Scareship_Issue8

ut put it on nonetheless. She told him to go to Humble’s Wood
and find Trapper Dugan. He was the kind of a feller who could be
helpful at a time like this. Gilly, not having anywhere else to go
and, whatever else he was, still only a scared boy, took Sunny’s
advice and disappeared into the woods afore Starr’s other gunmen
could find him. Little did Gilly know what he would find waiting
for him out in that forest.
The Coming of Inky Dugan
By the time Gilly came strolling through the woods on that
troubled day, Trapper Dugan had already moved on from the
environs of Rook and was nowhere to be found. He had, though,
left something behind him... a son, left in the care of a Humbabian
squaw. Now whether she was the child’s birth mother or only his
wet nurse no one knows for sure, but she was all the mama that
boy would ever know. Before departing, Trapper Dugan had
dubbed the boy “Inky,” for the jet black hair that covered most of
the child’s body and the deep set eyes that sat in his head like
bottomless blue-black pools of tar.
And that boy, Inky Dugan, he was raised a Hum. At the ripe
ole age of 12, he was left in the woods by his mama to fend for
hisself, as was required by the Humbabian warrior’s rite of
ascension. She let his hand drop and Inky walked into those woods
without a backward glance, and he never returned to the tribe
thereafter. Whether that filled the squaw’s heart with pain or relief
is unknowable, but I’d be acknowledging the corn of it to guess it
was both.
So now here was Gilly, on the run, spotting a figure
hightailing it across Humble’s Wood. At first he thought it was a
grizz, but then he realized that it was a man what gamboled
amongst the thickets, and so he hailed him. “Oyo, Mr. Dugan!”
shouted Gilly, thinking the feller to be Trapper Dugan.
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