Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West(12)

“I’ll fight Charlie Blanche. I’ll do it,” he interrupted.

“I don’t care about that,” she sighed, losing patience.

“Can I come in?” he asked, his body swaying with intoxication. “I’m really drunk, so I’m not gonna be able to get a boner, but I want us to talk.”

“Albert, get out of here,” she shot back brusquely. “I don’t have anything else to say to you. Listen, I’m sure you’re right for somebody else, just not for me. Now, good night.”

“Louise …” The drunken confidence in his expression fell away, leaving in its wake a pleading look of desperation. “What am I supposed to do without you?”

She regarded him silently for all of three seconds, then closed the door firmly.

He stood by himself, feeling like a wounded animal. “You heartless fuckin’ jerk!” he shouted at the closed door, then immediately covered his bases with a heartfelt “I still love you, though!” He knew the importance of ending on a positive note.


The old prospector looked as if he’d been born a century ago. Although he was barely sixty-five, the hardship of frontier life had put its dusty, rocky foot up his ass over and over, physically aging him far beyond his actual years. His grayish-white beard was scraggly and ill-maintained, and his face was cracked and reddened from years of sun damage, with a side order of alcohol abuse. He traveled with two companions, each one seemingly as old as he was. One was his horse, a solitary old gray who dutifully pulled the little wagon with a comfortable laziness, appearing to admire the landscape as if out for a casual stroll with a favorite gal. The other was a mangy dog of no particular breed that sat next to the old man, panting and swaying back and forth in rhythm with the movement of the wagon. The dog had unkempt floppy ears and a smelly brown matting of fur, patchy and uneven courtesy of innumerable desert battles with fellow furred adversaries.

The only thing that stood out amidst this drab tableau was the object that the prospector held in his hand. It was no bigger than a golf ball, but it screamed out its presence with larger-than-life luster. It was a real, honest-to-God nugget, the first one the prospector had found in all his fifty years of scratching and pawing at the land.

He turned and gave the dog a toothy, checkered grin. “You know what I’m gonna buy you with this gold, Plugger? I’m gonna buy you a big ol’ pile of fresh-cut steak.”

Plugger panted happily as the old man scratched his shaggy ears.

“And I’m gonna get you a whole mess of bones fulla marrow. You like that?”

Plugger licked the prospector’s liver-spotted hand.

The old man let loose a gravelly, bellowing laugh.

Plugger barked loudly in response.

The man patted the dog’s mangy back. “Okay, okay, that’s enough now,” he said with a smile.

But Plugger’s barking did not stop. Suddenly it became more intense.

“Hey, hey, settle down there, boy, whatsa matter?”

And then, as if in reply to the inquiry, the sound of approaching hoofbeats.

The prospector squinted against the bright sun. The road ahead looked empty, but the dust cloud ascending from beyond the next rise told a different story.

Riders. From the look of the dust, five or more.

His hands shaking due to both nerves and age, the old man hurriedly stuffed his glittering prize into his pocket. As he turned his attention back to the road ahead, a group of six men came galloping over the rise. The old gray shifted his weight with uneasiness, and Plugger continued his lengthy oration. As the riders approached and slowed to a stop, the old man could see that it was not six men after all. It was five men and a woman.

A rough-looking bunch too.

The lead rider was as hard-looking a man as the prospector had ever seen. The lines on his face betrayed a lifetime of anger, and the folds of his skin dove deep into those weathered grooves.

But his eyes.

Even from a moderate distance, it was evident. Those eyes were deadly. They spoke of a long-rotted soul, to which mercy and compassion had no value and never would. They were more reptilian than human, as cold-blooded as any creature that had ever lurked in the pocked depths of the Arizona desert. This was a man to be feared.

The girl was more of a puzzle. As the prospector slowed his wagon to a halt, he glanced in her direction.

She was quite beautiful. Probably mid-thirties, the old man guessed. She had a kind face, even though her stony expression was doing its best to deny the fact. Her soft-looking brown hair and graceful curves were out of place among the company she kept. She didn’t belong with this group—and yet somehow she did.

Plugger’s barking interrupted the old man’s thoughts. “Easy, Plugger,” he said. He tipped his battered hat toward the riders. “Howdy, there,” he offered, his tone bright with a cheerful nonchalance he did not feel.