Hardwood

            On Monday morning my hip muscles were still quite sore but as usual they didn’t bother me after yoga.

            I sang and played the lyrics I’d recently written to Frankenstein and made some adjustments before starting to post it on my translation blog.

            It was raining and I was worried that I’d have to ride my bike to OISE to return my books from the library but I was pleasantly surprised to be able to renew them online again.

            On Friday I discovered that my Serge Gainsbourg Facebook page had been unpublished. The notice on the page reads: “

            It looks like recent activity on your Page doesn't follow the Facebook Page Policies regarding impersonation and pretending to be an individual or business.” I don’t know if they think I'm posing as Serge Gainsbourg or not. I’m certain that none of the more than 250 followers of the page think that I’m Serge Gainsbourg, since they all know that he’s been dead for 28 years. It’s obviously a fan page. It’s also possible that the identity issue is about me using Myown Dick’s Facebook account as an administrator and so I removed him from that capacity just in case.

            I washed a little more of my floor. It’s almost blinding how blond the cleaned parts are.

            I had chickpeas, salsa and vegetable chips for lunch.

            David knocked on my door in the early afternoon and gave me a charger for the tablet he’d given me on Friday.

            I couldn’t take a short bike ride because of the rain and so I just did some exercises for gluteus muscles.

            I finished editing the video of me performing “Dead Autumn Leaves” and I uploaded it to YouTube.

            I boiled four small potatoes, sautéed some zucchini with jalapenos and heated some gravy. I heated a slice of roast beef for fifteen minutes but it was from the middle of the roast and a little too rare for me. I put it back in the oven for a while.

            I watched the last two episodes of the first season of Stories of the Century.

            The first was about Tom Horn, who was a private detective that had just gotten rid of some rustlers for a rancher named Stanton. Horn is about to leave town when Stanton hires him again to scare off some homesteaders. They’ve been driving their cattle across what he considers his land but the homesteaders say it’s public land. Stanton uses dynamite to block the pass. The leader of the homesteaders is named Livingston and he sends his 16-year-old son Henry to get dynamite to clear the pass. He is bringing the dynamite back in a wagon when Horn begins chasing him. He shoots the box of dynamite and when it explodes the boy goes off the road. Unlike his father Henry has red hair but Horn is colour blind and when he sees Livingston’s shirt he fires and kills Henry. When Horn learns the next day of his mistake he goes to see Stanton. Because Stanton had signed a contract Horn uses it to blackmail him. Stanton goes for a gun and Horn’s man Dobe shoots him. The cattlemen’s association thinks the homesteaders killed Stanton. A range roar is threatening to explode. Horn is discovered to have killed the boy and Dobe to have killed Stanton. Horn is hung in 1903.

            The real Tom Horn was born in 1860 in Missouri. Legend has it that his first kill was a Mexican officer in a duel over a dispute with a prostitute. Horn was hired by the US cavalry as a scout and an Apache interpreter. By 1885 he was chief of scouts. He helped track down Geronimo and was the interpreter during his surrender. Horn bought a ranch with 100 cattle and 26 horses. One night thieves ran off with all of his livestock and bankrupted him. He developed an obsessive hatred of thieves from that incident which compelled him to become a range detective. Horn became a brutal and very effective hired gun against rustlers. He joined the Pinkerton Agency and was very successful at apprehending criminals but they fired him because he was a killer. But a killer was what the cattlemen wanted to help them get rid of the homesteaders and so Horn got lots of work, although it was outside the law. Many of Horn’s killings were pure assassination, such as when he shot a rancher turned rustler named Matt Rash point blank just after he’d finished dinner. In the summer of 1901 the 14-year-old son of a sheep rancher was murdered and several sheep under his care had also been killed. In January of 1902 a drunken Tom Horn confessed to the murder while talking with a deputy about a job. Horn was arrested, charged with murder, found guilty based on the drunken confession and sentenced to hang. While he was in prison waiting for his execution he wrote his autobiography: "Life of Tom Horn, Government Scout and Interpreter, Written by Himself”. Geronimo said in an interview that he thought Tom Horn was innocent of the boy’s murder.

            The final story of the first season was about Clay Allison and his brother John. They both fought for the south in the Civil War and the war has just ended. Former Confederate soldiers that had been issued horses are allowed to keep them for farming but are supposed to turn in their guns. The Allison’s refuse. They form a gang and commit robberies. In this story they rob a stationmaster and kill him. The fictional detective Frankie Adams is also shot. John is shot in the back but he escapes with the others. The sheriff investigates at the Allison ranch and discovers John has been shot. We are told that Frankie died of her bullet wound. John is arrested and Clay, who had studied law defends him in court. It looks like he is going to win until someone steps in that can identify John as the killer of the stationmaster.  In this story it’s Frankie. John is sentenced to death by firing squad. Four soldiers are issued four rifles at random with a bullet in only one of them so that neither soldier would know if they were the executioner.

I would think one would know if one’s gun fired or not. It wasn't mentioned that the other rifles had blanks but with a blank cartridge there would be much less recoil and so an experienced shooter would notice.

Just before they can fire Clay Allison rides up and shoots them all. John sings onto the back of his horse and they ride away. Later we see that somehow they also managed to rob the army payroll. They get horses from their ranch and ride to Seven Rivers to get fresh ones before continuing to the border. But in Seven Rivers there is a Fourth of July celebration and they can’t buy horses. John is shot as Clay steals a wagon with a team of six that is getting ready for a race and is chased in this story by two other teams of six. His team wrecks and he apparently gets a broken back and dies. The fictional detective says, “It’s ironic that a man that lived by the gun would die of a broken back”. How is that ironic? It’s like saying it’s ironic that a bird would get run over by a car.

Clay was played by Jack Kelly, who was Bart Maverick on the Maverick series.

In the real story Robert Clay Allison enlisted in the Confederate army at the age of 20 when the Civil War started. After the war the family moved to New Mexico. In 1870 he led the lynching of a psychotic man that had murdered his family. Clay cut off the man’s head and carried it on a stick several kilometres before posting it. Clay's reputation as a gunfighter grew. In 1877 Clay sold his ranch to his brother and moved to Kansas where he became a cattle broker. There is a story from the early 1880s of Clay riding through Mobeetie Texas wearing nothing but his gun belt and gun. In 1881 Clay married America Medora McCulloch. They had two daughters but the second was born in 1888, six months after Clay died. He didn’t die while running from the law but while hauling a wagonload of supplies. He tried to catch a sack of grain that was falling when the load shifted but fell and the wheel of his wagon broke his neck. .