Junior & Me
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Listen, you yellow-bellied son of a green-yolked egg, this is how it happened. And if you don’t like it, well, we can just step outside where Junior and me’ll chew your snout off for you.
This here was down in the Red River bottoms, sixteen—no, seventeen—years ago now. I was down on my luck. I guess you could say so. The dancing girl in Dodge City I’d got sweet on, she laughed in my face. She was after somebody who’d keep her in a style she wanted to get used to. She had somebody in mind, too, and it weren’t me.
I could have killed him. Not, I wanted to kill him. I could have killed him, easy as you please. He was fresh out of the shell, practically—a kid from the East who kept books at the bank and for the grocery store. He didn’t know what she was, any more’n he knew about knives and eight-shooters. All he knew was, he liked the curve of her haunches.
If I did kill him, I might’ve done him a favor. Caught up in her web, he’d have had a demon of a time biting free. He wouldn’t be the same afterwards, neither. You never are.
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