Katana and the Peacemaker

Prologue

1890

Soft were his boots. No matter how much the wooden floor outside the room creaked and groaned under the wearer’s weight, the boots themselves made almost no sound.

The only sound that filled the air was that of a young blonde Caucasian-American woman’s terrified breathing. Her eyes pulsated with fear and rapidly perused her settings, her body unable to move as she lay paralyzed with fear upon the tatami mat-covered floor.

The entrance to the room, a sliding shoji door consisting of diaphanous washi paper under a crisscrossed wooden frame, was torn asunder. The body of an elderly Japanese woman lay sprawled through the entrance across the floor, her head arched unnaturally so that her lifeless eyes stared right at the rapidly breathing woman huddled under a small stand with a vase of irises on top. A trail of blood ran from a single bullet hole in the center of the dead woman’s forehead and saturated the mat beneath her head like a sponge.

BANG!

The most fear-instilling sound in the world. It was shortly followed by the thudding fall of another body outside the door in the hallway.

Then the second-most fear-instilling sound in the world strolled right through the doorway: Spurs spinning as soundless boots stepped ominously forward.

In strode a tall Caucasian-American man. He dressed in a dark brown jacket and everything else in black, from boots to bowler hat. He sported black sideburns and a clean-shaven appearance. He seemed every bit civilized but for his eyes and some small scars upon his face, both marred by years of experience brushing with criminals. Pinned to the breast of his jacket was the all-recognizable lawman’s star.

The woman shrieked like a frightened lamb when the man kicked the table over, smashing the vase on top into the wall. He opened the chamber to his revolver, a classic Colt 1851 Navy, and took all the time he had in the world reloading the gun.

In a voice as smooth as a deceptively charming snake, the man said, “Well, Miss Winston… you are one difficult woman to find. Saito said I might find you here an’ here you are. Should’ve asked for his help years ago. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken this long to find you… Of all the places in Japan, I find you hiding out on Tokunoshima Island. Never would’ve thought to look here… Now… I’m here to ask you three questions, no more an’ no less… You follow me? Nod if you follow.”

The young woman trembled upon the floor and gave one nod, too shaken to proceed with any more.

“That’s a good girl…” he said with a sly smile as he loaded the second bullet into the chamber. “Firstly… where are Billy Ringo, Jack Dobbins, Matsumoto Rokuro, an’ Shino?”

Her voice shakily answered, “I… I… I don’t know… I s-s-swear…”

He inserted a third bullet into the chamber. “Well, I’ll be damned… Took me seven years to find you an’ even you don’t know what happened to them… You, their damn biographer. Ain’t that just like a bitch?” He chuckled and loaded a fourth bullet into the gun. “Speaking of which, here’s my second question… where’s the original manuscript for that book you wrote?”

She looked right up at the man and whimpered, “It won’t matter. You’ll kill me anyway, even if I tell you… right?”

The man groaned in annoyance. “Okay… I don’t think I’ve made myself clear enough. See, the few copies of that book in distribution are giving the railroad companies, American an’ Japanese governments, an’ the Pinkerton Agency very harsh an’ unfair reputations. I work for the Pinkertons, so this puts me in a difficult position… meaning I have to do this!” He turned his back to her for a second before squatting down and then spinning around to deliver her an aggressive slap across the face.

She cried out and was thrown to the floor, clutching the reddening spot on her cheek. Then he roughly grabbed her by the skirt and pulled it up to expose her leg with one strong arm, the other cocking his pistol and blasting a bullet into her kneecap.

“AGH!! GOD!!” she screamed, loudly enough to make blood curdle. Her eyes flooded with tears as her hands gripped her leg tightly. It was not long before both her hands and her lower leg were covered in blood.

The man cocked the gun again and pointed it toward her other knee. “Now, where’s that manuscript?! Tell me, you bitch!!”

Tears covered her face like sweat, her eyes swollen from them. “Alright… Alright…” she whimpered and sniffled in defeat through blurred weeping eyes, “It’s… I g-gave it t-to a… a s-sugarcane farm-mer n-n-nearby… Iz-Izumi Shigechiyo… That’s-s his n-name…”

The Pinkerton man raised his pistol and continued to reload it, inserting a fourth bullet to replace the one he shot into her. “Oh, that young man who drinks lots of shochu… He keeps that habit up, he’ll be dead before he’s thirty.” A fifth bullet was then placed into the chamber. “Well, here’s my third question… If I let you live, will you promise on your mortal soul that you’ll never write an’ distribute such horrid things about the people I work for again? Frankly, they don’t take kindly to fraudulent slander.”

Unlike before, the woman’s face became defiantly stern and she gave him a clear answer in spite of her pain, “No.”

Smirking and moving his head a little, the man said while loading the sixth and final bullet into his gun, “Yeah, I supposed as much…” Looking directly at her, he raised his cocked pistol and aimed it point-blank at her rapidly heaving chest. “Nothing personal, ma’am…”

Bang! Click.

Bang! Click.

Bang! Click.

Bang! Click.

BANG!





Author's Notes

* To let everyone in a little in-joke here, Izumi Shigechiyo was a Japanese sugarcane farmer recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest authentically recognized man to have ever lived, from 1865 to 1986.