
                "Erm, thanks. Come on, we're finally going to get that son of a slug." Elana ordered, spurring her horse into a modest trot; moving any more quickly than that was impossible through the morning crowd, and would likely have sent Darlene plummeting into a muddy puddle. Teresa had very few qualms about that.
                Jonah, in what some might call his wisdom as long as they'd never seen an example of it, had decided that the post must always be sent without delay from Jonah's Refinement. Surely there would be hundreds of suddenly rich prospectors all desperate to stake their claims, and to tell their loved ones about the bountiful veins of precious ore that the mines there held. Consequently, it was deemed vital to build the post office directly above the railway tracks. There could be no delays in getting post from the office to the freight train if there was no distance to travel, and news of the thriving, booming market town would spread faster than typhoid in his sanitation-free public bathhouse back in Jonah's Respite.
                Bowing wooden planks and warped timbers stood in open collusion with one another, making bold and frankly unjustifiable claims of being a post office. To say that time had been hard on the structure would be to find it possible to visualise the component pieces ever fitting together, which was something quite beyond any of the bounty hunters or Darlene. To them, it was more feasible that someone had merely forgotten their scrap lumber when popping out for lunch, and the wind had nudged it into the coincidentally building-adjacent configuration they saw before them. This was still true despite the whole thing being set onto an enormous group of stilts, betwixt which ran the town's heavy iron railway tracks. Its underside was coated with soot and burns from the hot exhaust of the locomotives, and it appeared that several enterprising youths had made a hammock system, from which they could hop onto passing trains without fear of being charged a fare. The bounty hunters ignored this fare dodging, and would continue to do so until a price tag was placed upon the apprehension of those youths. Instead, they focused on the staircase that invited nothing but injury and death, leading the way up to the front door.
                Outside, tied to a wooden rail above a long trough of water, was Lazarus' horse: the brown and white skewbald horse known as clumpy. She was chewing contentedly on a bale of hay that Elana felt sure to be the property of someone else.
                "Teresa and I will head up the stairs and in the front. I don’t see a back door, but Pastor Bernaise, you're covering the rear regardless. Don't let him get by you!" Elana ordered in a loud whisper that might as well have been normal speech. "Darlene, stay clear of danger and don't eat anybody."
                "Not even if they die in unrelated circumstances?" she complained, affronted.
                "Not even then. We won't be long, but if you hear fighting then fetch help from the sheriff."
                "You got it. I’ll see if he has any leads on edible prisoners in other towns, too."
                Softly the three riders dismounted, their boots landing on the dusty road, and then Teresa slipped Darlene onto her feet, having secured her commitment to keep watch.
                "Weapons ready, but don't go shooting him. We're here to bring him in alive if we can." Elana reminded Teresa.
                "That 'if' is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here, Mrs Stubbs." the rancher growled.
                With the pastor on his way around the back, despite the dangerous railway crossing that such an exercise entailed, and Darlene patting each of the horses in turn, Elana and Teresa began a quiet approach. To call the post office a building would be a vicious attack on the rest of the construction industry; it was an insult of a structure, comprising more gaps than walls and seeming to be held up by the suspension of disbelief alone. If a gentle breeze were to blow, and it was to somehow not cause a total collapse of the rough accumulation of rotten timbers, then it would immediately penetrate the interior and all of the letters inside would be scattered across the floor. Not to put too fine a point on it, the building was not fit for purpose in its current, perforated state. So egregious were these structural flaws, that neither of the approaching women would have been surprised if they were all Boules' doing.
                Standing to either side of the door once they’d climbed the perilous stairs, Teresa and Elana nodded to one another. With that pleasantry dealt with, Elana pushed it open as quickly as she dared, and hurried inside.
                There was no need to scan or search this time. The whole building was about the size of a modest bathroom. Standing behind a barred counter window, visible only from the waist up, was the post clerk; he looked rather perturbed and weary, which was only natural given the company he was keeping.
                Sitting at a small table in a corner of the room that was, apparently, reserved for such things, sat a man in jet black jeans, wearing a black shirt that had been embroidered with golden thread. A wide-brimmed black hat was pulled down low over his brow, his boots were uncouthly resting on the table, and a glass of whiskey was gripped delicately between his fingers. There was no mistaking him.
                "Lazarus Boules!" Ms De Firenze bellowed, rather unnecessarily. Elana had to restrain herself from launching into a lecture about 'inside voices'. "You clock rustling snake!"
                The cowboy in black placed two fingers on the brim of his hat, and tipped it causally forwards. With swagger worthy of a whole body movement, he slowly lifted his head to show an overconfident smirk on his stubble coated face.
                "Please, call me Lazzy Boo Boo." he said, taking a sip of his golden whisky.
                "There's not a hope in all of creation of me doing that." snarled Teresa, looking at him along the barrel of her gun.
                "And even after I said please? See, Mr Tillinger? People got no manners these days. What harm could it do to these good people to call me by a name of my own choosing?"
                "Get out, please, Lazzy Boo Boo!" the post clerk snapped back at him.
                "Now, see, I think you're practicing, aw what's it called..."
                "Good sense, if he wants you gone." Elana told him, abruptly. "Come with us peacefully, boy, and you won't be hurt."
                "...aggressive compliance? Hostile compliance? Something like that." he continued, ignoring the schoolmistress' words. "Y'all called me Lazzy Boo Boo, and minded your manners, but still did it to push me away. You still need the presence of a good friend and I," he said, patting the side of his own raised knee, "am here for y'all."
                "Just like the creeping march of decay or that rat I can't keep out of my bed. Just because you're always there doesn't mean you're there for someone, Lazarus. Sometimes you're just a chewed up bedsheets and a pile of leavings by the pillow." Mr Tillinger replied, not leaving much room for doubt regarding his feelings.
                "One of the more generous descriptions I've heard of Mr Boules in my time."
                "With the help of the Lord, maybe we can make him earn a better one." said the pastor. Elana snapped her head towards him, surprised, but Teresa's focus would not be shifted so easily from her target.
                "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be watching the back!"
                "Ah, well I made a good attempt at doing so, but I'm afraid I can't be standing round there as an honest, god-fearing man, Mrs Stubbs. When my gaze fell upon the rear of the building it also fell upon the rear of this gentleman here, and that's not a sight for a preacher." he explained, mopping his brow with a handkerchief bible and pointing to Mr Tillinger, whose face turned red from equal parts embarrassment and anger. Lazarus giggled.
                "He done stole my britches! That's why I'm still standing behind here, for the sake of my own modesty, and not throwing him out myself." complained Mr Tillinger. "The holy man got an eyeful of my rump thanks to this monster here!"
                "Now what kind of person does that, Lazarus?" demanded Mrs Stubbs, who was in no mood for that sort of nonsense. "Who takes a man's britches while he's working?"
                "A piece of trash." Teresa answered.
                "Whoa! Y'all need to find yourselves some peace!" chuckled Lazarus. "Look at how angry and worked up you're getting. I know a great spiritual guide who'll help you find inner contentment. Just hand me thirty dollars apiece and I'll pass it on to her as your deposit. Then she'll find y'all and help y'all."
                Elana slapped the preacher's hand away from his money bible.
                "Nice try Boules. Is that how y'all got this poor man's britches? False offers of guidance?"
                "Naw, this man didn't need a spirit guide. There was a britches emergency and he needed a friend, which is what I'm being now by keeping him company. Don't act like I'm here for devilment, when I'm here for kindness."
                “It was an emergency of your creation! You threw hot ink at me!”
                "This misguided soul is in dire need of intervention, clearly." Ssothed the preacher, open-handed. "Come with us, boy. Make amends for a boiled chair and a dozen ruined cushions."
                Slowly, Billy took a step forwards. Quickly, impossibly quickly, there was a revolver in Lazarus' hand.
                "Hold it there, please, friend. I don't much like to feel like I'm being penned in, and y'all are standing between me and the door. Now, if you're approaching me to offer payment for the spirit guide then that's fine, but I've just about had enough of our timekeeping friend here pointing a barrel in my face. Would you please ask her to put it down, Mrs Stubbs?"
                A steam whistle blew outside, and the office slowly began to shake and rumble, the powder of rotting wood raining down onto the floor. Directly below them, a train was rushing through the town.
                "I think the time for that has come and gone, Lazarus. Drop the gun, and come with us. This is your last warning." said Elana.
                "You always were stubborn as a mule." Shrugged Lazarus. Making a show of it, he lowered the revolver back to his hip, removed his feet from the table, and slowly stood up. "Can I give Mr Tillinger here is britches back, before I go with y'all? I think he might appreciate some shelter for his thighs."
                It was a trick. Elena knew it had to be a trick. But denying a man his britches went against everything she stood for.
                "Slowly." she instructed.
                Smirking, Lazarus crouched down to his bag, by the feet of his chair, and reached inside.
                "Can I just shoot him now?" asked Teresa. Elana was too slow to grant that permission.
                With a hard kick, the table in front of Lazarus flipped onto Billy's feet, and Boules crashed to the floor behind hit. Barely a second later came the crack of gunfire, and a bullet thudding into the doorframe above Elana's head.
                "Damn it, Lazarus!" she roared, as Teresa returned fire at the upturned table.
                "That's awful foul language for a teacher, Mrs Stubbs!" Lazarus chided, blindly loosing a few more rounds. "Y'all oughta wash your mouth out."
                "I'm keeping as civil a tongue as I can in the face of your misdeeds, boy." Elana snapped, diving to the cover of the post clerk’s enclosure and reaching a hand into one of the many layers of dress. She could feel her own gun in its holster, but there was still a mass of fabric between her and it.
                With Elana cursing her layers and Pastor Bernaise cowering behind his hiding bible, Teresa emptied her magazine into the table top, giving future carpenters a few days' worth of work. In the meantime, she lunged forwards and tried to push the erstwhile cover on top of Boules.
                For her sins of quick thinking and decisive action, a boot lashed out and caught her in the gut.
                "All timepieces are non-refundable." sniggered Lazarus, as he stamped hard. Below him, set into the floor, was a rusting metal chute which had, until very recently, been covered with a thin sheet of wood. Whenever a postal train came past, the post clerk would carefully time its progress past the post office, and then bowl a heavy sack of letters down the chute, out of the building, and neatly into the awaiting carriage. It would have been an exquisitely slick system, if not for the post clerk's total lack of rhythm and timing; most sacks crashed down onto the tracks long after the train had disappeared from sight, but on occasion he would get there too quickly instead. With a thud and a rushing boom, the locomotives would then eagerly annihilate the bags of correspondence, shredding them into spray letters like papery snowfall.
                Lazarus Boules, on the other hand, had no such problems with timing.
                "It's been a pleasure, but I have to take my leave." he drawled. With the roaring of a train passing beneath, he plummeted into the chute, crunching into an open carriage of urgently despatched linens and cushions.
                Having made a few more futile attempts to pick the right petticoat layer, Elana was still unarmed. Cursing herself, she vaulted the table and careened down the chute after Lazarus, like a flash of pedagogical fury.
                "Billy! Get her up and get after us!" she shouted, pointing at the doubled-over Teresa as she dropped. Grey and russet metal, rusting with neglect, sped briefly past her eyes before her vision was consumed by the hessian depths of a carriage of used burlap sacks.
                Elana had learned all about the perils of quicksand during her own childhood, courtesy of growing up by a nearly endless sandy expanse, and spent many hours passing that information onto her pupils. She also knew how to react when plunged into water, as had happened many times during her teacher training. Burlap, however, was an medium for which no advice had been given during her youth, or at any time afterwards. She had no idea whether to stay still and let herself float to the top, try desperately to swim for the surface, spin rapidly to create a vortex of fabric, or take some unforeseen fourth course of action. The taste of dirt and old sacking filled her mouth when she tried to breathe it in, and then the feeling of shame overtook her mind when she wondered why she'd tried to breathe sacking at all. She forced calmness onto herself. To be below the surface in a sea of sacking was nothing to worry about, and her rational mind knew it perfectly well. Adopting her favoured swimming stroke, she pushed back up to the surface and the roasting sunshine, with the bouncing of train on track jostling her like waves in a tidal pool.
                Behind her, carriage after carriage of freight stretched away, long past the shrinking post office of Jonah's Refinement and into the empty plains. Ahead of her were a few more freight cars and then some passenger carriages, but only one could claim to be bearing Lazarus Boules, dashing as he was towards the front of the train. Elana spat out a ball of loose threads. He wouldn't escape this time.
                It was a short swim to the edge of the carriage. Hands dirty from second hand soil clamped onto the wooden wall and hauled her up into the lashing wind. Skirts flapping, hat pulling and heels high, Elana leaned hard into the rushing air and jogged as best she could along the narrow walls of the freight cars. Past linens and cushions, past coal and rocks, past a carriage empty except for a single wholemeal loaf, Elana Stubbs pursued her quarry, making daring leaps from one car to the next and trying her very hardest not to see the ground. She was closer now to her prey than she had been in months, practically within grabbing range of the scourge of the West. This was a significant contributor to his decision to fire his revolver blindly over one shoulder.        
                "When I get to my gun I'll give that boy the lesson of a lifetime." Elana growled to herself, making valiant but futile efforts to arm herself while she ran. With the turbulent whipping of the wind it was even harder to slip between the correct layers of fabric and find her weapon. "Stop running, Boules!" she demanded.
                “Never!” he cried. Ahead of him were the enclosed passenger carriages, domed wooden crates on wheels with a series of small windows set into each side. Below him a collection of bored dandies, naïve fortune-seekers and megalomaniacal train guards would be milling in the passageway or reclining languidly on their seats, unaware of the chaos above them. They knew nothing of the fleeing conman, nor the pursuing schoolmistress, the latter of whom seemed to be prospecting for something among the many strata of her own skirts. That is, until Lazarus started shooting again.
                Elana’s boots, and consequently her ankles, wobbled and tilted underneath her as she tried to keep up with Lazarus. For someone so committed to the cause of laziness and exploitation, he was remarkably athletic and agile, and for someone so pragmatic and sensible, she’d made an awful choice of footwear for running along the roof of a train.
                Past her on both sides whooshed the blurred mineshafts and quarries in the hills, and the bare, worthless rocks of Jonah’s Refinement. Despite founding tens of towns across the vast deserts, Jonah had never once struck gold. His only refinement for this settlement had been to build and abandon it in record time. Regardless, for some reason, the people still flocked to him, and hung around long after he himself had moved on. He was just as much of a con artist as Boules, but Elana would not let Lazarus escape justice like Jonah had.
                Heads were poking eagerly out of the passenger windows when she threw herself bodily onto the carriage roof behind Lazarus. The man himself was still running. He fired the last round in his revolver, and then fumbled with his gun as he tried to push more bullets into the chambers.
                "Oh boy! There's action on the roof everyone!" cried a young lady, her bonnet flapping like a palpitating hummingbird in the wind. "A good old fashioned shootout!"
                "A shootout?!"
                "Gunplay afoot atop the carriage?!"
                "Do we got ourselves a train brawl?!"
                Excited wails and whoops erupted from the carriage, sweeping forwards from compartment to compartment through the train.
                "Come on everyone!" a sandy-haired dandy laughed, pulling out a snub nosed pistol and firing it mirthfully into the air. All too eager to acquiesce and join in with the festivities, the other passengers cheerfully whipped out a modest armoury’s worth of small arms. Within moments the train was filled with the sound of rapidly exchanged gunfire, each passenger blasting away in the direction of whoever they could see, and giggling as they did so.
                “What in Heaven’s name is wrong with you?!” snapped Elana, using her teacher voice, but none of the passenger’s listened. Instead they leaned precariously from the windows and doors below, taking pot-shots along the length of the vehicle and up at the roof. Trying her best to ignore them, their fire, and their unadulterated joy, Elana resumed her wobbly dash after Lazarus, who was clicking the barrel of his revolver back into place.
                "You're awful sprightly for an old madam, Mrs Stubbs." he said, cocking the hammer. "But y'all should really stop exerting yourself. You'll break a hip like this."
                A chorus of theatrical 'Ooh's came from the audience below, in and around their playful gunfire.
                "I'll break more than that when I get you, Boules." she snarled back, to cheers, laughter and applause from the crowd. Spurred into action by the repartee, a few of the bolder and more boisterous passengers climbed their way out of the windows and up to the roof, guns holstered or clutched between teeth as hands clambered up the wooden chassis.
                “Well howdy, fellas.” was as much as Lazarus could manage before they set merrily upon him, like children wrestling in a rapidly moving, rigidly wooden garden. A pair of heavy shoulders crashed playfully into his sternum, lifting him off his feet and slamming him onto the roof.
                In Elana’s line of work, that is, the hunting of bounties, that type of development was known as a freebie; someone else tackled the quarry, then the lucky hunter could swoop in and tie them up without having to get their hands dirty or their boots wet. It was customary to buy the helpful vigilante a drink, or a sandwich, or a new shoe for their horse as they saw fit, but that was where compensation ended. In this instance, with three bored fops keeping Lazarus pinned in place, Elena was about to count herself as a very fortunate hunter indeed. Unfortunately, the hands that then grabbed her arms from behind, and the cackles of amused roughhousing that came with them, had robbed her of the chance to feel blessed.
                “Get off me!” she demanded, snatching at her arms, but she couldn’t break free or overpower the ever-growing number of fingers that clamped on.
                “Look at us all! Having a brawl on a train like in the stories!” cried a young woman with fresh gunpowder stains on her hands. She happily elbowed a companion in the nose as they tried to kick her in the spine.
                “Ha! You got me good, Nancy!” laughed the good-spirited owner of the now troubled sniffing equipment.
                Elana’s eyes were locked on Lazarus, still struggling against the holiday makers. She stamped her high heels down hard on any foot she could find, she yanked and hauled with both arms, she flung her head back and twisted and writhed and flailed, but nothing could overwhelm the number of guffawing brawl tourists who restrained her.
                “Let go! I’ve nearly got him!” she roared.
                “Hey! Hey!” shouted Lazarus. “Let’s all play ‘Get the bounty hunter’! The nice lady in the dresses loves wrestling folk, so let’s all wrestle her together!”
                This suggestion, it transpired, was enormously popular with the passenger demographic. They’d been loving their impromptu shootout, as the various holes, cracks and breaks in the train’s furniture would attest, but getting involved in a punch-up on a train roof with a real bounty hunter was too much to pass up. The men who’d been merrily delaying Lazarus turned their sights and grins towards Elana. She was powerless to do anything but watch as Boules dusted himself off, tipped his hat, and began to run further up the train again.
                “No! No! We can’t let him get away again!” wailed Mrs Stubbs.
                “Ha! That’s exactly what a bounty hunter would say!” chuckled a young man, while head-butting his travelling companion.
                “This isn’t a game! He’s dangerous! Get him, not me!” she appealed, but there was no reason to be found. Lazarus was nearly at the end of the carriage.
                “He’s too far away. We can brawl right here.” assessed one of her aggressors, before kicking her in the back of the knee. Finally, her leg gave way and she dropped into the morass of bodies, the only one not laughing and hollering to the cracks and bangs of gunshots.
                To one side of the train, barely audible over the cacophony of combat, was a squeaking sound. It wasn’t like a mouse or a bird’s squeak; it was too regular, too periodic, too human made. Even through the wall of wrestling dandies, Elana could tell that something was happening beyond the confines of the train roof.
                A trio of rapid-fire shots, too precisely timed to have come from the tourists, rang out over the squeaks, and with yelps of sudden displeasure Elana’s assailants released their grasps.
                “There’s more where that came from you varmints!” shrieked Teresa, fanning the hammer and riddling the train with bullet holes. Several of those holes were in  carriages that carried no threat at all, and in all the years that passed thereafter Teresa would never give a satisfactory explanation as to why she’d found it necessary to make them.
                On the adjacent track, from precisely the direction of the squeaking was a banged-up looking handcar. It was carrying utterly tremendous speed, as well as Teresa de Firenze, Darlene the aspiring cannibal, and Pastor Billy Bernaise, whose body was whipping up and down like a fiddler’s elbow as he pumped the cart along to keep pace with the locomotive.
                “You get that clock rustler, Elana!”
                “And I’ll get me a sweet meal!” screeched Darlene, launching herself onto the side of the carriage and promptly biting a woman’s outstretched arm.
                “Thanks, Teresa. Please stop her eating folk.” Elana requested, already in the process of giving chase once more. Behind her the sounds of playful gun shots were morphing to terrified screams, with the unmistakable sounds of wealthy people trying not to be consumed by a feral woman. She could hear the pastor making repeated appeals for the violence to stop, and then the sounds of violence being used to make him stop.
                Boules was already a full carriage ahead of Elana, closing in on the locomotive itself. With renewed vigour she broke into a full sprint, skirts pushed tight against her legs and revolver slapping against her uncomfortably from somewhere within the folds. Despite his advantage in years, and despite her disadvantage in high heels, she was catching up. She’d given up trying to duck away from his wild over-the-shoulder shots, and ceased to care about getting her own gun free. The ever-growing black jacket and stolen boots occupied every scrap of her thoughts. When Lazarus stole a furtive glance behind himself and saw the danger she kept her focus. When he yanked his hat off she barely acknowledged it. When he took a stick of dynamite from the hat, she twigged just a little too late to stop him lighting the fuse.
                He didn’t even bother throwing it. The dull, tan cylinder of potential effervescence simply bounced and rolled its way along the train towards her where he’d dropped it, as if he’d made exactly this manoeuvre before. It wouldn’t just blind her with a flash, or bust a hole in the roof or knock her down; he’d used enough to make sure that there wouldn’t even be a carriage left, and it was on a perfectly predicted trajectory to go off right between Elana’s boots.
                Sliding to a panicked halt, Elana looked at the stick with wide eyes, and then to either side as if anyone might be there to help. Seeing no-one upon whom to rely, and without a solid cast iron pan under which to hide the bomb, there were very few options available that didn’t also feature a redistribution of her flesh across the surrounding plains. There was very little time to think, so she elected not to bother doing it at all; instinct alone prompted her foot too lash out at the approaching explosive, as if it were a tumbleweed rather than a highly unstable substance, and kick it hard away to one side.
                It was just one more blasted crater for the hillsides around Jonah’s Refinement. As far as anyone else was concerned, the explosion was just another futile attempt to find mineral wealth in a patch of land that held nothing but sand and loose soil. As far as Elana was concerned it was attempted murder, and as far as Lazarus was concerned, it was just enough time bought to make a move. He slipped down between the carriage and the locomotive, and then remerged smirking, with a coupling pin dangling languidly from one hand.
                "Looks like this is where y'all disembark, teach. It's been right nice to see y'all again, but I have places to be and people to-"
                The end of his sentence was cut off by the crack of gunfire and shrill ricochet of a bullet on metal. The coupling pin span painfully out of Lazarus' hand, and then Elena, with a continued ferocity, crashed bodily into him as she cleared the rapidly growing gap.
                "Why won't you just give up!" snapped Lazarus, throwing fists wherever he thought me might find some bounty hunter.
                "You've done enough harm!" Elana replied, bringing a knee up into Lazarus' ribcage. "It's time for you to take your punishment."
                "Never!" he roared, crashing his knuckles into Elana's throat and sending her choking to her knees. Against the hot metal roof of the locomotive she pressed her hands and forehead, desperately trying to regain some composure, but something between the pain in her throat, the sounds of a pitched battle raging behind her, and the endless game of cat and mouse snapped in  her.
                "You owe me those ten lines and with God as my witness I'll get them, Master Boules!" she growled. Even without the throat punch interfering with her voice box it would have come out the same.
                Lazarus, at long last, stopped running. Slowly, torturously slowly, he turned to face her, with a look on his face that tried to marry confusion, amusement and fury in a melange of emotion. His gun was levelled directly at her.
                “You’ve been on my tail for months.” he spat. “You’ve dragged yourself through the desert and the stinking dirt. You’ve towed that idiot rancher and fool preacher with you half the way. You must have sat through the sob stories of a hundred yokels I’ve harvested for coin, and all for what? For ten lines of chalk on a blackboard?!”
                Lazarus roared the final question, shaking his weapon at Mrs Stubbs. She stared at him, not with the stony, emotionless gaze of a bounty hunter, but with the familiar disappointed look of a schoolteacher.
                “If you break the rules then you take a punishment, Lazarus. The other children all did it, they all respected my authority, but you still owe me ten lines of ‘I must not cheat’ and you know it.” Elana said, slowly rising up to her feet.
                “I didn’t cheat! Those cards were in my sleeves for a legitimate reason!” bellowed back 20 years of a child’s indignant rage. “It was two decades ago! Have y’all been following me since then?!”
                “No-one has sleeve cards legitimately, Lazarus, and you know it. I’ll have my lines and the sheriffs will have their fugitive. I was simply waiting to retire before I tied up this loose end.”
                “Kick your gun over to me.” he said, ignoring her words. “Right now.”
                Slowly, Elana fished through layers of petticoat, trying to find how on earth to get to her weapon. Increasingly impatient tuts emanated from Lazarus Boules, and a gradually increasing squeaking sound came from the parallel track.
                “Lazarus! Stop this nonsense! Come back with us and we can save your soul, son!” called Pastor Billy. Elana had to give him full credit; he was still pumping the cart furiously but barely sounded out of breath at all.
                “Go home, reverend. Y’all don’t want any part of this.” said the conman, trying to cock the hammer of his pistol for effect, but discovering that he’d already done that earlier.
                “Like I tried telling those folks in the carriages back there, violence won’t solve anything here. Lay down your arms and lets find justice together.”
                “Still waiting for Mrs Stubbs here to kick me her gun, your holiness. I’ll be keeping hold of my weapon until at least then.”
                “None of you need weapons. No-one needs to get hurt or killed. We can leave this situation  together as friends on a journey of redemption.” persisted the pastor, but Lazarus’ patience had run dry. His hands moved in a blur, firing a single round square into the pastor’s chest before flicking his aim back to Elana.
                “Billy!” Mrs Stubbs cried, but without the pastor’s impressive pumping skills the hand trolley had already started to lose ground on the roaring locomotive. “You’ve crossed a dark line there, shooting a man of the good book in cold blood, Boules. That’s at least another ten lines.” she said, liberating her revolver at last.
                "And that's a mighty fine nine-iron y'all got yourself. Or that I’ve now got myself." Lazarus drawled.
                "Courtesy of seven-fingered John, back home." said Elana. Seven-fingered John, the gunsmith in their home town, actually had a full ten fingers despite his name, but he could never be bothered to count them properly. He’d simply looked down quickly one day, saw roughly seven, and went with it as a good enough guess. He followed the same approach for counting the chambers in the weapons he made, leading to some very unique designs.
                “It’ll make a great new addition to my collection. I already have a few of his pieces.”
                “Stolen goods are hardly yours, Boules.”
                His expression darkened further, like a storm front rolling towards a leaky fishing vessel.
                “Kick it over.”
                “So that you can cheat at duelling me, just like you cheated Roger Feathers out of the answers to the maths homework?” asked Elana. A lifetime of holding up petty childhood slights as significant, character defining moments had led her to this place.
                “I didn’t cheat!”
                Lazarus fired at Elana’s feet to accentuate his point. Most people, when telling the truth, don’t feel the need to discharge a weapon. If anything, doing so undermines the credibility of the statement in the majority of cases.
                “Then don’t cheat here either. Duel me right and proper, here, on this locomotive.”
                Boules chewed on something. Maybe it was his tongue. Maybe it was his cheek. Maybe some tobacco, or straw, or just the suggestion from Elana itself. She couldn’t tell.
                “Holster it.” he finally said. “And take your hand back away.”
                Elana smirked, pushing her nine-shooter back into place and, dutifully, unthreaded her hand from the mire of fabric. Satisfied that she was empty and open handed, Lazarus shocked the schoolteacher by doing the same.
                Lazarus’ feet were planted firmly in the ground, wider than his hips but narrower, as is likely to be obvious, than the train. A width in the middle, closer to the former than the latter, was the stance of choice. His jacket was billowing around him, except for where his right hand was poised, just over the handle of his gun. Elana studied him up and down, uselessly. She knew him all too well, and would learn nothing from these observations. He was still just the petulant schoolboy she’d tried in vain to educate out of trouble.
                “There’s nowhere left to run, Boules. Jonah only founded so many towns. You'd know how many if you'd listened in class. Even if you take me down, which you won’t, Teresa’ll catch you and take revenge for me and the pastor."
                "You think y'all can outdraw me, teach? Y'all were too slow to catch me for all this time, and I've had bigger, scarier folks trying to do worse than bring me in. I got away from every one of them."
                "But did you cheat them, too?" Elana goaded, hand hovering over her skirts. She tried to keep a straight face, or as straight of a face as was possible amid the roaring air of a train roof in motion, but her pulse had adopted the rhythm of a galloping horse. There was no way she'd find her gun through her petticoats in time. She knew it. Lazarus knew it. This whole duel was a farce, but it had bought her time. Pastor Billy's mostly worthless sacrifice had to be made to matter, just a little bit.
                "You know what, Mrs Stubbs? Fine. Ya got me. I cheated that boy outta his answers and I cheated y'all outta your lines. I skipped class, skipped town, and made a life and a name for myself while you were rotting away in Jonah’s Modesty. But I never cheat in a draw, ‘cause I don't need to. Now get ready. I'm gonna enj-"
                Crack. A gunshot. And then another, and a third.
                The first bullet passed through Lazarus' belt, severing his holster from his body. The second sent it spiralling away, skittering over the edge of the roof and into the dirt below. The third took his hat clean off his head, leaving it with a sunroof in the brim that rendered it largely useless as a shading garment.
                There were three new holes in countless layers of skirt, and a lot of new creases. It looked a lot like someone had been gripping onto the handle of something hidden beneath the dress.
                "Next one goes through your eye." Elana said. Lazarus sneered.
                "You cheated!"
                "And you're to do as I say, not as I do. Now sit down on top of your hands and I'll try to resist the urge to shoot you here and now. You’re facing justice, Boules; for the answers you stole from Roger, for the hours the deputy of Jonah’s Calamity spent plucking the sheriff’s tarred and feathered horse, for the thimble you shot off old woman Jones’ hand, and most of all for dodging your lines. I’ll make sure your cell has a blackboard and enough chalk to give repentance for a lifetime."
                It only took a few minutes for help to arrive. The familiar squeaking of the hand trolley eventually replaced the screaming and banging of the carriage battle, and a triumphant Teresa was at the helm in a frenzy of pumping. By her feet sat a rather shocked-looking Pastor Billy, clutching bible with a bullet hole in it, and a bloodied and bloated but smirking Darlene.
                "You’ve stopped! Did we get him?" she shouted up, rather more breathlessly than the indefatigable preacher had been. Her bandoliers of ammunition were far emptier than they had previously been.
                "Alive and practically unharmed."
                "More's the shame. But there's still time to fix that." said Teresa, with complete sincerity.
                "Glad to see you're alive, Billy.” Elana called down. “Always keep a Bible close to your heart, right?"
                "And always keep the new lead for the church roof interleaved between its pages." he added, slipping a dented sheet of dull grey metal from amid Corinthians. “
                “I can get that lead repaired and ready for the roof again, padre. Just let me have a few dollars to cover costs and I-” started Lazarus, but he stopped when he heard the hammer of Elana’s gun click into place.
                “I’ll not be needing any more of your assistance, Lazarus,” said Billy “but I will be saying a prayer for your soul.”
                “And I’ll be saying a prayer that your arms are as delicious as my husband’s would have been.” added Darlene.
                “Once the bounty’s collected we can talk about how much of Lazarus you should or shouldn’t cannibalise, Darlene.”
                “We should totally let her do it, Elana! You’ve not seen Darlene in action, but it’s a masterpiece! She at a whole banker, a moment ago, it was amazing!” cackled Teresa.
                “A whole banker?”
                “Yep! He was travelling to collect some debts and create a few more, but then a young lady shot him in the back. Couldn’t take a joke though, and keeled right over on the spot. I wasn’t going to tell Darlene that she should let him go to waste, but also I was busy chucking folk out the window so I couldn’t have intervened in any case.”
                “You know what? Fine. It’s none of my business. We’ve got a job to finish.”
                "Yeah, speaking of that, could y'all ask the drivers to stop, maybe? My arms are getting real tired with trying to keep up.”
                “Nah, I don’t want to bother them. They’ll have a hard enough time of it when they find out that the carriages all got abandoned on the track; they don’t need to deal with being late as well.” replied Elana, ever the pragmatist. “Let’s just get Boules trussed up, off this roof and on the way back to Jonah’s Modesty. There’s a lot of folk who’ll be glad to see him passing through again.”
                Under the roasting midday sun, a lone locomotive sped through the dry plains towards Jonah’s Victory. The drivers were congratulating each other on a spectacularly quick journey, having somehow manged to stoke the engine up to an enormous speed with relatively little coal, despite the enormous chain of carriages that had been loaded up at the depot. The people riding in the back, they were sure, would be thrilled about the progress.
                In the opposite direction, a handcart made much slower moves towards its origin. Darlene was sleeping off a large meal, Pastor Billy was reclining under his large parasol bible, and Teresa was idly kicking Lazarus in the ribs. Elana Stubbs, schoolteacher turned bounty hunter, pumped a steady rhythm, making slow but consistent progress across the Badlands and back towards home where the naughty step awaited. The punishment was about to begin, but the hunt for Lazarus Boules was over.