L
ONG TOOTH’S PISTOL LAY cocked on the hard dirt floor that smelled of tobacco spit and old bacon grease, but I couldn’t reach it. I blinked the dust from my eyes to see my death in his. A wicked grin crept across his jagged face as a small trickle of blood ran down his chin where the long tooth used to be. He struck at the revolver quicker than a rattler. Our hands reached the gun at the same time. Long Tooth Tom got his name for the wolf-like eye tooth that dropped down an extra half inch. If he glared at you, it’d hang over his right lip like a lawman’s hog leg pistol. I never liked Long Tooth, but I never had to. I avoided running into him as did everyone who walked the town’s lone street. He pushed aside old men, cat-called pretty women, and scared all the children. There was only one way a person could go if Long Tooth Tom walked out on the street—the other direction. Long Tooth owned nothing but controlled everything. He even changed the name of the town from Sweet Valley to Long Tooth after he shot the sheriff in the back. He declared the town “law free” except for
his law. He didn’t know it, but I witnessed the murder. There was no mistaking the early light of the moon flickering on his tooth that night. Long Tooth knew someone had seen him when I knocked a box over, bolting from my hiding place like a scared rabbit. If he’d known it was me then, I’d be dead now. Everyone in town knew he killed the sheriff but were too afraid to speak up. The next day, Long Tooth tacked a fifty dollar reward sign on a post outside Griffin’s Mercantile. “I want that murderin’ scoundrel found!” Long Tooth watched from a dark alley trying to figure out who had witnessed the murder. Few stopped to read the reward poster. No one showed up for the fifty dollars. When my pa died, Mr. Griffin gave me a job in his store stocking shelves, delivering groceries, and sweeping up. The four bits I made each day helped Ma make it week to week. Her sewing money only carried us so far. Working across the muddy street from the fanciest saloon in town, I witnessed the kind of law Long Tooth offered. It mostly depended on which side of
