1. Trail of Death
Noon came blazing hot, scorching anything stupid enough to be out in the open and blinding anybody dumb enough to glance upward. But the two riders on this dusty trail weren’t stupid or dumb. They were Coyote Cal and his trusty sidekick, Big Yap.
“We muff be cwafey!” Yap gasped, hunkered down in his saddle as grimy rivulets streaked his wizened face and invaded his grizzly beard. “Gowin all wiss way—”
Cal drew reign and frowned. “Yap, did you take out your teeth?”
Big Yap sighed and gave a short nod.
“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times: Keep your teeth where they belong!”
“Buh-buh, va duff gess in em an—”
“The dust wouldn’t get in if you’d keep your big yap shut once in a while.”
Hemming, hawing, and cursing, Big Yap retrieved his set of false teeth from a sweat-drenched shirt pocket and slapped them back into his mouth. As a rule, Coyote Cal was never this brusque with his sidekick, but it had been a long day on the trail, and translating Yap’s toothless whining was beginning to wear on him.
“Happy now?”
They nudged their mounts forward into a trot.
“Like I was saying, Cal, we must be crazy going out all this way on the Trail of Death.” Yap snorted in disgust. His horse did the same. “Why are we, anyhow?”
Coyote Cal sat erect in the saddle, wore his charcoal Stetson angled to shield his rugged features from the merciless sun, and kept his lips shut in a firm line to keep the trail’s dust from spotting his dazzling set of pearly whites. As his muscular steed loped along, he faced his sidekick with one eyebrow raised.
“The name fascinates me.”
Big Yap snorted again. So did his horse. “But that old Indian back at the fork said nobody’s ever survived this trail—that it’s plum cursed!”
Cal smirked. “Never trust a fake Indian who sells iron disulfide at a trail-side curio shop. You should have known better than to listen to him.”
“Fake Indian?”
“He was Portuguese.”
“How could you tell?”
“Most of them are.”
Big Yap took that logic at face value. “And what’s iron disulfide, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Cal gave him a wink. “Fool’s gold.”
Yap’s jaw dropped. “Reckon I might’ve bought me a bag or two.”
“Let that be a lesson to you,” said Cal.
Be sure to tune in tomorrow for Episode 2!
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10 comments:
Sweet! I can already tell I'm really going to like Coyote Cal and Big Yap. :-) Congrats on the release.
Excellent. I wonder if you've made a sub here, Milo.
Dark Trails
I haven't-- not yet.
Gosh, I hate it when people won't keep their teeth in :-) Well done Milo!
I like the dialogue. You write it well accounting for the dialect and mispronunciations one would make without teeth.
Tony: Thank you, sir. They have good company in the Arcane anthology -- I enjoyed your story very much.
Deborah: First Scifaikuest, and now this one. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction; I'll have to get something out to them posthaste!
Lisa: It's a little disconcerting, don't you think?
Michael: Taking out my own teeth definitely helped in the process.
Milo - great stuff. Really enjoyed that. Lots of vivid detail.
Milo, I love that first sentence, first paragraph. It put me right into the story in such a smooth way. Well done.
Simon + Madeline: Glad you enjoyed it; thanks for reading!
The 'pearly whites' brought a smile to my face.
A rarity in the old days, I presume.
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