On Saturday
morning during song practice I fumbled to remember some chord sequences that
I’ve been playing every morning for years. I also forgot some of the French
lyrics that I sing regularly.
In the afternoon, two crows stopped to across the street, one of them
was out of my sight on the top of the building but the other was on the power
line in front. It flexed its sharp wings impatiently as if it was only stopping
for its companion but itching to get going, until finally it’d had enough and
exclaimed a couple of “caws” which caused them both to take off westward. They
split in the air a block later and one went southwest and the other northwest.
I assume that was a temporary separation, perhaps to spread out and look for
food, as they always seem to travel in pairs.
I spent a lot of the day trying to get caught up on my journal. I
finished my entry for Thursday.
It rained all day and when it rains
on the weekend I remember that it rains every weekend. In the evening it began
to snow, big fluffy slow cotton blobs of it.
This was the ninth day of my annual
fourteen-day fast and so I had my usual meal of tomatoes and avocadoes while
watching The Rifleman.
In this story a travelling
photographer named Abel, who is a long-time family friend of the McCains from
when they lived in Oklahoma. Abel is taking a portrait of Mark in the street
when he sees Colonel Whiteside and his colleague Jamison, men that tortured him
when he was in military prison during the Civil War. He exclaims that he’s
going to kill Whiteside. When Whiteside sees Abel from his hotel room window he
knows that he wants to kill him and so he arranges to go down and challenge
Abel to a shootout and the plan is that while Abel is distracted, Jamison will
shoot him with his rifle from the hotel room window. Abel is just about to take
the portrait of Mark that had been interrupted before when Whiteside walks up
and stands a shootout distance away from Abel and with a ready to draw stance.
Abel takes the photo, sees Whiteside and tells Mark to dive under his wagon. A
shot is fired, then Abel draws and kills Whiteside. The sheriff finds that
Whiteside’s gun has not been fired and so he assumes that Abel fired twice.
Abel is arrested for murder. Lucas sees the evidence and accepts that Abel is probably
guilty since he’d already said he would kill Whiteside. Mark disagrees with his
father and while the trial is going on, with Jamison testifying against Abel,
Mark goes out into the street and re-enacts the shooting, taking Abel’s
position and then Whiteside’s. Suddenly it dawns on him that there had to be
evidence of the real shooter must be on the photograph that Abel took. He tells
his father and Lucas comes to ask Abel how to develop a negative. Abel tells
him the sequence of chemicals and that they are in his wagon. We see Lucas in
the wagon about to pour a bottle of pyrogallol on the negative. Next we see
Luke walking into the courtroom holding the negative and saying that he has
evidence of the real shooter to show the judge. Suddenly Jamison draws a gun,
fires and shatters the negative. Jamison is captured from behind by the
sheriff. It turns out that Lucas was only bluffing because he couldn’t figure
out how to develop the negative.
Abel was played by John Carradine
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