Jim’s Bad Deed: A Gunsmoke Origin Story
Welcome to the first installment of Short Story Saturday, a new occasional feature for Saturday’s here on Titanquisitor where I write original fiction set in the worlds of entertainment and gaming that I actually care about. Some will be standalone pieces, some will be part of a series. All of them will be the kind of stories I want to read and tell.
Ideally, I’d like it to be weekly. But this one took awhile, and I don’t have it in me to be able to commit to one a week. This might be a monthly thing. It might be a one-off, but probably not.
This first one is a western, and it’s a Gunsmoke story specifically — a prequel to the Season 3 episode “Amy’s Good Deed” that explores what happened in the Dakota Territory years before Amy Slater ever walked into Dodge City looking for Marshal Matt Dillon. If you’ve never seen the episode, that’s fine. If you have, you already know how this ends. Either way, I hope you enjoy it.
Part One: Pierre, Dakota Territory
The Day Spring Saloon wasn’t much to look at, but in Pierre it didn’t have to be. It had whiskey, it had cards, and it had a roof that mostly kept the rain out. That was enough for most men in the Dakota Territory, and it was enough for Jim Band when he came through.
He sat at a corner table with his back to the wall, the way a man learns to sit when he’s been in enough rooms where someone might want to put something in his back. Jim was thirty-two years old, lean and hard-eyed, with the kind of stillness that didn’t come from patience but from practice. He had his father’s jaw and his father’s temper and not much else from the old man worth keeping. He’d left the Band ranch outside Pierre at nineteen with forty dollars and a horse that wasn’t entirely his, and he hadn’t looked back with any regret worth mentioning. The years since had not made him soft.
Across from him sat Emmett Gold, who had ridden with Jim going on eight years now and was the closest thing to a conscience Jim Band carried anywhere.
“Harrow Creek,” Emmett said. He said it the way a man says a word he’s been turning over in his mouth and hasn’t decided about yet.
“Harrow Creek,” Jim confirmed.
“That’s a long ride southeast.”
“That’s the point of it.”
Emmett looked at his glass. They’d had this kind of conversation before, the two of them sitting across a table in some saloon in some town while Jim laid out the particulars of the next job and Emmett found reasons it wouldn’t work and Jim found reasons it would. It was a ritual by now, and it always ended the same way.
“Mining payroll,” Jim said. “Comes in at the end of the month, sits four days before distribution. I’ve had eyes on it for six weeks. The bank is small, the sheriff is old, and nobody between here and the Nebraska line knows our faces that far southeast.”
“The sheriff being old didn’t help us much in Yankton,” Emmett said.
“The sheriff in Yankton wasn’t old, he was slow. There’s a difference. A slow man can get fast when he needs to. An old man with a bad arm is an old man with a bad arm.” Jim leaned back. “I’ve done my homework on this one, Emmett. More than usual.”
Emmett was quiet. Through the front window of the Day Spring the main street of Pierre went about its business, indifferent to the two men at the corner table. Pierre was safe for them. They didn’t work anywhere near Pierre, hadn’t since the early days when they were young enough and stupid enough not to know better. Now they rode south and east to work and came back north to rest, and the distance between those two worlds was what kept them breathing.
Jim Band was known in the southern reaches of the Dakota Territory, known in Nebraska, known in parts of Kansas. His name had appeared on wanted paper in three jurisdictions. In Pierre he was just a man who came to visit his sister a few times a year and spent a little money at the saloon and kept to himself. Nobody in Pierre had any reason to connect the two versions of him, and Jim intended to keep it that way.
“This is the last one,” Jim said.
Emmett looked up. “You’ve said that before.”
“I mean it this time.” Jim’s voice didn’t change, but something behind it did. “Amy wrote me. Pa’s getting worse. Drinking harder, taking it out on her more. I’ve been sending money but money doesn’t keep a man’s hands off a woman when he’s in that state.” He looked at the table. “I want enough out of Harrow Creek to set her up somewhere proper. Away from that ranch, away from him. Somewhere she can live like a person.”
Of all the things Jim Band was, he was a good brother. It was perhaps the only category in which he qualified without reservation. He’d been sending money back to Amy since his second year on the outlaw trail, more than she probably knew where it came from but enough that she hadn’t pushed too hard on the question. He’d set her up in a small house of her own in Pierre, away from Pa’s ranch, and he visited when he could and brought her things and sat with her and was, for those few days, something close to the brother she believed him to be.
The lie wasn’t that he was an outlaw. The lie was that there was another version of him somewhere that wasn’t.
“All right,” Emmett said. “But we do it clean. Nobody gets hurt that doesn’t need to.”
“When have I ever been anything but clean?”
Emmett didn’t answer that, which was an answer.
The front door of the saloon opened and Amy Band came in, which was not the kind of thing that went unnoticed. She was twenty-six and pretty in a way that the Territory had not yet managed to wear down entirely, dark-haired and serious-eyed, with the kind of bearing that suggested she had learned early on that a woman who looked uncertain got treated accordingly. She scanned the room and found her brother’s table without much trouble.
“Pa’s at it again,” she said, pulling out a chair without being invited. “Came by the house this morning wanting money. I told him I didn’t have any and he called me a liar.” She looked at Jim steadily. “He’s going to keep coming around.”
“I’ll talk to him before I leave,” Jim said.
“Talking doesn’t do much anymore.”
“I know.” He said it without elaborating. What he meant and what Amy understood were probably different things, and that was fine with both of them.
Amy looked at Emmett, who offered her the kind of expression that said this wasn’t his argument to get into, which was the only sensible position available. She settled back in her chair and picked up Jim’s untouched glass and took a small sip.
That was when the front door opened again.
He came in the way tall men sometimes do, ducking slightly out of habit more than necessity, and straightened up to his full height once he was clear of the frame. He was young, maybe twenty-five or so, with dark hair and the look of a man who had been moving for a while and was only stopping long enough to have a drink and move again. There was nothing particularly notable about him except the way he carried himself, easy and unhurried, like the room was already his before he’d taken two steps into it. He wore a Colt on his right hip, nothing unusual in Pierre, but he wore it like it was part of him rather than something he’d strapped on that morning.
He crossed to the bar, said something to the bartender, and got a drink poured for him without much ceremony.
Amy watched him for a moment longer than was probably polite.
Jim noticed. Emmett noticed Jim noticing.
“You’re staring,” Jim said, quietly enough that it didn’t carry.
“I’m looking,” Amy said. “There’s a difference.” She took another small sip from the glass. “Man like that. Tall like that. Built like that.” She shook her head slightly, something between admiration and wistfulness in it. “A woman married to a man like that could go anywhere she pleased. There wouldn’t be anything Pa could do about it, would there.”
“You don’t know anything about him,” Jim said.
“I know what I can see.”
Emmett kept his eyes carefully on the table.
The tall stranger finished his drink and set his coin on the bar. He turned to go and his eyes swept the room in the casual, automatic way of a man who had learned to always know what was behind him. That was when a man at the nearest table shoved his chair back hard and stood up, and the chair caught the stranger square in the back of the leg.
It might have been an accident. The way the man grinned suggested it wasn’t.
“Watch yourself,” the stranger said. His voice was even, no particular heat in it yet.
The man was thick through the chest and had the red-faced look of someone who had been drinking since before noon. He had two friends at the table with him who were watching to see how this played out. “Maybe you watch yourself,” the man said.
The stranger looked at him for a moment, the way a man looks at something he’s already decided about. “I’m going to walk out that door,” he said. “You’re going to let me.”
“Am I.” The man took a step forward and put his hand on the stranger’s shoulder, which turned out to be the last deliberate thing he did for a while.
What happened was fast and not particularly complicated. The stranger caught the man’s wrist, twisted it back and down in a way that folded him toward the floor, and when the man tried to straighten up and swing with his free hand, he caught an elbow across the jaw that sat him down hard against the table. Glasses went over. The two friends started to rise and the stranger looked at them with an expression that said the question was whether they wanted the same thing their friend just got, and they looked at each other and sat back down.
The man on the floor was trying to get his bearings. He made it to one knee and the stranger grabbed him by the collar and hauled him the rest of the way up and walked him to the door and put him through it, not gently, and the man hit the boardwalk outside with enough noise that a couple of passersby on the street stopped to look. The stranger straightened his coat, glanced back once at the two friends still sitting at the table, and walked out.
The saloon was quiet for a second or two.
Amy had her hand over her mouth, which on closer inspection was less shock than the effort of not smiling.
“That,” she said, “is what I mean.”
Jim looked at Emmett. Emmett was studying the bottom of his glass with considerable interest.
Jim watched the door where the stranger had gone and didn’t say anything. He filed it away the way he filed most things — useful information about a man he didn’t know, stored without sentiment.
“I’ll go see Pa,” he said, standing up. “Then I’ve got to ride.”
Amy looked at him. She didn’t ask where. She never did.
Part Two: Harrow Creek
The stranger’s name was Matt Dillon, and he left Pierre the next morning with a full canteen and no particular direction in mind. The bartender at the Day Spring had mentioned a town called Harrow Creek a long ride southeast, said they were short of able men out that way and had a decent sheriff, and southeast was as good as anywhere else.
He rode into Harrow Creek on a Thursday evening and found it to be a modest but orderly little town with a main street wide enough for two wagons to pass, a bank at the north end, a livery at the south, and between them the usual assortment of establishments that kept a frontier town breathing. The saloon was called the Lucky Star, which was either optimistic or ironic depending on your experience with luck.
Dillon stabled his horse and found the Lucky Star and put himself on a stool at the bar and ordered whiskey, and was halfway through it when the trouble started.
It wasn’t complicated trouble, just a drunk with handsy intentions and a saloon girl named Clara who had made her feelings about those intentions perfectly clear and been ignored anyway. The drunk had her by the wrist and was pulling her toward him while she twisted against his grip, and he was making a speech about it to the room at large that nobody seemed particularly interested in refuting.
Dillon set down his glass and stood up.
“Let her go,” he said.
The drunk turned and looked at him. He was a big man, bigger than he’d looked from across the room, with the kind of size that had probably gotten him out of trouble more than once and into the habit of thinking it always would. “Stay out of it,” he said.
“Last time,” Dillon said.
The drunk shoved Clara aside and came at him, which was the wrong call. Dillon stepped into it rather than back, took the man’s wild right hand on his forearm, and put a hard left into his ribs that you could hear from the back of the room. The drunk grunted and bent forward and Dillon straightened him back up with a right hand across the jaw that snapped his head sideways and put him against the bar. The man grabbed at the bar rail trying to stay upright and Dillon hit him again, same hand, same spot, and this time he went down and stayed there, one arm draped over the brass rail, the other flat on the floor, not unconscious but not interested in getting up either.
Dillon looked down at him for a moment. Then he picked up his whiskey from the bar, took a slow drink, and set the glass back down.
“You all right?” he said to Clara.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
Dillon nodded once and returned to his stool.
The room let out a collective breath.
An older man at the far end of the bar had watched the whole thing with the kind of careful attention that came with experience. He was in his mid-sixties, white-haired, with a lawman’s badge on his chest and a right arm that hung slightly wrong at the shoulder, the legacy of something that had healed badly and never come all the way back. He picked up his own drink and moved down the bar and took the stool next to Dillon.
“Sheriff Walt Carey,” he said. “Buy you a drink.”
“Matt Dillon. You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to.” Carey signaled the bartender anyway. “You’re new.”
“Came in tonight.”
“Looking for work?”
“Looking to move on, mostly. Heard there might be something out this way.”
Carey nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he’s working up to something he’s not sure will be well received. “You heard right, in a manner of speaking.” He paused. “You know the name Jim Band?”
Dillon thought about it. “Heard it. Outlaw. Works the southern part of the territory mostly. Him and a partner.”
“Emmett Gold,” Carey said. “That’s the partner. They’ve been at it four or five years, banks and express offices mostly. Nothing that makes the big papers but enough to put their names on wanted paper from here to Kansas.” Carey turned his glass in a slow circle on the bar. “I’ve got a mining payroll sitting in the bank at the north end of this street. Word is Band knows about it. Word is he’s been seen in this part of the territory in the last two weeks.” He flexed the fingers of his right hand, which didn’t flex as far as they should have. “I can still shoot. Don’t let anybody tell you different. But I’m slower than I was, and I know it, and a man who doesn’t know that about himself is a dead man.” He looked at Dillon directly. “Jim Band is not a man you want to face down with a slow hand.”
“I’m not a lawman,” Dillon said.
“No, but you handle yourself like one.” Carey almost smiled. “That business with Walsh just now. Most men either wade in swinging or they look the other way. You sized it up, said your piece, and only hit him once you’d given him a choice. That’s not a barroom brawler, son. That’s a man with some sense in him.”
Dillon was quiet for a moment, and Carey let him be quiet, which was the right thing to do.
“I’ll think on it,” Dillon said.
He was still thinking on it the next morning when Cole Rennick rode into Harrow Creek.
Dillon was at the livery checking on his horse when he heard the commotion out front, and he came out to find a crowd gathering in the street with the particular stillness of people who know something bad is about to happen and aren’t sure what to do about it. Rennick was on horseback in the middle of the street, a lean and hollow-eyed man with a long-barreled pistol on each hip and the look of someone who had been carrying a grudge so long it had become the main thing keeping him upright.
Sheriff Carey was on the boardwalk in front of his office.
“You put me away for three years, Walt,” Rennick was saying. “Three years in a territorial prison on your say-so. I told you when they took me that I’d be back.”
“Cole.” Carey’s voice was steady. “Ride on out of here. This doesn’t have to go anywhere it can’t come back from.”
“Already went somewhere it can’t come back from.” Rennick swung down from his horse and walked to the middle of the street and stood there. “I know about your arm, Walt. Word gets around. I figure that makes this about even.”
Carey stepped down off the boardwalk. His right hand moved toward his hip out of reflex and then seemed to check itself, some private calculation happening that only he could see. He was still a lawman and he would walk into the street because that was what the badge required, but Dillon had watched the man’s draw hand twice now and he knew what the outcome was going to be.
He stepped out of the crowd before he’d fully decided to.
“I’ll make it simpler,” Dillon said, moving into the street between them.
Rennick looked at him. “Who are you?”
“Nobody you know.” Dillon stopped about ten feet from him. “But the sheriff’s got a bad arm and you know it, which means this isn’t a duel, it’s an execution, and I’m not much interested in watching one.”
“Then walk away.”
“Can’t do that either.”
Rennick stared at him for a long moment, reading him the way men who live by the gun read each other, looking for the tells and the hesitations. He didn’t find what he was looking for, which seemed to settle something for him even if it settled it the wrong way. His hand dropped.
Dillon drew and fired in a single motion that the crowd would talk about for years afterward, not because it was showy but because of how fast it was over before it had started. Rennick’s gun had barely cleared leather. He sat down in the street with a look of genuine surprise on his face and then lay back, and that was that.
Carey came to stand beside Dillon and looked down at Rennick and then at the gun still in Dillon’s hand. Dillon uncocked it and holstered it without much ceremony.
“That’s the fastest draw I’ve seen in thirty years of lawkeeping,” Carey said quietly.
“Didn’t need to be fast. He telegraphed it.”
“Maybe.” Carey flexed his right hand again, that slow incomplete flex. “Used to be I’d have seen it coming too.” He turned and looked at Dillon squarely. “I’ve got a badge with your name on it if you want it.”
Dillon looked down the empty street. A week ago he’d been in Pierre with no direction and nothing pressing. Now there was a dead man in the road and an old sheriff with a bad arm waiting on an answer, and Jim Band somewhere out in the territory with his eye on a payroll.
“Just until this business is finished,” he said.
“That’s all I’m asking.”
Dillon took the badge. He didn’t pin it on right away, just put it in his shirt pocket, which was close enough for the time being.
The day passed without incident. The morning of the second day passed without incident. It was just past noon on the second day when Jim Band and Emmett Gold rode into Harrow Creek.
Part Three: What It Cost
Jim Band had robbed eleven banks, four express offices, and one federal payroll station in his years on the outlaw trail, and he had never once lost his nerve in the doing of it. It was perhaps his one genuine professional quality — that stillness under pressure, that ability to slow the world down when everything around him was moving fast. Emmett had seen it a hundred times and still found it unsettling.
They came in from the east, masks up before they hit the main street, and Jim had the bank door open and the teller’s attention before most of the town had registered they were there. Emmett covered the room from the back. Jim worked the teller with the unhurried efficiency of a man who had done this enough times that it had become almost routine.
It was going fine. The teller was frightened but cooperating, the bag was filling up, and Jim had almost convinced himself that Harrow Creek was going to be exactly what he’d needed it to be, clean and done, when Sheriff Carey came through the front door.
He came in with his gun already drawn, which told Jim that the old man was slower than he used to be but not slow in the thinking. He said “That’s far enough” in a voice that had probably stopped men cold twenty years ago and still had enough of whatever that quality was to freeze the room for a half second.
Jim shot him.
He didn’t think about it. That was the thing about Jim Band that men who only knew him as Amy’s brother would never have understood — he didn’t think about it. The gun came up and the decision was made before the decision was made, the way it always was when it needed to be. Carey went down with the shot catching him in the shoulder and Jim stepped over him without breaking stride and said “Let’s go” and walked out into the afternoon sunlight.
Emmett followed. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say in that moment that would have been useful, and Emmett Gold, whatever else he was, knew when to be quiet.
They rode east hard.
What Jim didn’t see, because he was already moving, was the tall man who had been halfway down the street when the shot went off. What the tall man did was not complicated. He ducked into the bank and checked on Carey and found him bleeding but conscious and told him to put pressure on it and got the name of the town doctor out of him in about fifteen seconds and sent the nearest person running for it.
Then Matt Dillon went after two outlaws by himself, which was either brave or stupid and in the Dakota Territory the line between those two things was not always clear.
He caught them a mile east of town where the trail narrowed between two low ridges and the horses couldn’t run at full speed without risk. He came in from a higher angle on the ridge and the shooting started fast.
Jim Band was good in a fight. That was simply a fact, the same way some men were good with horses or good with cards. He’d been in enough of these situations over the years to have shed most of the things that slowed a man down — hesitation, fear, the instinct to flinch. He came off his horse in one motion and put a boulder between himself and Dillon, and they traded shots across thirty yards of open scrub with the particular focus of two men who understood exactly what was at stake.
Dillon’s shot found Jim first. It caught him high on the left arm, tore through and kept going, and Jim felt the impact like a fencepost swung hard. His arm went hot and useless for a half second and then came back, and in that half second he fired twice on instinct and the second shot caught Dillon across the side of the head. Not square — square would have finished it — but close enough. Dillon went down off his horse and hit the ground and lay still.
Jim stood with his gun up and waited, breathing through the pain in his arm. The man didn’t move.
Emmett came up beside him. He looked at Dillon on the ground and then at Jim’s arm, the sleeve already dark and wet.
“How bad?” Emmett said.
“I’ve had worse.” Jim kept his eyes on Dillon. “He’s breathing.”
“You going to finish it?”
Jim looked at him. There was a long pause. “No.”
Emmett accepted that without comment. Jim Band was many things, but he drew certain lines, and Emmett had learned over the years not to question where those lines fell.
“He saw us both,” Emmett said. “Before he went down. He knows there were two of us.”
“I know.”
They stood there in the silence of the open country, the wind moving through the scrub brush around them, Dillon motionless on the ground. Jim was thinking. Emmett had seen that look enough times to know to wait.
“How long before he comes to, you think?” Jim said.
“Hard to say. Could be an hour. Could be more.”
Jim looked out at the country around them. Flat and wide and empty in every direction, the ridgeline behind them and the open prairie ahead. Then he looked back at Dillon. Then he looked at Emmett.
“There’s soft ground in that draw,” he said. “About fifty yards north.”
Emmett stared at him. “Jim.”
“A grave. My name on it.” Jim’s voice was level, the same voice he used when he was laying out a job. “He wakes up. Sees me gone, sees you gone, sees a fresh marker with my name carved on it. He figures you buried me and ran.” He met Emmett’s eyes. “Jim Band is dead. He’ll write it up that way. File it away.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’m done.” Jim said it simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “New name. Virginia City, maybe. Far enough east that nobody knows my face.” Something shifted in his expression, not much but enough. “I’ve got enough put away that Amy will be fine for a good while. She doesn’t need to know anything except that I’m gone.”
Emmett looked at him for a long time. “She’ll think he killed you,” he said, nodding at Dillon.
“Tell her that’s how it happened.”
“Jim–”
“Tell her it was him.” Jim’s voice had an edge in it now. “She’ll remember him. She saw him in Pierre. It’ll be real to her in a way that nothing else will. She needs to believe it, Emmett. Completely. Otherwise she’ll wonder, and she’ll look, and eventually she’ll find something.”
Emmett was quiet. The wind moved through the grass around them. Down on the ground Matt Dillon breathed slowly and didn’t move.
“And what about Amy spending years hating a man who didn’t do anything to her brother?” Emmett said.
Jim looked away. It was the only tell he gave. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “She’s tough.”
It was the most dishonest thing Jim Band had ever said, and both of them knew it.
Emmett reached into his coat and took out his knife and looked at the cottonwood scrub along the draw and didn’t say anything else. Because Jim Band was his closest friend and had been for eight years, and because there were lines Emmett drew too and this one he was apparently going to step over, and he’d have to live with that.
They dug for forty minutes in the soft ground of the draw. When it was done Jim carved his own name into a piece of cottonwood with steady hands, which was either the coldest thing Emmett had ever watched or the saddest, and he couldn’t decide which.
Jim mounted up and held out his pistol, grip first.
“Give that to Amy,” he said. “Tell her it’s all that was left of me.”
Emmett took the gun. Jim looked at him for a moment, and something passed between them that neither of them put words to, and then Jim Band rode east and didn’t look back.
Emmett stood alone beside a grave with no body in it and watched him go until there was nothing left to watch. Then he turned and looked at Dillon still unconscious on the ground, and at the marker with Jim’s name on it, and at the empty country in every direction.
He rode back toward Pierre alone and didn’t hurry.
Part Four: Settling Accounts
Matt Dillon came to with the sun lower in the sky than it had been and a headache that felt like the territory itself had fallen on him. He lay still for a moment taking inventory, the way a man does when he isn’t sure yet what’s broken, and determined that nothing was except his dignity and a strip of skin along the side of his head where the bullet had kissed him going past.
He got up slowly. His horse had wandered but not far and he caught it without much trouble. He looked around. Emmett Gold was gone. The other man, wherever he’d landed, was gone. What was there instead, about fifty yards north in a shallow draw, was a mound of turned earth with a piece of cottonwood standing at the head of it and a name carved into the wood.
Jim Band.
Dillon looked at it for a long moment. He supposed Gold had buried his partner and cleared out, which was what a man did. The job had gone wrong and one of them had paid for it and the other one had run. He’d go back and check on Carey, file what he knew, and that would be the end of Jim Band.
He went to the doctor’s office first and found Sheriff Carey sitting up on a cot with his shoulder wrapped and a look on his face that suggested the shoulder hurt considerably more than he was letting on.
“Jim Band,” Dillon said, pulling up a chair. “He’s dead. Buried out on the prairie about a mile east.” He paused. “Emmett Gold was there when it happened. He was gone when I came to.”
Carey took that in. “The money?”
“Still out there with the bag, near where it happened. I’ll ride back out and get it once I’ve checked on you.”
Carey let out a slow breath. “Gold just left it?”
“Left the money, left his partner’s grave, and rode.” Dillon’s jaw was set. “He wanted to be done with it. Can’t say I blame him for that part.”
Carey was quiet for a moment. “Jim Band’s been wanted in three jurisdictions. That’s something, even without a clean collar.” He looked at Dillon. “Gold’s in the wind but he’s got no money and no partner. Man in that situation usually finds a hole and pulls it in after him.”
“That’s my read too,” Dillon said.
“I’d be pleased if you’d stay on a while longer,” Carey said. “Town could use a man like you permanent.”
“Permanent’s not really my situation.”
“The badge, then. Keep it a while.”
Dillon reached into his shirt pocket and put the deputy’s badge on the small table beside the water glass. “I think you’ll find somebody better suited,” he said. “I appreciate the offer.”
Carey picked up the badge and turned it over in his fingers. “Where will you go?”
Dillon thought about it. “Nebraska first. Then maybe Missouri. Bounty work through the winter.” He stood. “Might end up down in Kansas eventually.”
“Long way to ride.”
“It usually is.”
He shook the old sheriff’s hand carefully, mindful of the shoulder, and walked out into the Harrow Creek evening. His horse was at the livery where he’d left it. He paid the stable hand, checked the animal over, and saddled up, and rode south out of town without looking back.
He didn’t think much about Jim Band after that. He didn’t always get their names, and when he did they didn’t stay with him long. Band was dead and Gold was gone and the payroll money was gone with him and that was the shape of it. You didn’t win them all clean.
That was all he knew, and he had no particular reason to know more.
Epilogue: Pierre
Emmett Gold rode back into Pierre four days after leaving it, alone and quiet, and went to Amy’s house without stopping anywhere first. She was in the yard hanging washing on the line, which was a thing she did every Thursday, and she saw him coming and read his face before he’d said a word and set down the sheet she was holding very carefully, like it was something fragile.
He told her what he’d decided to tell her. That it had gone wrong. That Jim was gone. That it had been quick, and he hadn’t suffered, and that Emmett was sorry. He said it all as plainly and gently as he knew how, which in the end wasn’t very gently, because there is no gentle way to tell a woman her brother is dead.
Amy stood in the yard and listened and didn’t cry, which was not a surprise to anyone who knew her. She was Pa’s daughter too, whatever else she was, and Pa’s children had learned early that grief was a private thing that you took inside with you when the time came.
“Who,” she said, when he was done. Just the one word.
Emmett looked at her for a moment. He thought about telling her it didn’t matter. He thought about telling her some name she’d never heard and would never be able to put a face to, and how that might be easier in some ways and harder in others.
“You remember that day in the Day Spring,” he said instead. “When you came to find Jim.”
He watched her face.
“That tall fella at the bar,” Emmett said. “The one you took notice of.” He felt the words like something he couldn’t put back once they were out. “His name is Matt Dillon. He was deputized out in Harrow Creek.” He stopped. “He’s the one.”
Then he reached into his coat and held out Jim’s pistol, grip first. It was old and plain, worn smooth at the grip from years of hard use. Amy took it without a word and held it like it weighed more than it did.
Amy looked at him for a long time without speaking.
Behind her, the washing moved slowly on the line in the prairie wind, white sheets turning in the gray afternoon like flags of something that had already been surrendered.
“I’ll find him,” Emmett said, because it was what she needed to hear, and because he knew in the part of himself he was least proud of that he never would. He knew what Jim Band was. He knew what Matt Dillon wasn’t. And he knew that somewhere east of the Dakota Territory a man was riding toward a new life while his sister stood in a yard holding his old gun and believing the worst lie anyone had ever told her.
Amy turned and went back into the house without another word.
Emmett stood in the yard for a moment, with the wind and the sheets and the weight of what Jim Band’s bad deed had cost all of them. Not the robbery. Not the shooting. The lie. That was the one that would last.
He walked back to his horse, checked the cinch, and stepped up into the saddle. Pierre sat quiet around him in the gray afternoon, ordinary and indifferent, the same town it had always been. He looked at Amy’s front door for a moment and then looked away.
He had a long ride east ahead of him. Jim Band was out there somewhere with a new name and a bullet wound and whatever future a man could build out of nothing, and Emmett Gold was the only person alive who knew where to find him. That counted for something. Maybe it was enough.
He touched his heels to the horse and rode out of Pierre and didn’t look back, and the town disappeared behind him the way towns do when a man has made up his mind not to return.
As for Dillon, he never did stop long in Nebraska. Passed through it on his way south, picked up bounty hunting work in Missouri that kept him fed through two winters, then drifted down into Texas. He took a deputy’s post in San Antonio for a while — long enough to learn what the badge actually meant, long enough to decide he could live with it. When word came that Dodge City needed a marshal, he was the right man in the right place at the right time, which was more or less how everything in his life had happened so far. He rode north into Kansas and pinned on a badge he meant to keep for a while and ended up keeping it for twenty years. He never knew about a woman named Amy Slater or the lie that had been growing roots in a yard outside Pierre since the day Emmett Gold rode home alone.
He would find out eventually.
Author’s Note: “Jim’s Bad Deed” is an original short story written as a prequel to the Gunsmoke episode “Amy’s Good Deed.” It is a fan work and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Gunsmoke estate or CBS. All original characters and story elements belong to their respective creators.
Short Story Saturday is an original fiction series published occasionally on Titanquisitor.com. Got thoughts on this one? Drop them in the comments or head over to the Vortex Effect forums and tell me I got it completely wrong.
