Evangeline had his Remington pistol pointed to her head. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, my darling,” Evangeline Payne said, pulling the trigger and doing what Mary Jo Scroggins had done, to erase the shame and end the torment.
THE DEVIL laughed.
* * *
THE DEVIL laughed as he sat in the church pews and listened to the lies Reverend Payne pontificated to the twenty men and women who sat and listened.
The Reverend stopped speaking. The doors to the church opened, and in walked that heathen creature.
“For you see now,” cried the Reverend, “Satan has sent one of his vile hell spawn to quiet the words of the Lord!”
“THE DEVIL sent me all right,” said the man who walked in the church, the man known as Judas Payne, the man who, before twenty witnessed, shot and killed the Reverend, “in cold blood and one eye,” as the story would go, the beginning of a myth...
Judas looked over at THE DEVIL when the deed was done.
“Good, good, very good,” said THE DEVIL with a laugh.
Sheriff Paul Lish was in the church and was just as shocked as anyone to see this stranger saunter into a House of God and murder a man of the cloth.
Lish ran after the one-eyed killer, reaching for his holstered gun, to shoot or arrest the culprit.
Lish didn’t have a chance.
Lish was shot dead on the steps leading into the church.
THE DEVIL stepped over his dead body.
* * *
Cold, without emotion and a frozen soul, Judas Payne rode his horse out of Tyburn, Kansas, hell close behind him.
And a weird western legend began....
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Hemmingson writes books in every possible genre he can: literary, western, SF, horror, noir, autobiography, erotica, narrative journalism, gonzo journalism, cultural anthropology, critical theory, critifiction, ethnography, and poetry. And private eye yarns. And film and TV studies. He also writes plays and screenplays. He wrote the independent feature film, The Watermelon, which you can get on Netflix or Amazon.
Judas Payne: A Weird Western Page 11
