The Six-Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher

and the cash and supplies they needed to set up shop in the vast western wilderness. When they came to Golgotha, it wasn’t much more than a scrap of a mining camp. There wasn’t a lot there at the time: the Paradise Falls Saloon and a few of the other properties owned by Malachi Bick, the local cardsharp, gambler, ne’er-do-well. The Chinese had arrived to work the silver mine and the nearby railroad projects, but Johnny Town was just rows of makeshift tents then. There were gamblers and prospectors and cowpunchers. It was a rough place and Auggie’s instincts told him to move on.
    Gert liked it here, though. She liked the old ruins that must have belonged to the Indians. She fell in love with the desert flowers. She kissed him on the cheek when he agreed to settle here. He still remembered how that kiss had made him feel like a hero.
    They opened the general store, unsure if they would have enough paying customers to make do. Six months latter the Pratt family and forty other Mormon clans rode out of the 40-Mile and took up residence in Golgotha. Shultz’s General Store became more profitable than Auggie’s family business had ever been back home.
    As the town grew up and became more civilized, more tradesfolk made it into town. People like Will Proctor and his wife, Gillian.
    Auggie remembered the day the Proctors arrived in Golgotha. Will was the schoolmaster for the newly built schoolhouse, out by Old Stone Road. With the arrival of more families, there were now children in Golgotha, and they needed educating.
    Gillian’s family had lived in England when she was a girl due to her father’s work with a big shipping company headquartered in Boston. She had traveled over much of Europe. The Shultze’s learned, to their delight, that the Proctors could speak German.
    Gerta eventually learned that Gillian had miscarried two years earlier and was unlikely to ever have another child. That knowledge, the unspoken understanding of such intimate loss—a stratum of pain beyond the ability of human speech to express—built a strong bond between the two women. In time, Gert and Gillian became inseparable.
    Truth be told, Auggie never cared much for Will Proctor. He was a nice enough young man, a bit too proud of his New England pedigree and a bit too eager to condescend to his fellow man for Auggie’s tastes, but Will’s major sin, in Auggie’s eyes, was that he spent entirely too much time sneaking off to the Paradise Falls to play cards and lose money. Auggie saw the writing on the wall, and knew the Proctors were always far too close to insolvency for Gillian’s or his comfort.
    “He’s a smart man,” Auggie would tell Gerta in the darkness of their bedroom. “He’s more then willing to tell you that, and yet he fritters his money away at that smiling devil Bick’s place. A man should save, for his family, ja ? Not be running around with a bunch of soap locks, grums and saloon trash!”
    So while he was sad to see it happen, he was not that surprised when word came on a night in August of ’64, as hot and black as pitch, that Will Proctor had been shot dead during a drunken fight at a poker table in the Paradise.
    It was quite the local scandal for a while, the secret life the schoolmaster had been living with whisky and cardsharps and even rumors of saloon girls. His poor wife, surely she must have known.…
    Auggie and Gert would have none of it in their store. They chastised anyone who tried to throw dirt on their friends’ name. They also took the grieving Gillian under their wing.
    Most figured that Gillian, alone and in an alien frontier, would up and head back east to her family in Boston. Instead she turned her home into a boardinghouse and pretty soon had near-full occupancy. There were rumors still about gambling debts belonging to Will she had to pay off and other mismanagement of funds that the poor widow had to deal with, but Gillian honored such gossip with no reply at all. And as the years