Unlikely Angel

Chapter 1

The sun was beginning to set and Johnny was cursing the late start he had gotten on the day. It wasn’t entirely his fault; he’d had to wait for a response from the territorial marshal before he could head out for home but still, if he’d been able to start out at first light like he’d wanted, he would have been home already. He wasn’t that far off and could still make it before it was full dark. He fully planned on doing just that. If nothing else went right today, he was going to finish it by sleeping in his own bed with a belly full of whatever Alice was cooking.

Alice. Just the thought brought a smile to tug at the young man’s face. He’d never encountered another woman like her before and doubted that he’d not find anyone else quite like her. A good ten years earlier she’d found herself widowed with a son toddling at her feet to care for. The dream she and her husband had shared had been of a small ranch. She had set her mind to fulfill that dream and do it on her own if there was no other way.

She worked hard at building that dream and worked by herself for far longer than most men even would have tolerated. In time, she set to building a larger makeshift family for herself and her son, Carl, out of runaways and strays. Johnny had been among the first but far from the last. Some left as quickly as they came and some stuck around.

Johnny had stayed and really never thought to do anything different. Life with Alice was the closest to what a family ought to be that he’d known. There were still those who drifted through, wanting nothing more than a hot meal and a warm bed in exchange for a day or two of work. Alice didn’t seem to mind one way or another. She would never turn away a soul in need.

Johnny found himself the oldest of the group, the man of the family in many ways. He had gone from half starved ragamuffin to a respected man in the town of River’s Edge. He had even earned the respect of the town’s marshal, Jasper Clay, known to most simply as Hound Dog. No one seemed to know exactly how he’d earned such a moniker. Johnny knew better than most that a name could just attach itself to a person and never leave him be.

Another smile graced Johnny’s face as he thought about Hound Dog. He’d be sure to be at the supper table too. Rarely did he miss a chance at a home cooked meal and even rarer still was a time when Hound Dog would pass up the chance to make time with Alice. In fact, if Hound Dog Clay hadn’t been sweet on Alice all these years, he probably never would have pinned the deputy badge on Johnny’s chest the first time. By now, Johnny had proven his worth as a deputy and anytime Hound Dog needed something done—taking a message to the territorial marshal for instance—there wasn’t even a thought before Hound Dog would seek out Johnny and hand over the badge.

His thoughts of a hot meal and warm bed were cut short by the all too familiar sound of gunfire. Gunfire and screams; that was never a good sign and a part of him wanted to do what Hound Dog told each of them to do any time he handed out a deputy’s badge: run. He wanted to go home and forget he heard anything but it wasn’t in his nature.

He pulled up on the reins, turned the horse toward the sounds and kicked at the animal’s side, riding as hard as he could toward the disturbance. It wasn’t long before the small farm came into his view and he could just make out the dark silhouettes of three riders fading toward the horizon. They were too far out to even bother with reaching for one of his pistols. He set to looking around and seeing if he could still be of help to anyone.

It wasn’t much of a farm and Johnny didn’t figure these people did a lot of growing for any sort of profit. It looked more like they worked purely for their own survival. Riding up, he saw bodies. A man and woman looked to have been a husband and wife and then two boys looking around thirteen or fourteen. He turned his head sharply away from the boys. Just children. What Johnny couldn’t figure out was what possible gain there was for anyone to hurt these people. They had nothing. And whatever they had couldn’t have truly been worth killing those boys. From the corner of his vision he saw movement in the barn. He slid off his horse drawing one of his pistols and walked cautiously toward the barn, hoping that he’d only find the family cow agitated from the flurry of violence that had transpired. Instead he found a girl, a young girl. She was maybe ten but he thought more likely as young as eight and her straw colored hair had once been in braids, perhaps as recently as that very morning but now more closely resembled a bird’s nest than the tidy plaits that her now deceased mother had most likely made. She wore a simple shift of a blue that matched her eyes. The dress was torn and there were scratches on the girl’s face and arms and there were angry purple finger print shaped marks appearing on her wrists and, Johnny discovered with anger, her neck. He had to shake his head to dislodge the memories that tried to overtake him but there was no holding them back.