Philip Smith

Golden Touch

Light streamed in from the slatted windows, exclaiming every mote in the dust-ridden air of the bar. One soul sat at the rugged counter, nursing his obvious hangover with a hair-of-the-dog and trying to keep the creak of the saloon doors out of his ears. He leans back in the stool, seeming to exhale for the first time in about a week, until he’s alerted to a metallic sound in the open air. That breath is sucked back in as he reaches for his hip and kicks his stool out into the lonely room. Heart racing and sweat beading, he draws and brings his sights up to meet the door. As it slowly swings in the late summer breeze, stillness sets in again when he remembered the windmill on the old fire-tower had needed greasing for a year or more, and malaise falls over the man once again. He pulls the stool back to the bar, his revolver finding its way back home as he tries to lose that breath again. He reached in his pocket, producing a handful of bills and change. Counting out the 3 cents needed, the clinking of the coins masked the jingle of spurs approaching. The man left the change, took a deep breath, and realized just how quiet it was. Recognizing the new silence of the groaning old doors, he turned to them and now faced down the barrel of a lawman’s rifle.