Five Sixes

   

                                                                                    Five Sixes


   Courtland Semmes was an educated man. He would have earned his law degree from the University of Mississippi had he not left with the rest of his classmates to join in the fight. His company, “The Mississippi Grays”, had arguably achieved the highest mark of the confederacy. The company had been destroyed at Gettysburg while climbing “The Cemetary Hill”, but not before reaching its top. Courtland’s right arm rests there yet, atop that Pennsylvanian hill. 

   This was Courtland’s typical response when asked, “What happened to the arm?” 
   
   “It lies a-moldering near the top of that hill,” he would reply, without finishing the thought, “along with the lot of its boyhood companions.” 
   
   Courtland was currently employing his educated mind on a moralistic and philosophical question. "If a man was down to his last thing, his very last possession, down to the only thing in this world left to him, then what kind of man would it be who took that thing from him? What would you call a man who would do that to a fellow human? And what would you call the man who would take that last thing over something so small as a six?"
   
   Murderer, no doubt, is what you would call him. Killer. Assassin. You could say that Courtland Semmes had been all of those things before, but then he had been at war. War justified those words and their meanings, did it not? But even if war did justify those things, this was not the same, was it? 
  
   In the current moment Courtland was looking into the eyes of a man with nothing left. Oh, the man had the clothing on his back, and it was nice clothing, just as Courtland’s clothing was rich, and high. And the man had a pistol, just as Courtland had a pistol. And he had four of a kind laid out on the table, but those four sixes spread wide for all to see came of bad judgment. The man with the sixes had seriously misjudged his counterpart across the table. It is an essential part of high stakes gambling, the ability to read the other players. This man was about to endure the results of his failure. 
   
   Perhaps it was the missing arm that led the man astray. Perhaps Courtland looked weak with it gone? Or perhaps it was Courtland’s ready smile. Might the man think him daft? Perhaps it was Courtland’s educated speech, maybe he appeared soft from culture? Perhaps the man was simply desperate. Courtland did not know what weakness the man saw in him, or why he made the decision he made, but when one chooses to cheat another, he had best be able to read his man.
Courtland looked once more at his own hand. Three jacks, a queen, and a six... the fifth six. Without pomp he laid the cards on the table for the man to see. Courtland’s pistol was holstered on his right hip, its smoothly worn, walnut grips facing forward. As he rose his left hand crossed over, found those grips, and drew them smoothly and efficiently from beneath the table. 
   
   The man with nothing left might have been a bad judge of character, but he was not a coward, he also being a veteran of that great war. He rose as well, while his pistol leveled symmetrically to Courtland’s. The riverboat’s floor was unstable, it rolled with the current just enough to sway two pistol barrels, so that neither missile was placed where intended.
   
   Courtland’s bullet, aimed at the button on the left breast pocket covering his man’s heart, went left. It found the man’s sternum, knocking him rudely backwards and into his empty chair, sending man and chair together crashing to the floor in a heap.
   
   The other bullet, the one fired by the man with the four sixes, went right, missing the center of Courtland’s chest, where it had been directed. The bullet would probably have taken Courtland’s right arm, had it been there to take and not moldering atop that Gettysburg hill. Instead, it found the left breast of the heavily endowed nude who was reclining beside a stream in the tasteless oil print above the bar.
   
   Perfect was the stillness following the roar of the conjoined blasts. Perfect was the silence in the small room, but for the muffled slapping of paddle wheels on the water without. Courtland Semmes surveyed the faces in the room. All eyes looked his way, but none into his. The acrid smell of burnt powder found his nose as the smoke of the guns married with the smoke of cigars, and pipes. He holstered the pistol. His lone hand scraped the greenbacks and the coins into a pile on the table before clawing it all up to his coat pocket.
   
   The air was warm on the promenade deck. Black water glistened beneath the half moon. Courtland stopped at the rail before entering his stateroom, watching the water swirl alongside the ship’s hull, again contemplating that philosophical question. He had taken everything that man had... the only thing the man had ever really had. “What kind of man did that make Courtland Semmes?” He wondered. “And what vile words would the men in that saloon be using to describe him now?”

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