Gunfight At The Old Nicolett

Why the humans built a Post Office at the bottom of the dang-fool canyon, when the town itself is up on the prairie, is the great mystery of Lubbock County. It’s always been the subject of loud arguments, and sometimes the occasional saloon brawl.

Postmaster Hugh Cullen said (when you could wake him up) that it was built down there so as not to play favorites. Its location, (he claimed) was equidistant between the two towns, and thus equally inconvenient to both.

That was nonsense to begin with, as anyone with the brains of a housecat could see. The other settlement, named Monterey, wasn’t really what you would call a town even on its best day. It just sat over there like a cluster of homely toadstools that had come up during the night on the prairie.

There wasn’t much of anything to it except a half dozen ramshackle houses, a saloon, and a livery barn with only one horse. The saloon had a leaky roof and a dirt floor, but it was the only source of liquor on that side of Yellow House Canyon, so it usually did a good business. The entire population of the place consisted of twelve or fifteen cowboys, no women, two mangy hounds, and no cats.

The railroad and the telegraph went through Lubbock, so naturally just about everything else worth having was there too, including me and my human friend Lucy Contreras. I like to think she and I are individuals of considerable consequence, so that settled things as far as I was concerned.

I expect what old Cullen really meant was that he liked it way off down by the creek, which was actually one of the tiny, wandering forks of the Brazos River. Down there he could sit and hoist his jug and take naps all afternoon, with nobody to bother him. There wasn’t anybody else closer than a fifteen-minute walk in either direction, and that suited him just fine.

His only tasks were to get the mail off the noon train, carry it down into the canyon to the official Post Office, and get it sorted out. Then he could go back to his jug and his nap.

Of course, that meant the people in the town had to walk or ride all that way down there to get their letters and whatever goods they’d mail-ordered from Monkey Wards. Then they had to haul it all back up into the town.

Which is where the dang-fool Post Office should have been in the first place, if anybody had asked me, which they didn’t. Who cares what an arthritic old cat thinks, anyway?

The location did provide some entertainment for the citizenry, that being the chance, at least once a week, to get a look at whatever new tomfoolery the Spangler brothers had ordered from back east. The brothers, like everybody else, had to go down to the Post Office, load their goods onto the back of their buckboard, and then haul them back up to the dilapidated carriage house they rented in town.

They called themselves inventors, but the more traditional Lubbockites delighted themselves in making up other, less charitable epithets for them. Crackpots and shoo-flies were among the mildest of these. Folks in West Texas don’t as a general rule like new things. If an idea hasn’t been around for at least a hundred years, they don’t trust it. What they don’t trust, they mostly shun.

And well, the Spanglers were all about new things; new, strange, dangerous-looking contrivances and gadgets. They called all of it “technology,” and were full of grand talk about all the wonderful things that would surely be invented in the future. “Five-dollar words for shiny human stuff,” is what I thought. An amazing amount of which disappeared behind the barred doors of their workshop.

Once concealed within the brothers’ locked sanctum, all the new, strange, “shiny human stuff” got even more mysterious and sinister in the starved imaginations of the other, more normal townspeople. The easiest way to get humans to pay attention to anything is to try and hide it.

What the humans do never makes much sense to me, but out here in the exact geographic center of nothing, it’s even crazier than what they usually come up with. And that’s when you can catch enough of them sober at the same time to do anything at all.

Maybe that was what made the brothers so strange: they were always sober, and always working on something. They never had time to drink in any of the saloons, neither of them was married, and they wouldn’t say exactly what they were building in their workshop.

In Lubbock, Texas that was enough to get anyone branded a heretic, so most conversations between the locals eventually drifted around to speculation about what the Spanglers were assembling out of all those gizmos. Theories abounded, ranging from the merely improbable to the wildly outlandish.

Of course, I knew exactly what they had in there. I’d seen it one night while prowling the town. Like any inquisitive cat, I can get into just about any place in town if I want to badly enough. Hidden spaces and ratholes the humans would never suspect are all open doorways to me.

What was in the Spangler boys’ carriage house actually was a “carriage.” Of sorts. At least there was a door to it, and there were seats inside, though it hadn’t any wheels that I could see.

Parts of it were polished brass, some were wood, and some looked like ivory. There were levers to be pulled and switches to be thrown, and it had lots of little twinkling lights. Right in the middle of the thing was a big clear rock crystal, mounted on gimbals so it could turn every which way.

That crystal aggravated me; it wouldn’t let you look directly at it. I tried two or three times, but it kept dodging away, like one of those little black dots in your eye that you can never quite look at. Finally, I shook my head angrily and gave up.

There was nothing there that could be eaten or played with, nothing worth the time of an irascible old feline like me, so I left and came home.

Thomas, a littermate of mine who lives in the schoolhouse, told me later that I was wrong about the wheels; he said it had some little ones mounted inside, because he could hear them spinning. He’d gotten in more or less the same way I had and examined it for himself. He said that big crystal was “full of electricity,” like when you walk across a rug and then get your nose too near something made of metal. “No good can come of a thing like that,” he said.

I never thought much more about it after that night, until the day the whole thing blew up. Except that it didn’t exactly blow “up.” What it actually did is another story, and I’ll get to it in good time.

You can call me “Scatter.” It’s not what my own kind call me, but it’ll do. My human companion Lucy Contreras gave me the name when I was just a brindle-striped kitten, for reasons I’ve never quite understood.

It’s true I like to jump into the middle of the flock of pigeons she feeds behind her place, just to see them fly off squawking in all directions. There’s no cat alive who would turn down a chance to do that. But I’ve never yet caught one, and now I’m getting too old to try very hard, so what’s the harm?

But if Lucy wants to call me “Scatter,” it’s as good a name as any, I guess. Lucy Contreras is my friend, and for a human, she is an excellent person. She can call me anything she wants to, and I’ll stand beside her, no matter what kind of trouble comes.

I’m from the Clan of Cat, in case the notion hadn’t occurred to you yet. My kind have been on the Llano Estacado for about as long as the human folks have. Where humans go, rats and mice soon follow, because they eat the same things. That’s why they need us.

Cats have always lived with the humans; that’s just the way things are. I suppose when the Spirit Above made the first human being, somebody must’ve mentioned the rodent problem. He thought it over for a while, and then made a cat, too. It makes about as much sense as anything else I’ve heard.

My mother arrived here, meaning the town of Lubbock, while following a wagon load of farm people and their kids that headed west from Fort Worth. Why they stopped here is anybody’s guess, since there’s not enough rain to farm anything but horned toads and prickly pears. But here is where they set up housekeeping, and so did my Ma. I don’t know anything about my father; Ma said he was something of a traveler.

Anyway, Lubbock Town is where my brother Thomas and I began our lives, and I haven’t found any compelling reason to move on. Thomas was adopted by the schoolteacher, so that her pupils could have the experience of raising a kitten, and I moved in with Lucy. Both situations have worked out pretty well, all things considered.

Lubbock County was named after a pair of brothers, one of them a Colonel in the War of Northern Aggression, who died of camp fever without firing a shot. The other brother was the smarter of the two, and he got himself elected Governor of Texas during the same war.

Lubbock, the town, named itself after the county, because nobody could think of anything better to call it. It was Mayor Tisdale who picked the name, one afternoon when he had nothing else to do.

Lucy always said it was a good name for the place, on account of it only existed because no one could think of a better place to build a town. Most folks made the mistake of thinking Lucy’s attributes stopped with being the prettiest woman around, but she was also the smartest human in the county, even if I was the only one who knew it.

The rest of the citizenry were the usual collection of loose-screws and misfits to be found just beyond the edges of civilization, drawn there by grand notions of being cattlemen and farmers. Few of them ever amounted to anything, but more families kept on trickling in, so Lubbock grew.

My human, Lucy Contreras, was the owner of a sort of combination card parlor and bawdyhouse that operated on the other side of the tracks from the Texas & Western depot. I lived there with her, and I made a pretty good living off what Lucy fed me, plus the usual donations from customers and the girls. Perhaps too good a living; I always stayed just a bit too fat to catch the pigeons that gathered out back.

Lucy also owned the property next door to the First Baptist Church, but she left that lot empty for the churchgoers to use for picnics and socials. It was sort of an unspoken deal between them, but it probably kept Lucy and her fancy-girls from getting run out of town.

There were three saloons on Main Street, ranging from the dingy Lone Star, which catered to visiting cowmen, and the Liberty, the chosen watering hole for most of the locals, to the gilded extravagance of the Rio Grande, which occupied most of the first floor of the Old Nicolett Hotel. The Nicolett was the grandest building in town, with three stories and a high balcony in front.

There was also a blacksmith’s forge, a general mercantile store owned by a gentleman named Singer, a barber shop that was only open on Fridays and Saturdays, and the Texas Cattlemen’s Association office.

On Broadway, one street back from the businesses, were some houses, the Baptist Church, a boarding house, a schoolhouse, and the Spangler brothers’ place. The Church and the Nicolett Hotel were painted; the rest of town was bare lumber.

The school was the obligatory one room affair, and came complete with a pretty schoolmarm named Miss Elizabeth Reed. Beth was always fending off ardent proposals of marriage from Mr. Singer the storekeeper and Bob Holmes the barber, but so far she hadn’t given either of them a definite answer.

Then there were Ed Gowan and his friend Toby Russell. They were by unanimous acclamation the oldest citizens in the area. Neither one of them could remember his exact birth date, but it was common knowledge that they’d both already been too old to go to war when the Battle of Shiloh was fought. If they weren’t centenarians, they couldn’t have been far from it.

It was doubtful either of these desiccated ancients could have heard it thunder, unless the lightning had actually struck one of them, or clearly seen anything further away than the worn checkerboard that had sat between them since time immemorial. That was all right with them; in their frequently expressed opinion, there wasn’t anything else worth hearing or seeing anyway. I rather agreed with the old coots.

They claimed they’d been playing checkers in front of the Old Nicolett Hotel since 1875. If that was true, they’d done it sitting all alone on the prairie, since general opinion held that Singer’s Store was the first permanent building in Lubbock, and it hadn’t been erected until 1881.

Whatever the truth behind their claim might be, they’d certainly been there long enough to fossilize in place. People were accustomed to watching over them and fetching whatever they needed, whether a bite to eat or a fresh beer. When the sun went down, somebody would show up to get them safely to their homes. They quarreled intermittently, but at their ages they could hardly do each other any lasting harm.

Other than tumbleweeds and coyotes, that was all there was. That was Lubbock, Texas in 1890’s, right smack in the dang-fool middle of the big emptiness that was the Llano Estacado prairie. If it weren’t for the windmills that pumped up enough well water for a few kitchen gardens and some scrawny cows, there wouldn’t even be that, and probably shouldn’t have been.

The only memorable thing that ever happened here was the Great Gunfight that was fought in front of the Old Nicolett Hotel in July of 1894. That epic shootout was reputed to be the last such fight in the entire Wild West, and the very last gasp of the Cowboy Era.

It all started because Mayor William Tisdale, having nothing better to do one afternoon, came up with the dang-fool notion that both towns, Lubbock and Monterey, were built in the wrong places, and had to be moved! He claimed the water table was much shallower at the site he’d picked out, thus guaranteeing a more abundant and reliable supply of the liquid resource.

As if that weren’t foolish enough, the place he’d picked out was on the south side of the canyon! That might be all well and good for Monterey, which would only have to shift itself a few hundred yards, but Lubbock, the actual town, would have to pick up and move every building, outhouse, and checkers game, across the dang-fool canyon and the creek too!

Now, I have lived with humans throughout all my lives. I’ve become somewhat acclimated to the kind of irrational notions they come up with, but if that wasn’t the wildest bunch of tomfoolery I had ever heard of, it would certainly do until I could find something worse. Water tables! Lunacy!

Besides, wasn’t water fetched by humans, who then put it into dishes for their cats to drink? If your human provider didn’t give you enough water, you just found another one, that’s all. You didn’t move the whole dang-fool house! No cat of normal intelligence would ever have conceived of such a ridiculous thing.

But Bill Tisdale was all on fire with his plan. He explained it in elaborate detail to everyone he could get to listen to him. The more he talked, the more he convinced himself it was the most wonderful idea anyone in the county had ever had, and the more enthusiastic he grew.

He kept up his noisy evangelism for several weeks, until he’d made everyone in the county thoroughly sick of him. He made such a nuisance of himself in the Rio Grande saloon that the bartender told him he could either shut up or take his business elsewhere. Tisdale’s mayoral trumpeting was disturbing the cardsharps and hustlers who made up most of his trade, and that was liable to cut into his bosses’ income.

The Mayor immediately moved his crusade down the street to the Liberty, where his august position in city government carried more weight. There he announced an official Town Hall Meeting. As soon as he could get everyone’s attention, he banged for order on the bar with the heel of his boot. The town hadn’t given him a mayoral gavel; he was more than noisy enough without one. His first order of business was to dispatch runners all over town to announce commencement of Official Proceedings.

He convened the meeting in the saloon because there wasn’t any actual town hall. It and the sheriff’s office hadn’t been built at that time. In West Texas, the humans build things when they get around to it, and in order of descending importance. Those two edifices had a very low priority in the minds of most folks.

It had to be that way; there wasn’t any sawn lumber closer than East Texas, and it could take months to get it shipped in. The railroad was a lot faster than the mule-drawn freight wagons of the old days, but it cost more too, so you were between a rock and a hard place either way. Besides, nobody was in a hurry to build anything that didn’t contain groceries, beer, or fancy-girls.

As word of the Meeting spread, most of the citizenry not already in the Liberty Saloon that hot afternoon began to drift in by twos and threes; except for the bearded ancients Ed and Toby, and no one really expected them to interrupt their game.

Miss Elizabeth the schoolmarm entered on the arms of Bob the barber and Mr. Singer the storekeeper, just as Tisdale started to speak. I was there with Lucy, and so was Thomas the schoolhouse cat, and four or five others of our kind, perched on tables and scattered through the crowd. As soon as an official quorum, that being fifty one percent of the sober population, was present, he began laying out his plans.

What he hadn’t expected was that his grand vision for the future of both towns would swiftly split the citizenry into two angry, opposing camps. Thomas and I looked knowingly at one another as dissent began and heated up. When a cat sees something that needs doing, he just up and does it, that’s all. Humans, on the other hand, are never quite that sensible. Before they can actually start a one-hour job, they always waste at least twice that much time arguing about it. It was going to be a long afternoon.

Postmaster Cullen threw up his hands and hotly declared that no matter where the towns moved, the Post Office would stay right where it was, in the bottom of the dang-fool canyon. He stomped out in a state of high dudgeon, and nobody tried very hard to stop him.

Beth rose from her chair and said sweetly, and quite reasonably, that the school should be equally accessible to pupils from both Lubbock and Monterey, and therefore would follow the town wherever it went.

The Ladies’ Auxiliary refused to sanction the move unless Lucy’s bawdyhouse was left behind, but the Cattlemen’s Association refused to budge unless it (the house of ill fame) was the first structure shifted to the new location.

My friend Lucy allowed that she would follow the will of the majority and then sat down, refusing to join the confrontation. She and Beth were the only human beings present who were willing to show that much common sense.

The rest quickly joined one side or the other. Mr. Singer was favorable to moving his store, but Bob the barber wanted monetary compensation for dislocating the county’s only barbershop.

Hank Carney declared he would move his blacksmith’s forge by dismantling it and then reassembling everything on the new site. The First Baptist Church, on the other hand, could not and would not move away from the little cemetery they maintained behind the Church, and nor would they allow its sacred graves to be disturbed. Doctor Liam Jenkins, the town’s only physician, said that in accordance with his oath, he would go wherever his patients did.

As the afternoon dragged on, the human Lubbockites faced off like two warring factions. Voices grew harsh and faces were empurpled with rage. They got louder and louder until they were spewing spittle and shaking their fists in each other’s faces.

Unbelievably, the dang-fools were about to come to actual blows over Bill Tisdale’s silly, hare-brained scheme. And most of them had started the day as friends! The women were as bad as the men. Ladies brandished long hatpins yanked from their coiffeurs, and men balled their fists and roared at one another like beasts.

I caught Thomas’ eye and jerked my chin toward the door. The only thing a cat is likely to accomplish in a human saloon brawl is to get himself kicked or stepped on, and I wasn’t interested in either option. My brother and I quickly exercised the better part of valor by darting out beneath the swinging doors of the saloon before one could start.

Lucy Contreras was only seconds behind us and scooped me up in her arms. Beth Reed was next out and grabbed Thomas. I knew the two of them were about to head for Lucy’s place across from the train station, and that was fine with me. The rest of the town had fallen victim to mass insanity, and it was definitely time to go. The ladies would discuss things quietly over a cup of tea, and then we could get Thomas and Beth back to the school after things quieted down.

By now the sun had set, and we picked our way along Main Street in the evening twilight. Few lanterns were lit on the boardwalk, for the simple reason that their dang-fool owners were busy trying to reenact the Battle of Picket’s Charge in the Liberty Saloon.

We were nearing the railroad depot when we heard two more enraged, shouting voices on the street. Gravelly, wheezing old voices of ancient codgers who had each seen nearly a hundred years of life. News of the Mayor’s lunacy had even reached the checkers game!

“Oh, my precious word!” said Beth the schoolmarm. “Uncle Ed and Toby! Who on earth could have told those old poor old geezers?”

“It wasn’t me!” said Lucy. “But they’re out in the middle of Main Street with their pistols!”

They were indeed. There they stood, faced off like gunslingers in the last gloaming of the fading sunset, albeit a bit unsteadily, squarely in front of the Nicolett Hotel. Ed had his rusted Peacemaker shoved into the waistband of his trousers, and Toby was brandishing a cap-and-ball Navy Colt.

“You confounded old coot!” he shouted at his friend. “Moving towns is the lame-brainedest idea that lame-brain Mayor ever came up with, and you’re a dang-fool for agreein’ with him!”

“It ain’t neither!” yelled Ed Gowan right back at him. “If yonder across’t the canyon is where the water is, then that’s where the towns have got to be, and you’re a dang-fool for not seein’ it! Where’s your brains, ya ole fossil?”

“Who you callin’ a fossil, ya miserable old snappin’ turtle?”

“They’re going to hurt each other, or else keel over with the apoplexy!” Beth squealed. “You grab Toby and I’ll get Uncle Ed!”

“Run!” Lucy yelled. “Toby, no! that thing might go off!” They set me and Thomas on the ground and took off, and we were right behind them. The only four people in Lubbock town who owned a lick of sense, two humans and two felines, raced down the darkening street to avert tragedy, but we were just a couple of steps too late.

At that instant Ed Gowan went for his gun, and Toby Russel pointed his squarely at his old friend and started snapping the trigger.

But nothing happened! It had been so many years since he’d loaded the thing that all the caps had fallen off its chambers. Then BANG! Ed’s old Peacemaker caught in his trousers as he was trying to yank it free, and went off with a thunderous roar. It blew a smoldering hole in his pants leg and took the toe off his right boot.

He started screaming and hopping around in the street on one foot, with his friend Toby running after him, crying and yelling for somebody to fetch the doctor. Lucy scooped up both firearms from where the old fools had dropped them, while Beth tackled Ed so she could get his boot off and see how badly he was hurt.

About that time the rest of the town came stampeding out of the Liberty Saloon, having adjourned their town war in favor of seeing what all the shooting and yelling in the street was about.

Doc Jenkins was in the crowd and helped Beth capture her great-grand-uncle Ed. It was quickly determined that he had lost the big toe of his right foot, but Doc decreed that it was “just a flesh wound,” and should heal in time. Toby hadn’t been hurt at all, except for the trauma of seeing his best friend shot. The Doctor prescribed whisky for him, to be administered as required.

And that was the end of the Great Gunfight at the Old Nicolett, the one and only western-style shootout ever to be fought in Lubbock County, the dying whimper of the Wild West. Both participants would soon recover and resume their friendship and their interminable checkers game. Both would exaggerate their roles in the battle until their dying day.

The remainder of the citizenry were in no mood to resume their quarrel, and sheepishly ready to be friends with one another again. Sheer relief that Ed and Toby hadn’t managed to kill one another and shoot up that whole end of town left everyone drained, but smiling once more. Mayor Tisdale’s delusions would have to be dealt with another time.

But that wasn’t the end of the evening’s activities! Not by a long chalk! You seldom get that lucky when it comes to the dang-fool humans and their doings.

There was a vivid blue flash that lit up Main Street from one end to the other, followed by a wild cry and a drawn-out, resonant WHOMP! A fierce but brief wind tugged at everyone’s clothing and kicked up clouds of dust from the dry street.

“What in the name of Charlie Goodnight was that?” said someone into the ominous silence that had dropped like a curtain over the scene. No one ventured an answer for perhaps half a minute.

“Were the Spangler boys at the town meeting?” asked a woman from the back of crowd. No answer. “Has anyone seen them today at all?” Again, no answer. As one person, the assembled citizenry of Lubbock turned and began to move in silence toward The Spangler brothers’ carriage house/workshop at the other end of town.

Except that it wasn’t. There wasn’t anything there. I mean nothing. Where the carriage house had once stood was nothing at all, and the air all around smelled like thunder and lightning. I glanced at my littermate Thomas, who stood with his back arched and every hair on his body bristled out. I realized that I too, had gone into a stiff feline defensive stance. I don’t like strange happenings that I can’t understand. I never have.

Bill Tisdale called for lanterns, and a dozen were swiftly fetched and lit. I almost wished he hadn’t. As Thomas and I crept forward, we could see that what few sticks and fragments of the carriage house that remained, all lay flat on the ground, all pointing inward. In the exact center, a shallow, dish-shaped hole maybe twenty feet across was gouged into the earth where the Spanglers’ machine must have been sitting.

This… crater, for lack of any better word, was absolutely smooth edged and circular, and anything that would have overlapped it simply stopped, right there at that incongruous edge. I peeked down into the depression, and I saw a big nightcrawler worm that had been sliced in half, as if by a knife. Its other half had gone with everything else that was missing. The Spanglers’ machine hadn’t blown up. It had blown in, or maybe fallen inward on itself, presumably taking them with it. Where it had taken them was not something I cared to think upon.

Thomas gave a soft, sibilant hiss, and began backing away. That was as good an idea as I’d ever encountered, and I quickly followed suit. “I told you that dang-fool thing was full of electricity,” my brother said. “I told you. I’m going home.”

I started looking for my human friend Lucy. If she was unharmed, then surely everything else would be all right. The lanterns were being put out one by one, and the townspeople were moving silently toward their own homes. There had been quite enough excitement for one day, in a town that seldom saw any at all.

I wanted to lie down in my place on the foot of Lucy’s bed and forget about the whole affair, the townspeople’s saloon brawl, the gunfight, and especially what had just happened at the Spangler brothers’ carriage house.

The next day, everyone was busy making their own arrangements for the coming move across Yellow House Canyon to the new townsite. There was no more discussion about it at all. After all the argument and near riot of the day before, there was one thing every single Lubbockite solidly agreed with today. No one wanted to live anywhere near that preposterous hole where the Spangler Brothers had… departed.

Its impossibly sharp edges were already drying out and crumbling, and the inevitable tumbleweeds were beginning to fill it up, but that didn’t make any difference. No one who had been present that night was ever likely to forget it was there.

Two weeks later, Lucy Contreras’ bawdyhouse was carefully raised with borrowed railroad jacks, and rollers were placed beneath it. A team of twenty mules then slowly towed it across the canyon. It took the entire day, with sweating men taking the rollers from behind and replacing them in its path forward. Lucy and I rode behind, safely out of the way in her fancy one-horse buggy. Our home was then lowered onto its new foundation to the cheers of the Cattlemen’s Association and sniffs from the Ladies’ Auxiliary.

One by one, the rest of Lubbock’s buildings followed over the course of the next month and assumed their permanent places along the new Main Street and Broadway. Monterey’s houses and shanties followed with less fanfare and were established on prepared foundations in their assigned places.

On the final day of the Great Move, the Old Nicolett Hotel was raised with every railroad jack and levelling screw that could be found or borrowed, set on rollers, and pulled by two twenty mule teams from one side of Yellow House Canyon to the other. Mayor William Tisdale made the voyage on its high front balcony, pacing back and forth like a ship’s Captain on his quarterdeck. When it was finally affixed on its new stone foundations, everyone was sure that a new and better day had come for the little prairie town of Lubbock.

Ed Gowan and Toby Russell were treated with special kindness from everyone. They were ferried across the canyon in matching rocking chairs, to which carrying poles like those of the biblical ark of the covenant had been attached. When they were carefully set down in their old/new places in front of the Old Nicolett and presented with a brand-new checkers set, the whole town cheered until they were hoarse.

The Post Office was still down in the bottom of the dang-fool canyon with old Hugh Cullen napping inside it, but the rest of Lubbock, Texas was here to stay, and the future looked bright.

I couldn’t help wondering what the vanished Spangler brothers might have thought of that future, but they were gone… somewhere. No one could ask them anything, now.

My brother Thomas said that stuff was all a bunch of dang-fool balderdash from start to finish and wouldn’t talk about it at all. I thought things over for a while and shook my head. When you lived with humans, peaceful moments could be few and far between. It was best to enjoy them as they came. Then I ambled lazily around to the back of Lucy’s place. I wanted to see if her flock of pigeons had followed us to our new home.

END