Lucky Strike

Lucky Strike

For a man with the nickname of Lucky, James Armstrong was anything but. He was born to a wealthy South Carolina family before the Civil War. He attended the finest schools and even attended West Point. But the War changed everything for him. The Battle of Chancellorsville cost him his left hand when his pistol backfired, ending his war with the pull of a trigger. But that was only the first of his travails as he arrived home to find nothing more than a burned out husk of his family plantation. A few weeks of searching later found his mother on her deathbed, devastated by Lucky's fathers death at the hands of the very slaves he had grown up around. With little more than the twenty dollars that represented the remainder of his family’s wealth, Lucky made his way west to make his own fortune. But James Armstrong found still more misfortune ahead of him.

Six months and seventeen hundred miles later Lucky pulled his horse up to the derelict remains of a log cabin on the outskirts of Denver. He was on a job tracking a band of bank robbers from just outside of Pueblo. This was his life now, bounty hunting fugitives for the very government he fought against. The Branford Gang had robbed three banks in the Colorado Territories in the October of 1864. The Branford brothers, John and Jim, along with their friend Caleb Maxwell had stolen over twenty thousand dollars. Lucky’s job was to bring them in, dead or alive. Not the way he thought his life would go but there was little else he was fit to do. The stump of his left arm ached, the leather brace that held his hook rubbing uncomfortably against the scarred flesh. He took out a worn steel flask from his left pocket and fumbled with the cap. The cheap whiskey burned going down but it was the only thing that kept him going.

“Alright,” Lucky said, bolstering his will and preparing himself for the gunfight ahead. He dismounted near a copse of trees about thirty feet away and tied the reins around a low hanging branch. The snow had started to come down harder, creating a white tableau that crunched beneath his feet with every step. The sun was going down and the temperature was falling fast. He would need to capture them quickly if he had any hopes of making it to Denver before the weather became unbearable. With each step he expected to hear gunfire but there was none.

Lucky stopped next to the front door listening intently for any sign of movement inside but there was only the rush of wind from the oncoming winter storm. He took a step back and splintered the door in with a kick, only to be blasted with the stench of recent death. He swept the room for any sign of the Branfords. Lucky put his left arm sleeve to his nose in the hope of keeping the miasma of death away. He crept into the dark waiting till his eyes adjusted before he stopped. There, in the corner, were the two bodies of John and Jim Branford, grey with decay and rot. Their faces, what was left of them, were contorted in expressions of agony.

“What the hell?”, Lucky began as he made his way over to the corpses. Their throats had been ripped out, jagged holes where their voice boxes had been. Lucky struck his flint and steel to the remaining tinder in the rundown fireplace, bathing the cabin in flickering firelight. He turned to survey the cabin again and froze. It sat there like a mirage, seven large bags with twenty dollar bills spilling out of the top. It had to be the stolen money, Lucky thought, his mind whirling at the possibilities ahead of him. This was his redemption. A shot at the life he could have had.

The reverie was shattered by the piercing shriek of Lucky’s horse outside, a horrible whinny that spurred him to the front door into the freezing cold. The sun had recently set causing the last of the day’s light to cast haunting shadows in the face of the arriving blizzard. Lucky looked towards where he tied the horse only to see a vaguely human shaped form standing over the fallen form of it. A blast of icy wind buffeted Lucky, driving him back into the confines of the cabin. He was trapped now with no way to get back to Denver.

Lucky shuffled slowly back, facing the door as he moved towards the lone remaining intact chair in the cabin. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath. He kept his pistol trained on the doorway, waiting for whatever he saw out in the storm to come inside. The seconds stretched to minutes. The door shuddered as the gusts shook the cabin. The fire sputtered, the light dying briefly as the last of the kindling was consumed. Lucky looked around frantically. The fire was life and the only thing that awaited him if it went out was a slow freezing death. He thought about using some of the cash before catching sight of a small black notebook clutched in Jim Branford’s rigored hands.

Lucky thought it was a bible at first and hesitated ripping the pages out. He wasn’t a religious man but he had seen too much hell on earth to believe in a beneficent god. Opening it Lucky saw the barely legible script and realized it was Jim’s diary. He tore the first dozen pages out and threw them into the fire, bringing it back to life. He tore out several more pages for the before stopping on a single drawing of a young woman. There were only a few more pages left but he was drawn to the picture. Lucky would have never guessed Jim was a man of this kind of talent.

Lucky flipped to the next page and paused. It was dated for the last week a day after the Branfords hit the First Territorial Bank of Pueblo. The passage was short.

November 11th, 1864

We should have never stopped by that farm on the way out of Pueblo.

What Caleb did to that family was just wrong. Me and John have done a lot of bad in the past but we ain’t ever killed kids. Now we got this woman here cause Caleb wanted to have some fun.

Lucky was shaking, partly from the cold but mostly from rage. He’d been in war and seen a lot of horrible things but had always tried to leave kids of it. The wind wailed its sorrow in snow, though Lucky could swear he heard a woman lilt in it. He shook his head in disbelief. He needed to be more worried about whatever out there that killed his horse than some ghost story. He turned to the next page.

November 12th, 1864

God Damn Caleb Maxwell! This woman, Scarlet, simply will not

Be quiet and the worst part is we can’t understand a damn word

she is saying. John is looking at her in a bad way and I don’t think

I can stop him. Or if I even want to.

Lucky took the worn wooden chair and jammed it against the door to bar it shut. It was the least he could do but he didn’t have much hope that it would hold against something with a powerful will to get inside. He searched the cabin carefully looking for things beyond the money to burn. He grabbed the Branford’s clothing but it was too soaked to burn. He stacked the remains of the wood near the fireplace to dry it out. He was exhausted. He looked at the last page of the diary and blanched. The handwriting was barely legible. It read:

November 13th, 1864

Everything is a blur. Scarlet is dead, ravaged by our inhuman desires. Caleb is gone, fled into the wild though I have no recollection of the night’s events. Our horses are gone, and we are trapped here. John is praying for forgiveness we surely do not deserve. I won’t bother. We are damned.

Lucky looked around confused. There was no sign of a Scarlet. The wind died slightly as the storm lulled. He could hear the crunching of snow and ice just outside the door, and he pulled his gun in preparation for what was coming through the door. The door crumbled inward, revealing a simply dressed small red haired woman. Her faded blue dress was torn across the chest and legs and barely covered her breasts and pubic area. Her hair was a rat’s nest of tangles with black tears streaming down her face despite the freezing cold.

“Caleb?” the woman asked weakly though her mouth didn’t appear to move, “you hurt me so badly.” Her head was cocked at an odd angle, as if she were locked into a perpetual state of confusion. She stepped forward on blackened, frostbit feet. Her legs were pale white, almost alabaster, spackled with dried blood and dirt. Her face was probably once pretty but now it was misshapen and bruised. Her eyes were swollen shut, leaving her practically blind.

“No ma’am,” Lucky started, “He’s gone.” He paused, uncertain on how to proceed. He has seen injuries like this on the battlefield. Her feet would need to be amputated if her blood had not turned toxic already. Better to put her out of her misery, he thought. He cocked his gun as she righted her posture, her spine crunching like grinding stones. Scarlet opened her mouth to reveal several rows of jagged teeth before she said, “Pity, I was still hungry.” Then she lunged.

My grandfather told me this tale of his grandfather and how our family’s fortune was started, from twenty thousand dollars of stolen money and a single black notebook that kept him alive during the blizzard of 1864. Today we are millionaires who can still change people's fortunes with the pull of a trigger. It’s the Maxwell way.