Outlaw Hills: Afternoon Soiree

Afternoon Soiree

Bishop Wright was a city dweller. He was the type of hobgoblin who wore a gray suit, round spectacles, shined his own shoes, and parted his hair neatly down the middle. He shaved his face and polished his tusks every morning. He went to chapel twice a week because not only was he a good practitioner of his religion but he was also the Parson. He was the type of hobgoblin his partner called a "Righteous Man."

Vandel Strong, or just Van to his friends, was the kind of person Wright called a No Good Drifter. Strong was a gambler and therefore more religiously found at the saloons, gaming tables, and dance halls. He could be straight laced and buttoned up, but most of the time he slicked his hair to the side with sweat instead of pomade. Strong preferred the wild frontier towns of the Territory to any old coastal city sprawl. His only vanity lay in the care he provided to his carefully manicured beard and mustache.

They called each other partner and friend. They had the bullet holes to prove it. Once, in a range war between Glenhaven and some Silver Creek Gathries, Wright had taken a lead ball for Strong. Then, during a saloon brawl, Strong had taken a knife wound for Wright. Almost as if to balance some invisible scale, Strong ended up stabbing his partner over some slight or another soon after.

Having fought together and against one another respectively for the better part of five years, from the Gods Heads mountains in the south all the way up to Blue Forest in the north, the two decided the only natural path left to them was to go into business together. So they did.

Bishop Wright did not ask for his name, but he was a practical hobgoblin, and so he worked with what he had. At the moment he was working closely with an Eigermacht 210 modular firearm system in the Number 3 shotgun configuration, and, an empty pickle barrel. Somehow, this whole situation was all his partner's fault. That partner was a man named Van Strong, a vainglorious gambler who preferred to charge into dangerous situations with his head down, blades drawn, and a rebel yell on his lips instead of using his head. That madman now stood on the boardwalk across the street from Wright, leaning rakishly on the hitching post and flirting with a dark haired game hall girl named Ravena Halstrom.

Two men emerged through the swinging wyvern-wing doors of the game hall where Ravena worked and stopped on the boardwalk close to where Strong stood. The two men wore black suits and high white collars. Each man was pinned on the the collar with a badge shaped like a section of rail, distinguishing them as Black Iron Agents, the rail road's secret police.

In those days there was not enough law to go around in the Territories, and so Rail Magnates and Cattle Barons hired their own form of justice to protect their business holdings from bandits, desperados, and renegades. This form of justice often came on the edge of a fighting knife or from the barrel of a handgun. From a distance, the Railroad badge looked more like a ladder tilted on its side. Wearing the pin earned these men the derisive slur of, "Ladder men," or just, "ladders."

Bishop had no quarrel with Big Business, unlike his associate, friend, and eternal frustration, Van Strong, who had fought against them in a recently failed rebellion. However, he was about to arrest these two men dressed in black and wearing high, starched white collars, and he was going to do so with the full backing of the Territorial Charter Marshal, Bill Conrad.

After all, these men in suits were not Black Iron Agents. They were murderers.

It was the little things that no one else would notice. The day's growth of beard on the men. The silver ring on the hand of another when Rail Agents were allowed no jewelry. The goblin tooled boots, the riverboat revolver, the kraken tattoo and...well, to Wright, the list went on and on. If one took the time to look one could deduce much of a man's life by his appearance, bearing, or manner of dress. Get the man to speak a few words and Wright could tell even more. He was a student of humans. He liked to study them, watch them, listen to them. After all, he was only half human, and so he found it much easier to study his mother's people than to talk to them. And studying the two men dressed in black and wearing high, starched white collars coming out of the game hall, Wright could tell these were not men of the Rail. Nodding to himself, decision made, Wright cocked the hammer on his Eigermacht 210-3, and stood up in the empty pickle barrel.