Jazz Bullet’s Mail Order Bride

Jazz Bullet’s

Mail Order Bride

*

An Old West Romance Caper

by

Sharaya and Sherman Lee

Copyright 2013 by Sharaya and Sherman Lee

All rights reserved!

Smashwords Edition

License Notes:

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This story is a work of fiction.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

*

Table of Contents

1

How The Fearsome Gunslinger Jacques Boullette Became Sheriff Of Boot Hill

2

How Sheriff Jacques Boullette Came To Order A Bride Through The Mail

3

How Jacques Boullette Became Jazz Bullet

4

How Jazz Bullet’s Mail Order Bride Gunny Saxe Survived The Voyage To Boot Hill

5

How The Sheriff And His Mail Order Bride Met For The First Time

6

How A Musical Jazz Bullet Barked Up The Wrong Tree, So To Speak

7

How Bride And Groom Went On Their First Date

And What Happened There

8

What Gunny Thought During The Ceremony

9

How The Bride Whispered Something Into The Groom’s Ear During The Ceremony, Whereupon The Groom Panicked

10

What Gunny Said To Jazz During The Ceremony

11

How The First Telegram Ever Arrived In Boot Hill And Who It Was Addressed To

12

How Gunny Foolishly Decided To Accept An Invitation To Visit Her Distant Cousin

13

How It Came To Pass That Gunny Didn’t Get Very Far

14

How Sheriff Jazz Bullet Got Agitated Beyond Measure And What He Did Because Of It

15

How Jazz Bullet Did A Great Deed

16

How Gunny Raised An Army

17

How Jazz Almost Didn’t Survive The Night And What Gunny Did About It

18

How All Was Well In The End

*

1

How The Fearsome Gunslinger Jacques Boullette Became Sheriff Of Boot Hill

*

Near Boot Hill, Arizona Territory

October 1878

A man is not always ready to tie himself to a wife. No, sir. He loathes the responsibility that marriage saddles him with and he cherishes his independence.

A man also loves to fancy he has options. So many mothers have beautiful daughters. Why settle for just one? (Daughter, not mother).

Even the very fact that daughters have mothers poses a problem for a man. Those mothers always have expectations he has no desire to fulfill. Because that’s difficult. They are picky. There’s truth to the old saying that goes: Behind every great man you’ll find a surprised mother-in-law.

No. Man’s mind seldom turns to marriage.

Especially the mind of a gunfighter.

Gunfighters are lonely.

Always.

Goes with the territory.

But then one day a man—even a gunfighting man—gets a hankering. He can’t quite explain it, but all of a sudden a wife seems not so bad. He thinks of ladies’ ladylike ways of doing things, of their voices, their faces, their hair, their smiles, their clothes, their cooking, their cleaning, their unique architecture...

His thoughts return to the tender loving care his mother bestowed on his father, while he’s even shunned by the bar ladies lately.

His mind returns to the wholesome meals he ate as a youth, while now it’s just stringy rabbit, cooked in a pit over a prairie fire.

He thinks of all the wise things he’s learned that he’d now like to pass on to his offspring. All that wisdom was going to waste if nobody heard it.

Not long after his thinking rumbles down that alley, marriage becomes downright attractive. Soon a wife is the only thing that man lacks to be truly happy.

When that happens, the time is right.

And when the time is right, a man marries. He marries not the woman that is best for him, or the prettiest one he’s ever laid eyes on, or the smartest one that ever tickled his great intellect with her witty one-liners.

No, sir.

He simply marries the next eligible woman that comes along. Picks her up like a stage coach picks up the traveler that happens to be waiting by the station. He marries her for no other reason than that the time is right. Man is simple, you know.

Of course, there are also matches made in Heaven. And sometimes the right time and Heaven conspire to bring the right woman to the man who’s ready. Got to bear that in mind.

The unsuspecting Jacques Boullette’s problem was that the time was right, but no eligible woman wanted to have anything to do with him. How his heart yearned for female companionship of the orderly kind. Alas, there was no bride—let alone prospective mother-in-law—who waited for him to sweep her off her feet.

That he had a front tooth missing didn’t help, even though hardly anybody ever noticed, since Jacques never smiled.

The real root of the problem was Jacques’s profession: he was a fearsome black-clad, black-mare-ridin’, six-shooter-totin’ gunfighter—who whispered in a menacing way. When he deigned to talk at all.

Lately, Jacques had thought about talking louder and about changing his dress code to wearing white clothes and a red carnation in his jacket’s button hole instead of his old shootist’s uniform. But he didn’t. He was still a man and not a lavender-scented lion of the parlor sipping tea with the matrons.

Besides, his dad had never worn white clothes and carnations.

Dad had been a smelly Louisiana dairy farmer and mother had loved him just the same. She’d cherished him. She cooked his favorite meals and rubbed his back when he told her to. And he in turn picked flowers for her sometimes, wild blue and yellow irises, and the occasional passion flower when he found it. Jacques was ready to pick passion flowers, too, for a woman who rubbed his back.

Ah, for a family…

Truth be told, Jacques Boullette was now in his thirty-seventh year and ready to marry a scarecrow if she wore girl’s clothes. But not even scarecrows cast him a friendly eye these days. Not that he’d met a lot out here in the desert.

A pair of vultures circled overhead in the evening sky. Jacques cast them an unfriendly glance. Those beasts had followed him since he’d crossed into the Arizona Territory days ago. At night they sat on cactuses near his camp on the desert floor, just hanging out, enjoying his company.

The nerve!

He named them Ada and Zilla, after the two wives of Lamech, the first gunfighter in the Bible. Perhaps Lamech hadn’t exactly been a gunfighter, as guns weren’t invented back then. But he’d have been a shooter if he’d lived in Jacques’s day. Same mentality: shoot first, ask questions later, and always react way out of proportion to the slightest provocation. Let the lead fly.

Anyway.

One night, Jacques had been so fed up with their eyeing him, he’d flung a stringy rabbit at Ada, the bigger one of those two bald-headed, leather-necked, beady-eyed, head-dipping nuisances. But the birds didn’t care. They fluttered up, took care of his rabbit, and then came back to sit on their Saguaro cactuses to eye him.

What’s next, pal?

Of course, he could have shot them. But they were just dumb beasts and Jacques was lately developing sensitivities. Lamech was no longer a hero to him. Neither was Cain, Lamech’s PawPaw. What would a woman think if he’d turn to his six-shooter every time somebody crossed him?

Still.

Lying there that night, Jacques took out his revolver and made the drum to ticker. He aimed at Zilla from the hip. Should he?

Nah, he just couldn’t do that.

The vultures followed him of course because they were smelling what kind of man he was. He was a gun for hire, death incarnate. They knew that serious chow—and not just stringy rabbit—would turn up where Jacques turned up.

They had no idea what was going on inside him.

Those birds…

Jacques frowned. How could a woman love a man whom vultures followed naturally? Why couldn’t canaries or nightingales follow him around? Those were great romancers. They sang pretty and scared nobody. And they didn’t stink.

Brooding over his fate, Jacques Boullette arrived at a low wall of untreated field stones. Beyond it stretched a field of weathered crosses that cast long shadows in the evening sun. The garden gate on his end stood open, thus he rode into the picturesque graveyard of Boot Hill, a village to the east of a little town named Tucson.

Whenever he entered a new locality, Jacques rode in through the graveyard. Graveyards spoke to him and he read them like the newspaper. They told him who and how many had died at what age and when, if not why.

For example, if there were fresh graves and a lot of young men had recently been buried, chances were that a war of some kind was going on. Perhaps the law fought a gang, or cattle ranchers fought farmers or vice versa.

A lot of young women’s graves in a row meant that a saloon was doing brisk business. Out here, not a lot of barflies lived far past their thirtieth birthday. Theirs was a hard life, Jacques knew. They died early. Unless they got reformed.

Reformed barflies were a different thing. They many times lived to a ripe old age, often married to a reverend or elder or a deacon of some kind.

Family graves with children and young mothers in them told him that the local water was no good.

Jacques found that these days he liked graveyards best that housed mostly old people from forty on up in well-tended graves. These were healthy towns and probably even boasted a church with a bell-carryin’ steeple.

The gunman noticed two new graves side by side. Fresh mounds covered them. He rode closer and read what was written on the crosses marking them.

They were the resting places of Phineas Slaw and Cole Border. Both had been sheriff of Boot Hill in their time. What gave the gunslinger pause was the fact that both lawmen had died within the short space of just a few weeks.

Jacques made a mental note of that.

He rode on. On his black mare Rocinante he approached the arched townside gate of the yard. It was brick-built and overgrown with dried-up vine. He lowered his head and held on to his Stetson as he rode under the arch.

The orange fireball in the west was about to touch the flat horizon on Main Street, which already hid in the shadows of dusk. The boardwalks to both sides were deserted.

To his left Jacques heard a mournful harmonica. When he looked to where the sound was coming from, he found an old colored man in rags, sitting on a stool. The gunman’s eagle eyes pierced the murk and saw how the eyes of the musician grew large. He kept on playing, though.

Jacques was used to his reaction. He ignored it and instead pointed his nose straight ahead. He let his gaze wander up the street, where quite a commotion was going on. A bulk of noisy people was busy doing something. The mad shouts of many voices, male and female, reached his ear. Jacques Boullette finally stopped in mid-street to watch.

Then he caught on.

Up ahead, an angry mob of citizens was trying to hang a fellow. They had erected a make-shift gallows—right in the middle of Main Street!—and were right now shoving a rope over the doomed man’s head. Jacques heard the people’s irate shrieks. He sat erect in his saddle and squinted at the scene from under his flat-rimmed hat.

Then Jacques’s eyes caught a bright reflection. Something on the man’s chest gleamed. The gunman squinted even more—and sure enough! The man carried a star.

The mob was about to hang the sheriff?

Frowning, Jacques deliberately inhaled through his nose. He took his good old time and felt out every wisp of air traveling down into his lungs. Then he decided, he didn’t like the lynch-smell this hanging had.

Slowly and with a sure hand he reached forward and pulled his Sharps rifle from its fringed scabbard. It seemed that he pulled forever, since the gun’s barrel was very long. Then the one-shot sniper rifle was in his hands.

The scene ahead was illuminated by flickering torches. The irate mob weaved around the makeshift hanging tree and yelled curses at the doomed man ready to swing.

The loudmouth on the gallows next to the sheriff screamed a little speech and finally pushed the lawman off the plank with a fiendish grin. The rope went taut and the sheriff hung. A howl went up from the crowd as he swung gently.

Then Jacques Boullette’s gun boomed and the sheriff hit the ground with a thud like that of a sack of potatoes.

Immediately the mob fell silent—graveyard-silent—and froze. The lawman on the ground rubbed his neck as all eyes snapped toward Jacques, from whose head a cloud of gunsmoke wafted away.

Jacques gently spurred on Rocinante, who flicked her tail and began to walk. The gunman slid his Sharps back