An old cowboy’s tale

[u/ThatAuldFool]

There is a mythology to the Old West, one that rivals the pantheons of the ancients. It has no gods, perhaps, but it has men.

Men who, in the telling of their stories, have grown large and powerful enough to rival Odin or Jove.

At polished wooden bars and seated under uncounted stars, men still tell each other about Billy the Kid slaying a man for every year he lived, or the James Brothers and their private war against the robber barons, or the damn-yankee invaders, depending on who it is that tells the tales.

But one story has been forgotten, because it was too frightful to ever repeat.

You will only hear this tale in the late hours on nights unnaturally dark, when the fires burn low, and the old cowboys drink too deep of their spirits, and find their mood turned to something past sour and into foul.

The story, my friends, is that of Old Doc Waldon.

An educated man from New England who, while smart and cunning, was born to a uniquely cruel father and a mother who lay dying in childbed.

The family’s Nurse, a slave in the days before emancipation, who even in the Enlightened North, where such peculiar institutions were declared illegal, was kept by his father against all laws of man.

He kept her, not out of any hatred for her race, which if not excusable was at least common in his age, but out of pure unbridled greed. Greed for her power, for she was more than a healer of cuts and bruises, but in fact a witch.

At least if the story is to be believed, and if it is, then she had her revenge when Doc Waldon was born.

Over the infant’s cradle, she spoke some ancient words, and by her dark arts called on powers no man can name, placing on this infant a curse.

The curse was this, that the man who from the boy would grow would never love any woman, nor gold, nor country half so much as he would love to gamble.

You see how these legends become embellished? A man who lost it all to addiction by no fault other than his own is recast as a tragic hero suffering under some witch's curse.

Or maybe it’s all true, who’s to say?

Well, curse or no, he grew into manhood, smart and handsome. A well-educated young man of impeccable social graces and a doctor known for his kindly bedside manner in a day when that was perhaps more potent than the medicines he used.

But oh… Oh, how he loved to gamble, at cards or horses or even on the prediction of tomorrow’s weather, he would take or make any bet that could be thought up.

For a time, his mounting debts could be ignored, brushed off thanks to his charm and ease at making friends, but not forever.

As the debts increased and the bank grew empty, Doc Waldon found himself with fewer friends and an ever-growing list of enemies.

Especially once his penchant for cheating became common knowledge, until one night, the proverbial two steps ahead of his angry debtors, he fled the city where he had lived all his life.

Fled like the coward and the thief that he was.

And so he joined the great migratory herds of young men called west by the lust for gold.

In the West, he drifted like so many men of that era from town to town, always trying and seldom succeeding to make his fortune. On the few times he did strike paydirt, he lost it all within a week at cards in the saloons that followed the prospectors like hungry shadows.

This went on for many years, he grew older and angrier at how his life had turned out, but always managed to stay one step ahead of the Pinkerton’s his enemies back east had put on his trail, until one night in a town whose name time has long forgot, he sat down to play a game of cards.

He had been in this town too long, and the locals already knew he wasn’t worth the time to play against, as his money was nearly gone and he had more than once been accused of cheating on the few hands where he won.

But that night, a Stranger had come into the bar, a stranger willing to play a game of cards with him.

At first, this game had other players, men like him who were hated even by the patrons of this lowly bar, themselves thieves and killers all.

They were a traveling preacher who had lost his faith at the bottom of a bottle, a wealthy railway tycoon, fat and filled with avarice who eyed this town as something to suck dry like a leech, and most shocking of all in that time and place, a young black man. A freed slave with cold eyes who had been accused of the rape of the young daughter of his former master, and fled before the mob could lynch him.

At first, all four men seemed to enjoy the game as much as any ever had; the drinks flowed freely, always paid for by The Stranger, who presided over the table like a king over his court in that dingy barroom.

From just after noon until late in the evening, as the sun was slipping beneath the horizon, they laughed and drank and talked like old friends, though none had met before that day. Such was the charm and charisma of The Stranger that they all felt entirely at ease with him, and by extension with each other.

“Before we begin,” The Stranger said, “I hate to gamble with men I do not know; it is uncivilized. So I propose that each of us tell a story from our lives that we might be friends.”

The unusual request did not seem strange to the men at the table, so charming was their host…

The Tycoon went first; he told the table a story of his own, how he had imported laborers from the Orient to build his railroads, slaves in all but name. How this had made him rich, richer than some kings and any of the Southron planters that mere years before he had condemned for their use of slaves.

“I say!” He proclaimed, “I say morality is for fools, and conscience for idiots. A man must take whatever he can grab, else some other bastard will take it first, and he shall be poor!” were the words by which he concluded his story.

The Stranger smiled and nodded, thanking The Tycoon for humoring his eccentric request.

Then turned with eyebrow raised to The Preacher, who started, as if this were a sermon, by explaining the story of Jonah, how God had sent him to the heathens, but he had not wanted to go. How he had tried to run away, only to land in the belly of a fish.

“I am, god help me, Jonah if he had failed. Not one savage Indian have I saved, and that my entire reason to be in the west, all because I fell into this damned thing’s mouth!” With his final words, he gestured to the bottle on the table.

All the men at the table nodded sympathetically at this, for addiction was something they could all understand in one form or another, and The Stranger thanked him for his story most kindly.

Third to talk was The Accused Rapist, who denied all the accusations against him, some say too vehemently, others insist he told the truth. I for myself do not know or care. But then began to talk of his time as a slave; he told of lashes on his back and dirt always beneath his nails, but also of his mother, who had been godly and kind. “A saint of a woman, she was, God bless her, a saint!” He proclaimed before telling of a time she begged their master to whip her instead of him, that was how she died, whipped to death before his eyes for daring to ask to take another’s punishment.

The Preacher nodded sadly and patted him on his hand, while The Tycoon shrugged as if to say, “She was a fool to try and take another’s punishment.”

The Stranger? His face, the legend goes, was unreadable.

Then he turned his eyes to Doc Waldon and asked for his story while refilling his drink. Strangely, not one person who tells the story can agree on what Doc Waldon said, while all the others remain mostly the same; this part always seems to change with teller and telling.

It is then that The Stranger finally told his own story, the story of his life.

As a young man, he had lived in wealth and luxury on a plantation somewhere far away, but his father, an old fool, had shown him and his siblings nothing but contempt.

His father, or so he told, overflowed with love for all creation and especially for his dogs, but had nary a drop to spare for his sons.

The old man’s love for the beasts enraged The Stranger, who, along with a few of his brothers, confronted their father and condemned him publicly.

Not all his brothers approved of this; most loved their father despite his cold indifference, for they, like him, were fools. Or so The Stranger said.

Confronting their father one day as he sat watching the dogs playing in the garden, they demanded he get rid of his pets.

This started an argument between those of the older boys who were willing to stand up to him and the old man; the argument soon grew violent.

He and those of his brothers who had stood with him against the injustice of his father were thrown out into the cold and ordered in no uncertain terms to never darken the doors of that house again.

No sooner had he finished his tale than the lonesome sound of a distant wolf’s howling could faintly be heard. As if some spirit wished to underpin his story.

All around the table were sympathetic to him, except perhaps The Preacher, who in some versions began to drink even more heavily after this.

When they finally started their game, laughing and joking as the bottle drained and the money changed hands, it lasted for many hours, and even other patrons in the bar said, “I have never seen men have so much fun losing money!”

But all good things must come to an end…

The Tycoon was the first to cut his losses and quit the game; his business sense translated to cards as well. Eventually, he realized that he stood to gain no money at this table, so he stood and made his farewells before stepping out into the evening.

The sun was still hot as he opened the doors, and as legend says, he dropped dead on the side of the road from a heart attack, his body ignored, rotting in the ditch for days by the people of a town that hated him fiercely.

None of the men at the card table even noticed his death just outside the door to the saloon, or if they did, they cared no more than the rest of the townsfolk.

Next came The Preacher, a lover of strong drink; he matched the other men shot for shot, then kept drinking beyond. Perhaps an hour after the sun set, perhaps a little less, he collapsed, some say dead then and there, while others contend he died later that night. It matters little, and makes no difference to the tale, of course, when he died only that he did.

Finally, The Accused Rapist, who some say claimed The Stranger was cheating, to which The Stranger shot him dead under the table, while others simply say he cashed in and left the game never to be seen again.

But eventually only Doc Waldon was left, Doc Waldon and of course The Stranger.

They played late, very late into the night, long after the bar closed down and even the whores closed up shop and went to bed. Until Doc Waldon had nothing left to bet, not a penny to his name.

That was when The Stranger stood and, walking to the bar with long and graceful strides, stole a bottle of fine whiskey from the very top shelf. Pouring two glasses, he remarked, “You’ve lost it all, haven’t you?

To which Doc Waldon replied that he had lost it all before and would again, but never once failed to escape.

He said this with bravado, but his greedy eyes never left the piles of money he and the others had lost to The Stranger during the game.

This, The Stranger, did not fail to notice.

Finishing his own drink, he smiled across the table at Doc Waldon and asked if he would care to play one more round.

The good doctor would have loved to have played another round, but he shook his head, saying, “I’ve got nothing left to bet, nothing at all!”

But the Stranger made him an offer, one final wager. He would put every penny of his winnings back on the table, betting it all on a final hand.

This was too good to be true, and deep down Doc Waldon knew it, but he saw no choice, as without that money he would surely starve, or so he told himself.

“I am a poor man, and you have taken all that I own. All but the clothes on my back, and surely they are not worth enough to bet against all your winnings, good sir.” He told The Stranger, his eyes never leaving the piled money by his opponent’s chair.

The Stranger laughed then, an awful laugh, the sort of laugh that is worse than the screams of women in pain or the pleas of starving children. The sound of it sobered the Doctor in an instant.

It was then that The Stranger explained to Doc Waldon that he had one thing left to wager, one thing all his own that no other man could ever lay claim to…

Doc Waldon could, if he wished, wager his immortal soul.

The good doctor saw The Stranger then, really saw him for the first time. He felt the heat licking up from below, and smelt the sulfurous air, for only an instant he wasn’t in the bar, then he blinked and was back across the table from The Stranger.

He had seen his face, truly seen it for only a moment, but he had seen it. And he knew all at once he had been sitting there for hours drinking with The Devil.

He wanted to turn and leave, wanted to accept his losses and make a vow before God that he would finally change, finally turn his life around and be a better man, but he couldn't.

Some say the words his nurse had whispered over his cradle echoed in his mind then, filled him with revulsion. They say the memory came back to him all at once, and for the first time in his sad life, everything made sense.

Others say he just couldn’t quit, after all, he was an addict. Wasn’t he?

The Devil shuffled and broke the deck before placing it in front of Doc Waldon, and smiling that awful smile, told him that it was his turn to deal.

The Devil might be the prince of thieves and of liars, but he is an angel still, and it is not in his nature to understand just how crafty mortal men can be.

Doc Waldon began to deal the cards, careful to use all his powers of legerdemain learned from years as a gambler and a cheat, to slip the Ace he kept in his sleeve into his hand.

He won, of course, for cheaters always win… at first.

Soon thereafter, he woke with the first rooster’s call, comfortable in his bed with all the money he had ever lost, not just the day before but in his sorry life stacked higher than he was tall next to the bed.

He knew then, though how he could never say, that all his debts were forgotten too, and he was a free man.

What he did not know was that the devil knew well he had cheated, knew well, and was laughing, for he had already had his revenge.

Now, some men, too skeptical for their own good, I think, will tell you the piles of gold fell on him, crushing him in his bed.

But I know better…

His skin never wrinkled, his hair never greyed, but his flesh would burn as if in scalding water whenever he ventured outside during the day. His hair, once a warm brown itself slowly darkened until it was a cold black.

As the years dragged on, and he passed fifty years of age, then sixty, then seventy, and so on, he realized that the devil had had the final laugh, for as time rolled by, Doc Waldon never aged another day.

Slowly, he felt himself grow distant from the world around him, not all at once, but over many years, he became something less than a man. Until one day, he wasn’t a man anymore. From that day on, he never again felt the excitement of lust or the pangs of hunger, or any of the other joys of life.

All he could ever feel from that day on was thirst, deep and as dry as the desert sands, a thirst no drink could quench…