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saddlebag dispatches
up at the far end of Garrison Street. They and others had plied at him since the first day he’d put on the badge for Parker, but the Judge had been right. Sam Hane’s only drive was to serve the law and Judge Parker and to see justice done. This had been a desire storming in his heart and spirit his entire life, since his first memories of the Masonic Home for Orphans in Batesville. No family ever existed for Sam Hane, no semblance of a childhood. Only the urge to see wrong made right. He’d resisted the juvenile pleadings and teasings of other marshals for the last two years, but for some reason tonight, saw little harm and even felt compelled to at least trail along behind Borton and Maker on their jaunt through town. They hadn’t crossed a batwing door of a saloon, though, before Hane knew he’d made a mistake. In an alley between Moore’s Dry Goods and the Hewitt Hotel, Baker spotted a woman. Sam knew her. Molly Ferguson, daughter of one of the handful of doctors in town. Molly saw the three men as well and, blushing, said she was expecting someone, but would be on her way. What came next sounded the beginning of the end of Sam Hane. Borton grabbed Molly about the neck from behind, his snakelike arm tightening taut like dried leather, and forced her back into the alley. Maker followed, his fat hands making fast work of the girl’s coat, ripping into her bodice like a child at Christmas. Hane, overcome
with shock but for a second, drew his six-gun and shouted, demanding to know what was going on, telling them to leave her alone. Deep in the alley, Maker laughed, hawing like a donkey, and Molly only gurgled, her breath escaping in gasps from the alley. Hane ordered once more, threatening to shoot. Borton’s whiny scrape of a voice rose from the alley in response. A response that chilled Sam Hane’s bones. “Come on, Sam,” Borton invited, sadistic glee hanging on every word. “Take a taste with us. We’re the law, after all. The good people owe us something now and then. No one’ll know, boy. They never do.” Only one word made its way out of Sam Hane’s throat. “No.” “Then,” came a voice from behind him, one that Sam had heard sentence a murderer to hang mere hours ago, “you were correct, Borton. He is just the man to pay our yearly price for peace and prosperity.” And Sam Hane’s world ended, only to be savagely reborn with a gunshot to his stomach minutes ago. “You are a good man, Samuel,” Parker’s words intruded on Sam’s recollections, “and only good men, pure of heart and clean of vice, can help me bring justice to the badlands. Other men serve purposes, like Borton and Maker, but they are the Master’s hands, not his succor. I could not do my job, my destined duty without becoming what I despised. So,” Parker sounded almost regretful, yet justified, “I did that, not simply by employing men who would murder, rape, and steal in the name of my law. I sought out the true source of the corruption and decadence of not only what lies beyond Fort Smith to the west, but the very wellspring of wantonness and wickedness that has plagued humanity forever. I sought it, Samuel, I found it, and I gave myself to it. I sacrificed myself and the men who would carry out my will so that this town, this country would become the glowing bastion, the beacon it should be!” The cold steel of a gun barrel caressed the underside of Sam’s chin, forcing him to look up. Parker was there, his eyes vacant of any light. He whispered only so Sam could hear. “But even with such self-sacrifice,” Parker said in a sing song voice, a demented child reciting a lunatic’s nursery rhyme, “one must give life. Paying the piper. Giving good