My Schmuddy Valentine, Chapte r One

*** The Undersheriff ***

Once upon a time in Valentine, there was a swarthy young Undersheriff who worked far too hard for too little money. This was evidenced by the fact that on this particular morning, he was scrambling from roof to roof, chasing after one of the mischievous Ballace brothers.

“GET DOWN FROM THAT ROOF, FRANKLIN!” he shouted at the wiry man who had been eluding him for the last fifteen minutes or so. This wasn’t even his job, he complained internally - though that particular thought had never stopped him from clambering up onto the rooftops before.

“No!” Franklin replied simply, before leaping the gap between the saloon and the tea shop.

The Undersheriff groaned, doing his best to keep up with the slippery little git. Unfortunately, today was not his day. Though, in the almost everlasting moment between when his foot slipped on the crumbling wooden shingle and when his noggin made contact with the strangely unforgiving schmud that made up the streets of Valentine, the Undersheriff noted that almost every day this week had not been his day.

Fortunately for the Undersheriff, on this one particular morning, he would turn out to be wrong. As he pulled himself up from the sucking schmud - a fine mix of horse shit and mud - and shook off the lingering shock of the fall, a shadow fell over him. Then, a hand floated into his field of vision - a pale hand with long, delicate fingers and neatly trimmed nails. A hand without a trace of the dreaded schmud upon it.

“Well, I guess that’s one way to say howdy,” came a soft, low voice.

The Undersheriff followed the proffered hand up until he finally found that face that matched the voice and hand, and found himself - perhaps for the first time in his life - speechless. It was the smile on the woman’s face that did it; wide, white, and framed by lips that had him wondering for a moment if they would feel as soft as they looked.

*** The Outlaw ***

When it comes to crime, it could be said that there are two types of criminals - the violent kind, and the non-violent kind. One could argue that the former are the more dangerous of the two, but the truth about the latter kind of criminal is stranger than fiction. After all, the pain of a bullet passing through your shoulder is temporary, but the pain of a broken heart is the kind that lasts a lifetime.

And this woman, she was a heartbreaker. With green eyes and hair a fiery shade of red, she turned heads wherever she went - and she knew it too. It was the kind of beauty that distracted men so fiercely that she’d be well away with their coin purse before they realized that her delicate, dextrous little fingers had lifted the pouch without so much as a wayward tug.

Granted, she’d left behind parlor tricks like lifting purses years ago, and had moved on to bigger, better things. Like banks; specifically, the bank in Valentine, which she’d been casing from across the street when the Undersheriff plopped down into the mud in front of her.

She’d seen her fair share of men in her twenty some-odd years, but even covered in mud from head to toe, there was something about the shiver of this man’s timbers that struck her. Before she knew it, she was stepping down from the deck she’d been perched on, her hand reaching out of its own accord.

“Well, I guess that’s one way to say howdy,” she said, as a slow grin spread across her lips like sweet molasses.