'A Horse with No Name'
The town of Dodge Junction had a rough start -- not rough as some, but rougher'n most. It's not a secret, or a hard thing to guess, as most of the frontier towns started out as just wide spots in the long road out west and more'n a few of them didn't make it, but what makes the story of the birth o' Dodge special is just how many ponies you'll find from Las Pegasus to Baltimare claiming they were there the day it happened. I'm not talking about the boring day of actually founding the place, mind, the date of when somepony laid the first brick of the building that would go on to be the first bank or what-have-you, but the day the place was born and really took on a life of its own. I know all of the ponies who were there, since the whole town -- n'more than a couple dozen hard souls either willing to rough it in the dust or unable to find a place anywhere else, it was -- was there for the final showdown, and I ain't ever been much one for misremembering faces or forgetting names, and while any of them still with us could tell you their version of that particular part of the legend, you see I'm really the only pony left who knows exactly how it started, and how it really ended.
Where it started was the Rusty Nail, in the early morning. The Nail was Dodge's only saloon back then -- we used to joke about how the whole place was such a rickety shack that it'd go over in the next stiff wind, but when the place actually did fall in on itself during the big dust storm it didn't seem quite so funny -- and even in the morning, she had a few regulars. There was m'self, of course, and Gin Blossoms, who was a hard lass who went well before her time, and old Pickaxe, who went off on a prospecting trip a few years back and nopony's ever seen him since. We all like to think he struck it rich, found himself a claim that was fully loaded and retired somewhere the sun always shines, because that's better than to speculate on the alternatives. Spit Shine was behind the bar, of course, like he was during that dust storm when the whole top level of the Rusty Nail fell on him, rest his soul. And then there was the two members of the Dynamite Gang, neither of whom knew that when they set hoof in the Nail then, that it would be the last time for both of them.
The Dynamite Gang was what gave Dodge its tough early days. They rode up not long after the railroad came through and started talkin' real big and real loud about the places they'd been through that had just been devastated by bandits -- crops burned, homes destroyed, ponies robbed 'n shot, that sort of thing. Got so that Wide Acres, Dodge's first mayor, was practically knocking his horseshoes together when he walked on account of all that it made him shake. When Black Powder -- he was the leader of the Dynamite Gang, and he factors into the story a little later -- said him and his posse could keep the town safe, for just a small amount of bits each week, why, he nearly fell to the ground and begged them to do just that. It wasn't soon after, of course, that we realized it was the Dynamite Gang who were the bandits, taking a break from doing something as obviously criminal as holding up trains or blowing up safes, and they were extorting Dodge and bleedin' her dry. So it wasn't a surprise to find two of them laughing and playing cards and licking salt that early in the morning, either, while the rest of the town went about resenting them and resenting they couldn't do anything about them.
There was Pocket Ace, who despite her name was an awful card player and an even more awful cheat. She more than held enough conversation for both her and Iron Sight, who was sitting across from her, and half a dozen ponies more, and none of it was worth listening to. She'd complain about everything in the town, from the drinking water to the stiff beds upstairs at the Nail to the way the sun rose through the mountains and turned this strange shade of red, and she'd brag about all the robberies she'd been involved in, train and coach and plain ol' muggings at gunpoint -- to hear her talk you'd think talkin' about herself was her special talent. I'm sure it made Black Powder fit to spit, but he must've had some reason to keep her around. Maybe he thought she was lucky. See, what she was best at, at least according to her, was being in the right place at the right time, of always being able to make a clean getaway. Whether that was a thing that was completely true or not I haven't decided, because while I'm sure there might have been a nugget of truth in all the mounds and mounds of bragging Pocket did and the fact that she did have a look about her of a mare that'd seen more than her fair share of being wedged between rocks and hard places and managed to squeeze out of 'em, I got to witness first-hoof the morning when her luck finally ran out.
She was playing cards with Iron Sight, who was a big heavy bruiser of a workhorse with a face only a mother could love, and I doubt even old Iron Sight's mother had cared too much for the sight of him. He rarely spoke -- I don't think I ever heard him say more'n a dozen words, tops -- just sort of made his will be known by glaring at'cha, but we all knew the thing that really did the talking for him was the rifle always slung over his back. He looked like a brute that would go to work with his hooves, but I think the only thing Iron ever cared for in the world was watching somepony down the length of that rifle. There was some kid, just a young colt, and it makes me sad to say that I never knew his name because nopony in town caught it before he ran afoul of Iron Sight. Fresh off the train, he was, probably looking to make it big somewhere out in the untamed west, and he was too busy looking up at the water tower in what used to be the middle of town when he ran into Iron. And he started sayin' how he was so sorry, and gosh he didn't see where he was going, and ponies back home were always telling him what a klutz with four left hooves he was, and the words all sort of dried up and died off in his mouth as he started to fell the full weight of Iron's gaze. and he started to back away. And then he turned and started to trot. And then he was looking over his shoulder back at Iron, who was still standing there like a slab o' rock with the dust from this poor colt's hooves still on his coat, and the kid started to gallop, like he'd just run on back from Dodge Junction to wherever it was that he called home.
And that's when Iron Sight shot him.
And that poor kid, he just keeled right on over by the train tracks, and nopony said a word, because Iron Sight had just had the final say. I was there that day, stood in the doorway of the general store and saw the whole thing, and the look in Iron's eyes was a thing I'll never forget. See, normally that pony had this dull, dead look about him, like he was doing something boring like sorting mail or ironing sheets, far away in his own thoughts, but he turned away as he was putting his rifle over his back and I saw his eyes then, and it was like all the fires of Tartarus had come alive in them. He wasn't a pony that enjoyed much, but he enjoyed this, and that's probably how he wound up riding with Black Powder.
Anyway, he had just finished cleaning out Pocket Aces in whatever half-bit game they were playing for the umpteenth time that morning, and that was when she came in to the Rusty Nail. She wasn't much to look at -- not that you could see all that much under that ratty poncho and rawhide hat -- but you could sorta tell that she wasn't a pony to be messin' with. She had an air about her, the kind that makes folks with less spine step out of the way and leave the room when nopony's looking -- it's the kind of thing that lets a bunch o' critters know when there's a bigger animal around that eats 'em -- and it's also just the kind of thing that raises the hair on the backs of the necks of lowlives like Pocket and Iron right up.
She was taking a stool at the bar and ordering a drink when Pocket came down, not close enough to get right up in her face, but definitely so everypony would know there was about to be a confrontation. "Hey, you," Pocket says, "that's my stool you're sitting on."
Cool as a tall glass of iced cucumber juice, she says back, "Don't see your name on it, friend."
"I got some news for you," says Pocket. "Every stool in this entire woodpile is my stool. I run this place. And you don't sit anywhere in here without my say-so."
And then she added one more thing, and you could hear that she thought this would end their little exchange. And why wouldn't she? She'd had a pretty good run of making threats without anypony being game enough to call her on them -- if she didn't back them up, since Pocket had a kind of vicious mean streak in her, a bit like a kicked dog, then Black Powder eventually would. We were all too used to living in fear of the Dynamite Gang, but this newcomer, she didn't seem to pay them any more attention than a tumbleweed rolling around in the breeze. On that day I thought she was the most foolish of fools, but thinking back on it, she knew she had their number, every one of them.
So Pocket says, "And one more thing."
And she left a big pause, real dramatic-like.
"I'm not your friend."
By this time, everypony in the Rusty Nail had gone completely still. Spit Shine had stopped pretending he was polishing a glass, Gin Blossoms had lifted up her head to watch what was going on, and Pickaxe was just staring from the corner with that scrawny beady look he always had. Yours truly was at the far end of the bar, trying to keep as low a profile as one can in that particular position. Iron Sight was also not drawing attention to himself, but we'll get back to him in a minute.
Slowly, the stranger turns her head away from the bar and back to Pocket, only to find she's staring down the barrel of a holdout pistol. I don't recall Pocket ever actually shooting at anything, and I'm sure she would have hollered to the ends of Equestria and back about it if she ever had and she managed to hit it, but she did have a good long time to take aim and it wasn't like there was a bunch of distance between them. She had the drop on the stranger, to be sure, but the thing the stranger really should have been worried about was Iron Sight's rifle poking over the railing of the second floor balcony. See, during the commotion he had crept upstairs with the kind of quietness the world is supposed to have granted cats and shadows and not burly gunslingers, and trained his rifle on the source of trouble he knew would be coming. They were a good team, Pocket and Iron, able to anticipate what the other was going to do before they did it and covering they other's weaknesses through their vast amount of differences.
A good team, but the stranger alone was better.
Now, I've seen pegasi be fast. They're quick as a breed, them bird-horses, flighty and prone to being erratic and twitchy, and it makes 'em able to pull off sleight of hoof and feats of speed like no other. But the stranger, she was something else. One second, she had all four hooves on the ground, calmly facing two loaded guns held by ponies who didn't have much restraint. The next second she was up on her hind legs, wings flared, rawhide hat flyin' back, a revolver in each hoof, and a single deafening gunshot near rocked the walls of the Nail.
See, the funny thing about sound is that you can take a sound, and then make the exact same sound right at the same time, and it's going to seem louder. It's some trick that I never fully understood the exact meaning of why, but it's the truth and that morning the gunshot was enough to prove it. The stranger had a pair of guns, and she had unleashed them at the exact same time. The sound of one gunshot, but two bullets, and both found their mark true. I couldn't see it at the time, but only she could have made that shot, them in two different places but hit at the same time with guns shot off from the hip. Pocket staggered back into the table and sent it and all the bits and playing cards on it to the floor, then a second later Iron slumped over the railing he'd been leaning on and fell to the floor in a heap, his rifle comin' with him. At the end of the day, Spit Shine would mount that rifle of his over the back of the bar, as a sort of trophy to remember that day by, and there it hung until the place finally came down, rest his soul.
And then the stranger, she just adjusted that hat o' hers to smooth out her mane a little and turned right back to her drink like nothing had happened. 'Side from the two bodies you couldn't tell something had happened, since those big irons of hers disappeared under her poncho quickly as they had come out. We were all in shock, not so much from what she'd done but who she'd done it to. There'd be retribution to face from Black Powder when he found out two of his gang had been gunned down over something so trivial, and if we didn't play our cards right with the stranger that wrath might fall down on the town -- then again, on the other hoof, if we said the wrong thing to her to explain the situation, her wrath might just fall down on us, and we had just seen how that all played out.
It was Spit Shine who broke the silence, while the stranger was sipping her drink. "I don't mean to trouble you none, blondie," he said, his voice quivering like a plucked string, "but you've just gone and opened up a whole can o' worms with those two. See, they was a part of--"
And then he stopped talking, because the stranger had cut him off with a wave of her hoof.
"The Dynamite Gang," she said, the expression on her face -- what little you could see of it under that big hat -- not changing at all. "I know."
She pulled out a scrap of paper from somewhere under her poncho and laid it down on the bar. I couldn't see all that well from where I was, but I didn't need to -- even Pickaxe in his dark corner had to know it was a drawing of Black Powder's ugly face, a number underneath with a lot of zeroes, and a proclamation of WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.
"What I'm going to do," the stranger explained, "is remove these two--" And she gestured to the corpses like there wasn't a day that had gone by without her encountering a corpse. "--From your establishment. Then I'm going to wait here for Black Powder."
And as she was dragging what was left of Pocket out the front door, she added, "And I'd like another drink waiting for me when I get back, if you please."
She took 'em both, Pocket and Iron, out to the trough out the front of the Rusty Nail, and dunked 'em both in there head-first like they were trying to wake up from the mother of all salt headaches. I didn't see the sense of it then, but now I do, and I can pass it on to you. See, she knew Black Powder would be missing two o' his riders, and was counting on him coming out of his hideout up in the hills and down into Dodge proper to look for them -- making it look like they were dead drunk instead of just plain dead would throw him off, ease his mind a little, let the stranger get one up on him. Anyway, her firin' off her revolvers and then hauling the results outside had stirred up the rest of the town, and there were a couple of gawkers poking their heads of out windows and out from behind storefronts. This was fairly standard practice, as it paid to know which way the wind was blowing if shots were ever fired back in those days, but just who had come off worst in the conflict was something new. Folks were gathering by the time the stranger had managed to drop Iron Sight into the water trough -- Dead Letter, that gangly doofus who ran the mail exchange, even went so far as to stand in the stranger's way as she went from the trough the last time on her way back to the Nail, though I think that was more dumb luck on his part that anything else (most things Dead Letter did were a dumb of some kind). He was starin' at her with his mouth near dragging in the dirt, and all she did was pause by him to suggest not drinking that water for a little while.
Then she made good on her promise to wait in the Nail until Black Powder showed up. You could feel the whole town winding up, just getting tenser by the hour like a fiddle string being tuned too tight and threatening to snap. If the stranger felt any of this, she didn't let it show, but the rest of us were all jumpin' in our skin like we'd just had half a dozen cups of coffee blacker'n mineshaft at midnight. It was a quiet tension, and those are always the worst because there's nothing you can do to make it ease up, and everything anypony else does just makes it worse. You might keep checking out the window every five minutes, and then you notice that somepony else keeps tapping their hoof and some other pony else is always coughing but never manages to get their throat clear, and on and on it goes with nothing ever happening while you all get more nervous than a long-tail cat in a room full o' rocking chairs.
It was around sundown, when the shadows were at their longest, that Dead Letter finally burst into the Nail and broke the tension. "He's a-comin'!" he shouted, so out of breath it sounded like he'd been runnin' laps around the town, and then he added, "Black Powder!" as if we all didn't know who he meant.
The stranger, she just pushed herself off her stool that she had sat at for hours and, without saying a word, stepped out the doors of the Rusty Nail.
Now, Black Powder should have known something was up. He was equal parts mean and crafty, just the kind of top dog needed to keep the rest of his pack o' mutts in line, so he was the kind of pony to be able to sniff out an ambush. But this was no ambush, despite all of Dodge Junction hiding out in some nook or cranny or another -- the stranger just waited in the shadows of one of the big beams holding up the Nail's little balcony, not hiding but not so much making herself known, either. Black Powder didn't even see her, and probably wouldn't have cared right at that second even if he had -- he had seen two of his posse face-down in the trough outside the saloon and he had seen red. It's not that he had an aversion to saloons or anything of the sort, but when the ponies keeping the town under your hoof in line are passed out in the street, they're not especially intimidating, you see. So he grabbed Pocket and was about to slap some sobriety into her, but her head just lolled back like her neck was made of soggy noodles. Now he had to know something wasn't as it should be, and -- here's the genius of the stranger's way o' doing things -- that he hadn't foreseen it, and that must've put the fear of all things dark and terrible into him if only for a second. But that second was all the stranger needed.
"Black Powder," she called, and Black Powder turned around to see she had strode into the middle of the main street ('though I suppose there really only was one street, back then). "There's a price on your head, and I plan to cash in."
Now, here's where the legend starts to grow, and once you hear the truth of it, you can see how the tale would grow with each retelling. But what I'm about to tell you is the version I've always told, right from the day after it happened, because it's what I saw with my own two eyes. I was right at the doors of the Rusty Nail, and I heard the entire thing. Here's how it went.
First, Black Powder sneered, and said, "So collect. I'm right here."
Then the stranger told him, "I'm a reasonable mare. I'll make you an offer. The fastest draw is the one who walks away."
"What about them?" asked Black Powder, tilting his head at the two bodies in the trough but never once taking his eyes off the stranger in the poncho. "Did you make them the same offer?"
"More or less," she said, and didn't elaborate.
You could see Black Powder thinking this over, and he was a pony I'd heard tell had a pretty rigid poker face. See, even though he called his gang the Dynamite Gang, and he had a mark of fine black powder on his flank, that wasn't blasting powder -- it was gunpowder. He also wore a revolver at his hip, an oily heavy shooting iron that in all his days had never been the slower of two guns, and he had seen more days than most in his chosen profession. He was confident he'd never meet the pony faster on the trigger than him. But on the other hoof, this mare in front of him at gotten the better of Pocket Aces and Iron Sight, the exact manner of which he did not know. He might have been worried, yes, but what I think he was most was curious.
And, you know what they say about curiosity, and what it does to cats? Just keep that in your head.
Black Powder didn't say anything, just moved to the middle of the street to line up with the stranger, all while never breaking his gaze. He reared up and balanced on his hind legs, and she did the same. They each held a hoof down by their hip, their shadows painted on the buildings across the street.
"One more thing," the stranger said, and she tilted her head back a little to lift some of the shadow from her hat out of her eyes.
Black Powder just stared at her, drillin' into her with his eyes. His time for talking was done with.
"Aim for the heart," she said.
Waiting there at that moment felt longer than we had waited already that day, and a thousand times more tense. Nopony lurking at doors and ducked behind windows breathed or twitched. Neither did the two in the main street. This kind of a contest, it might look like it's about speed of hoof on from the outside, but what it's really about is force of will, about who's going to falter first. It's all played out up here, in the head, and the gunshot at the end is just the result. Mental fortitude, out-thinking your opponent -- that's the only way to win.
So intense was the staredown that we of the town didn't even react to the shot. It was just some outside noise, something far away that had happened to somepony else. The important part was who fell.
It was the stranger.
Oh, don't look at me like that! You know she's the one who walks away from this, else I wouldn't be the one standing here before you to tell you the story. You knew the what of the story since before I started telling it to you -- what you're really after is the how.
Anyway, if I'd've been in Black Powder's horseshoes at that moment, I might have been a bit surprised. For all the build-up, for all the confidence the strange had going into the gunfight, she hadn't even had the time to draw her gun. Could it have been that she was all talk, all hat and no ranch as we used to put it? But there was still Pocket and Iron, and they didn't just up and shoot themselves. Something didn't add up.
So, of course, Black Powder, he had to go and take a closer look.
He crept closer to the fallen stranger, cautious as a mouse trying to steal from the Sunday lunch table, nopony from town willing to move or even exhale. They knew things weren't over, and somehow, maybe a part of Black Powder knew it too, somewhere deep in his bitter heart. He pushed back the stranger's hat with the barrel of his revolver, real careful-like, as if he was afraid she'd spring back to life if he startled her or something. Maybe he wanted to unravel the trick. Maybe he wanted to see the pony who'd had nerves of steel but hooves of lead. Maybe he just didn't trust any pony who'd keep the brim of their hat so low.
Whatever the reason, that was what undid him.
Because that's when the stranger shot him.
The look of surprise that came across his face, put into other circumstances, might have been funny. Way it was, it was very close to something you could call cosmic irony. The stranger hadn't been dead, of course, she had just been playing dead to get him in close, and though he couldn't have lived long enough to have seen it, the ponies of Dodge Junction all saw when she dropped the heavy iron plate concealed beneath her poncho to the ground, a dent in it from the bullet from Black Powder's gun.
There was celebrating after that, of course, like there always is for such occasions where folk suddenly feel as though they're able to fill their lungs after having been breathing through a tiny straw for so long, but the stranger wouldn't have any part of it. Had to keep moving along, she said, which I guess is the way of the kinds of ponies who come from a different breed as to those would would settle down somewhere, even a place as remote and unforgiving as Dodge Junction started off.
I did get a moment to talk with her before she left, though, just me and her, and I found out a few things that made the whole event make some kind of sense. See, this is the part that's missing that makes the truth grow into legend, because folks want to speculate on just why it was that she chose the ruse she did. Some say bravado, others say showmareship. Some say it was to trap Black Powder, who would have backed out of a normal ambush. I even heard one fool go so far as to claim she had a set of magic bullets but spent 'em all up on Pocket and Iron.
No, the truth is this. I asked her just as the sun was setting if she was a bounty hunter, and she said, "Nope. Just a pony looking to make some bits."
"What do you need so many bits for?" I asked.
"Need to get somewhere far away in a hurry. I made a promise to somepony out there."
"Must've been one heck of a promise," I said.
"Making the promise the easy part," she told me. "It's the keeping that's hard."
And then she lifted her hat back, and I understood it. See, she could shoot, there was no doubt about that, but she was also unfortunately the most wall-eyed created I had ever laid my eyes on. One eye going up and the other down, it was a wonder she didn't walk into every wall from here to Neighvada from not being able to see straight. She would've been able to track Pocket Aces on the ground and Iron Sights up on the second level at the same time, but to pinpoint Black Powder from such a distance would have been impossible. She needed to get him in close, where even with those two busted eyes she had no chance of missing.
Anyway, then she said, "And now it looks like I'll be able to keep that promise after all."
And that was the last I ever saw of her. I never heard any tell of a cross-eyed gunslinger either before or since, so she must've left the life nearly the same time as she'd taken it up, but I like to think that, in one way or another, she's still out there, helping folks just the way she did that day in Dodge Junction.
Author's Note
With two episodes that are obvious homages, who knows how many stories based on a certain post-apocalyptic video game set in the Mojave Desert, and for being a show about, y'know, horses, it's a wonder there isn't a Western tag already.
Something completely outside my wheelhouse, in terms of both style and content. I had a blast writing this, though -- the conversational style is something I might pick up further down the road.
That AU tag covers a universe where ponies have handguns and a violent frontier, by the way -- this is legit my headcanon otherwise now for the kind of life was living before they settled down.
