It Came from Anomaly Flats by Clayton Smith

Author:Clayton Smith [Smith, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dapper Press
Published: 2016-07-28T23:00:00+00:00

The remaining men made little speech that night, for each was consumed by his own thoughts. The first bandit raged in an internal sort of way, cursing the game and cursing himself. As for the third bandit, who can say what thoughts made claim to his attention, for is not such a man as he a singularly lonesome and brooding creature?

If words passed between the two men, they were surely as formless and empty as the thin trails of cloud snaking through the darkening sky above.

At some length, the second bandit returned, a whistle on his lips and a cheerful carelessness in his step. He carried with him an old flour sack, which he dangled between his fingers as a piece of meat over a dog’s head. “What do you bring?” the first bandit asked sourly, feeling already that some great injustice had been done him, and that his failure at claiming the game was all but complete now that this second man had returned with something other than a body gone cold.

“This, brethren,” said the second bandit, jiggling the sack and flashing his leering smile, “is the proof of my achievement.”

He tossed the sack into the well-used ring of earth around the fire, and a swarm of hornets exploded forth from its neck, sore for the confinement, confused for the smoke. The first bandit scrambled back away from the monstrous, angry insects, plunging back over his log of a seat and tumbling into the ferns and brambles beyond. The third bandit, for his part, simply sat and let the hornets wash past him, which they did, without paying him courtesy. The swarm buzzed angrily up into the trees and disappeared in the leaves high above.

“What’s this?!” the first bandit cried, righting himself in the bushes and stomping back into the firelight. “Speak, brother, for we’ll have no chicanery in this contest!”

“Why, it’s naught but the uncontested proof of my victory,” he said with a self-satisfied sort of grin.

“Tell us how your time was passed,” said the third bandit with a simple and direct authority that could not be denied. The second bandit cleared his throat and began:

“When I left these homely woods, I ventured straight as a loosed arrow to the banks of the Emerald Snake” (for this was the name of Plasma Creek in those days, though its properties were ever the same as they are today) “and set myself to waiting behind a tree that dares to dangle its roots above the floating green mists of that place. By and by, a gentleman comes along, a right gentleman, too, buckskin jacket cut in that style of the highbrows that inhabit Scudder’s Point, and handsome gloves to match. In his cups, he was, and giggling to the night like a fool. I wait until he approaches, tumbling and stumbling over his own shining boots. So close he comes to my tree that the air stinks with the scent of his shaving oil, and at last, I strike!

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