One wouldn't be remiss for thinking kindly of the small town of Rhodes in Lemoyne. On the surface, it seems friendly, peaceful, and perhaps a touch too warm. Despite a decades-long feud between the Braithwaites and the Grays, the locals maintain a peculiar charm. Perhaps it's the oppressive heat that drains the energy for hostility, or perhaps it’s just the way of things here on the frontier. Whatever the case, Rhodes lulls you into a false sense of ease.
Or so our outlaw friend was led to believe.
That was until happenstance caused him to stumble upon a most disturbing sight—a boy, no older than his teenage years, catching his attention through the narrow bars of a basement window. The boy pleaded for help, his voice raw with desperation. He claimed to be chained and held hostage by none other than the proprietor of the local gunsmith’s shop.
Our outlaw, hardened as he was, couldn’t turn away. The boy’s cries stirred something deep within him—a mixture of anger and pity. This wasn’t the first time kindness had led him into trouble, but in the West, morality and risk often walk hand in hand. Against his better judgment, he stepped into the gunsmith’s store, his hand resting heavy on his holstered pistol.
“What’s this I hear about a boy in your basement?” he growled, his voice low and cutting.
The shopkeeper—a wiry man with a nervous twitch—blustered and stammered as he claimed the boy was his son. “He’s been actin’ up,” the man said with an uneven tone, “needed some discipline.”
But the outlaw wasn’t buying it. There was something too rehearsed in his words, something too casual in the way he said them. He leveled his gun and demanded to be taken to the basement.
What he found there would change the way he saw Rhodes forever.
With the barrel of his revolver pointed squarely at the trembling shopkeeper, the outlaw forced him to unlock the basement door. The air grew heavier with each creaking step down the narrow staircase, the dim lantern light revealing more with every breath.
What lay below was enough to churn the stomach of even the most hardened soul. The boy, as he claimed, was chained to a bed bolted to the floor. Around him, the room was unsettlingly decorated with toys, faded wallpaper, and the kind of trinkets meant to comfort a child—yet here, they only added to the grotesque scene. The boy’s voice cracked as he pleaded with the outlaw, tears streaking his dirt-stained face.
“That man ain’t my father,” he cried, his chains rattling as he struggled to sit upright. “He keeps me down here like some animal. Please…help me!”
The outlaw had heard enough. With a cold, deliberate glance, he turned back toward the stairs. What transpired in the moments that followed isn’t something that made its way into the history books, nor into polite conversation. Suffice it to say, the shopkeeper’s control over the boy ended that day—permanently or otherwise.
When the outlaw returned, the boy was freed from his chains, his tears giving way to cautious hope. Without a word, the two left the gunsmith’s shop behind. Whatever justice had been served that day, it wasn’t the kind you’d find in a courtroom. It was the kind delivered by a man who’d seen too much wrong in his life to stand idly by.
The people of Rhodes would whisper about what happened in that store for years to come, though few would ever know the full story. And for the outlaw, it was just another chapter in a life spent walking the blurred line between sinner and savior.
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