GRIT
They call me Grit on account of how I’d jump into any fight as a kid. As I got older, well, I became sheriff of Talon Point Springs. I always found myself dealing with the baddies, as Ma and Pa used to call them. I just call them yellowbellies myself, seeing as they ain’t never tried me without running tail-first out of my town.
Now I feel like a yellowbelly myself, ’cause I ain’t never wanted to run and hide so bad in all my life.
They say my soul is made of grit, and that it can take anything. Well, I reckon if you take that grit and grind it against stone after stone, at some point that grit turns smooth. And after this fight, I reckon they might just start calling me Smooth.
It’s midnight, and the Injuns causing my town trouble have started acting funny. They only come out at night now, and they’ve been stealing my townsfolk one by one. Just when I thought we’d made amends.
Hell, old Chief Sitting Wolf won’t even talk to me no more. I ain’t seen him in weeks, not since we spoke about sharing resources. Then the red storm swept through his encampment.
One hell of a dust storm it was—red as blood.
So I sent my right-hand man, Jacob “Deadeye” Smith, to find out if everything was all right.
That was a week ago.
Jacob never came back.
Then people started disappearing, one by one.
Now here I am, trapped inside a ring of fire that I lit myself. ’Cause when I came here, they all looked like monsters, almost like some demon had gotten hold of their souls.
And now I sit here with only one bullet left in my old Colt revolver.
So the question rattling around in my head is simple:
Who is the bullet for?