PENNY FOR A MATCH, MISTER?
Garth Nix
The moon was high above the canyon, its silver light reaching into even the most shadowed depths. It was too bright to be a good night to lie in ambush at the exit, where what passed for a road finally wound its way out of the narrow, zigzag way between rocky walls and ran straight for the town, some five miles distant.
But bright moon or not, there were three men lying in wait for the next stagecoach to come out of the canyon. Two were long-term outlaws, the Osgood brothers, of whom nothing good was known. The third man, the much younger Danny, surname variable according to who was asking, had been drinking whiskey with the brothers all day in town and now he wasn’t sure how he had ended up with them, crouched down behind a large rock, his father’s old .52-70 Sharps with the black walnut stock in his hands, and fear in his heart.
The Osgoods were the leaders of a large outlaw group known in those parts as the Nail in the Head Gang, after a certain episode where Ten Osgood, the older brother, had attempted to torture the combination for a safe out of a bank manager, hammering a nail into his head. Predictably, the manager died, and the safe was not opened. But the name stuck. Eleven Osgood, the younger brother, did not like the name but had not been able to come up with a viable alternative.
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