Tragic Tale of a Man in a Duster Read online

  “Grandpa?” a voice said from behind him.

  The voice was from his youngest grandson, Steph, standing respectfully in the door to the study. Steph was going on thirty, and was already making a name for himself in Space Rescue Corp.

  Fergason took a deep breath and slowly swung around, looking up into the green eyes and pale skin of his grandson. The kid was about the same age as Canny had been when they had started working together. Steph had her eyes and her good looks and fair skin.

  “You all right, Grandpa?”

  Fergason shrugged. “I guess as good as can be expected.”

  There was no other answer to that question. Of course he wasn’t all right. He had lost the love and meaning in his life.

  “Thought you might be interested in this,” Steph said, stepping forward and handing a report from Rescue Central to him. “It came into control today after one of the test runs of a new search system.”

  Fergason glanced at the paper, not really seeing it. Then suddenly a name caught his attention. Western.

  He quickly scanned the sheet, stunned at what he was reading. They had finally found the cargo ship Western, over sixty years after it had dropped out of hyper-drive and vanished.

  He glanced up at Steph who was smiling. “This is the ship that was lost on your grandmother’s watch. I was supervisor that day.”

  “I know,” Steph said, smiling. “You and grandma decided to get married that night, didn’t you?”

  Fergason nodded as he stared at the report. He couldn’t believe the Western had been found. He hadn’t thought of that ship for decades.

  “There was a man on that ship,” Fergason asked, trying to find the information on the report that he was looking for, but failing. “What happened to him?”

  Steph snorted. “His name was Reeves. Shipboard time only had two weeks passing. But the guy didn’t manage to survive that long.”

  Fergason shuddered. He couldn’t imagine the loneliness the man named Reeves must have thought he was facing. Deep space did that to people, sent them over the edge and into insanity, often far quicker than two weeks.

  Fergason knew he was facing the same type of loneliness without Canny.

  “What did he do, kill himself?”

  “No,” Steph said, shaking his head. “He broke his neck.”

  Fergason glanced up at his grandson. “How?”

  “From what the investigators could tell,” Steph said, “he fell off a horse.”

  “A horse?”

  “A horse,” Steph said. “And he had grown cattle, pigs, chickens and who knows what else in an old Accelerated Growth Chamber. He even had a campfire going in a botanical garden. He had reverted to being a cowboy from the old west region of Earth.”

  Fergason shook his head as he grandson went on, not really understanding how a spaceman could become a cowboy on a hyper drive jump freighter in less than two weeks.

  “You ought to see a picture of the guy. He put on the cowboy hat, duster and all.”

  “You’re kidding?” Fergason asked, knowing his grandson wouldn’t joke about something like that.”

  “Nope,” Steph said, “it’s the truth. And what’s even more amazing is that he’d only been dead for less than an hour when they found the ship. There was even burnt fish still cooking over a campfire.”

  “Fish?” Fergason asked, remembering the wonderful fish dinner he and Canny had had the night the Western vanished sixty-three years before. The dinner that had changed their lives.

  “Fish,” Steph said. “Burnt fish. I doubt they’re ever going to get the smell out of there.”

  “Fish,” Fergason repeated softly to himself, shaking his head and remembering the dinner that night all those years ago.

  The dinner over which he and Canny had decided to spend a lifetime together.

  He glanced up at his grandson. “He fell off a horse?”

  His grandson smiled. “Broke his neck while cooking a fish dinner over an open campfire.”

  For the first time since Canny had died, Fergason laughed, knowing without a doubt that Canny would have laughed with him.

  About the Author

  Bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith was born and raised in Idaho and knows the trails in the primitive area. And the picture at the top of his web site, www.deanwesleysmith.com has him wearing a duster and cowboy hat.

  Dean has written more than one hundred popular novels and hundreds of published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest, also set Idaho. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom.

  He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.

  Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.

  Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books, and now as the executive editor of Fiction River.

  Currently, he is writing thrillers and mystery novels under another name.