The Blood Red Cowboy:
The Tall Boy’s Saloon was packed with scum, just like it was every night. The combined bounty on everyone in the bar would be enough to live off for at least three generations. The saloon was tucked away in the mountains; anyone was welcome as long as they paid their tab. Most people didn’t even know it existed and most of the people who did know its wearabouts avoided it at all cost. The local Sheriff knew exactly where to find it, but he was a good God-fearing man, so he never stepped foot anywhere near the mountain. With as much garbage and riffraff that hung around the bar, though, no peep of trouble ever happened. This was due to the owner, Clarence J. Jansen III. He wasn’t just a tough customer, he was THE tough customer. Every generation of Jansens kept getting tougher. The original managed to kill a full-grown grizzly with nothing but a rock. The second didn’t even use a rock. By the time III came, the bear knew better than to mess with him.
As scary as he was, his wife might be more to fear than him. She wasn’t much to look at. Well, I take it back. There was a lot to look at, but nothing pretty. One night, she’d been getting hell from the Groer boys, so she lured ‘em to her house, chopped off their hands, and mailed them to their wives with a letter reading “You’re free now.” No one ever did find the rest of their bodies. Rumor was she did make a big batch of chili the next day.
Directly outside the bar doors, three men were smoking cigars and trading stories about heists. Suddenly, a gunshot fired off, one bullet going through each of the men’s heads. Inside the bar everyone stopped talking and had their guns cocked in their hands. Everyone's gun pointed towards the door. They didn’t care who had come or who he had come for. This was the doorstep to hell itself. They planned on making an example of this person, so it would never happen again. Through the dark, some cans rolled in. Liquid was coming out of each can. Suddenly, a match was lit outside the bar, revealing a cowboy with blood red eyes. The match hit the liquid around the cans and a massive explosion went off. The blood red cowboy ran in with a revolver in each hand, running onto a table, then jumping into the air off of it. He fired them both independently in separate directions, each shot being a headshot to one of the bar’s patrons.
Jansen III knew by the creature’s eyes who he was dealing with. This was one of the few men in the world he feared. Jansen shot at the Blood-Eyed cowboy as the bar started was engulfed in flames. What happened next, Jansen saw in slow motion. The cowboy dodged the bullet as if it was a ball, easily moving off to the side and doing a cartwheel in the process. The Blood-Eyed Cowboy threw his guns to the side and grabbed a tomahawk from around his belt, which he planted into Jansen’s head. Before he left the blazing bar, he grabbed a bottle and started drinking it. This was all in a day’s work, work which would never be complete. Making the world a safer place was his goal and he surely did it on this night. He didn’t have much of a reputation because most of the scum he found wouldn’t live to see anything other than the Blood-Eyed Cowboy.
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