Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

gun, you get on out.”
Silence. Another footstep. Breathing.
“That you, Foggy boy?”
The door opened again and another man came in.
“He’s in his bed,” came a voice.
“Foggy, we are going to light a lamp now. Just sit still and we will get this all straightened out.”
Instead, the men opened fire into his bed, splintering the frame. Johnson grabbed his second pistol
and lifted both guns, emptying each without skill.
He heard wood splintering, groaning, something falling, then maybe the door being opened.
He paused to reload, fumbling in the darkness. He heard breathing—he was sure of it. That made
him nervous. He could imagine the killer squatting there, listening to Johnson’s panicked exhalations,
listening to the clink of the bullets going into the chambers, focusing on the sound, locating
Johnson . . .
He finished reloading. Still nothing.
“Oh, Carmella,” came a sad and tired voice. “I know I’ve been—” The man’s breathing became
labored. “If’n I can just get my breath good . . .” He coughed and there was a kick against the floor.
Then a crackling, choking noise. Then nothing.
In his journal, Johnson wrote,
I apprehended then that I had killed a man, but the room was too dark to see who it was. I waited there
on the floor with my guns ready in case the other shootist came back, and I resolved to fire first and ask
questions afterward. But then I heard Mr. Perkins, the proprietor, calling from the hallway. I answered
back. I told him I wasn’t going to shoot, and then he appeared in the doorway with a lamp, throwing
light across the room and down to the floor, where a big man lay dead, his blood a wet rug beneath him.
There were three neat bullet wounds in the man’s broad back.
Perkins rolled the body over. In the guttering light of the lamp, he looked into the sightless eyes of
Clem Curry. “Dead as a doornail,” he muttered.
The hallway filled with voices, and then heads poked their way through the doorway to gawk.
“Stand back, folks, stand back.”
Judge Harlan pushed roughly through the onlookers into the room. Harlan was in ill humor,
probably, Johnson thought, because he had been called out of bed. It turned out to be nothing of the
sort. “I left a hell of a poker game,” the judge said, “to deal with this here murder.”
He stared at the body.
“That’s Clem Curry, isn’t it?”
Johnson said it was.
“No loss to the community, as far as I’m concerned,” the judge said. “What was he doing here?”
“Robbing me,” Johnson said.
“Figures,” Judge Harlan said. He took a drink from a hip flask, passed it to Johnson. “Who shot
him?”
Johnson said he had.
“Well,” the judge said, “as far as it matters to me, that’s fine. The only trouble is, you shot him in
the back.”
Johnson explained that it was dark, and he could not see.