There was a
time and place when disputes were settled by a smoking gun. The law was what
men shot it out to be, and lessons came from either your parents or the black
and blue and red that colored your skin and advertised your poor judgement.
Mothers
would fight every evening to save their sons from reality by teaching them how
to survive. They tempered their tempers. They taught of justice, peace, and the
dangers of an overripe pride. For those sons and daughters who could not hear
their mothers’ pleas, fathers
bore the burden of their children’s longevity. They taught their combative offspring how to choose their
battles, how to save their bullets, how to fight, how to win.
But then,
there are always those who cannot heed the warnings their parents impart for
their own good. Those wild fools who lack insight, patience and moderation in
spite of all their parents do. Past that, there are those who had the even
greater misfortune of parents who did not teach them virtue enough to protect
their lives.
Today, I
tell you the story of one such boy. A child whose parents did not do enough to
teach him his place, his manners and who, as a result, became the destruction
of those he ought to have held dear.
David was
the first son of Gertrude and Daniel Kingsman. Daniel was blind and had once
thought himself destined to die alone in the Western wastes his parents
abandoned him in. When Gertrude, the daughter of the local banker, found him
and saved his life, he owed her everything and loved her more than life itself.
When she bore him a healthy son, he loved that son as if he were the sun, the
stars, and the rains all at once.
The people
living in the town of Bigston noted his behavior and warned Daniel, telling him
he should teach his son to be a good man before he showered him with gifts and
spoiled him rotten. Daniel wouldn’t hear a single word of it, though. He was a blind man gifted with a
strong, healthy son. He would give him every blessing without regard.
As the
years went by, David grew strong, stubborn, and selfish, paying little regard
to the needs of others when he sought to please himself. Once, he beat a weary
traveler for being impudent enough to beg him for spare change, calling him a
godless vagabond.
One day, a Westbound
train carried in a letter telling of the death of Gertrude’s brother Peter. Peter’s wife Katherine and their sons
begged Gertrude and Daniel for a place to live. The couple quickly consented to
share their wealth with their destitute relatives, promising them a share of
whatever they had to offer. The next month, Katherine and her five sons arrived
on the train and were welcomed by Daniel and his wife to their new home. The
only problem was David’s reaction to
his cousins. Amon and Brandon were brave boys, easily as big as their cousin
and twice as good shots as a result of the lessons their father had given them
with a gun. No one could hit their target with as much precision or accuracy as
those two boys, and Daniel grew incredibly jealous of them
At his sons
complaints and rage, Daniel grew weary, bought him a new gun and hired a
sharpshooter to tutor him. David grew better and quicker, but Katherine’s boys began tutoring with the
sharpshooter as well and continued to improved, exacerbating their cousin’s intense jealousy.
Eventually,
David’s jealousy
festered into a cruel plot to eliminate his cousins who seemed to outshine him
at every turn. According to his black plot, David stole his father’s horse and rode out one day before
dawn with nothing but a net, a knife, a box, and a bloodhound. He came back
that morning with a rattlesnake, the rattle carefully removed. David hid the
serpent in Brandon’s room beneath
the pillow on his bed so that the venom would be injected directly into his
neck, removing any chance of survival.
That
evening, Brandon returned to his bed after a hard day working for his uncle to
earn his keep. He was exhausted and lay directly down onto his pillow. With a
startling hiss, the snake bit the young man and he yelled loudly enough to draw
his aunt from the dining room where she was cleaning supper off the table.
Gertrude
cried out and wasted no time, running to the cabinet of medicines her father
kept on hand and sending Amon for the local doctor. When he arrived, the doctor
administered an experimental salve to Brandon’s wound that miraculously cured him
and left him stronger than ever. Though David was displeased, he could express
his frustration to no one for fear of being hanged as a murderer.
Amon camed
to Brandon after his recovery, telling him of the snake’s missing rattle and David’s poorly concealed disappointment at
his survival. The brothers were quietly enraged, and hatched a plot for their
revenge that would not be traced back to them. Thus, the two houses’ feud began, and from that day on,
none of Katherine’s sons would
waste love on their hateful cousin.
Author's Note: I've decided to center my stories for these two weeks around Duryodhana's story and the result that his lack of restraint has on the other characters. You could almost say that it's a set of stories centered arround intrigue resulting from poor parenting choices. I chose the old west theme for two main reasons:
1. There are not many settings where so much wanton killing and so many vile murder plots would go largely unpunished by the law.
2. Who doesn't love a good high-noon shoot out?
I hope you will enjoy the Wild West antics of these feuding cousins.
