A/N: What I love about Gunsmoke is it's gritty realism. It was, as described by E.A Villafranca, "a harsh and dark cowboy Camelot" ( ). I read comments about the show and people say things like, "I wish we could go back to the time when things were so much simpler... right and wrong clearly defined ..." etc. I wonder if we're watching the same show. Gunsmoke is one of the most violent shows I ever watched, especially the first 8 or 9 seasons. Fist fights, hangings, men getting dragged behind horses, burned and stabbed, robberies, murder, kidnapping, rape. Even the title of the show is inherently violent.

Life in a cow trail town was difficult for everyone. It was worse on the prairie. If you were a woman, you were pretty much at the mercy of men - your husband, your father, your brother. And if you weren't white, you had mostly God's mercy to count on.

Dillon, Doc, Chester, Festus were valiant and behaved heroically but they weren't heroes. Dillon denied being a hero multiple times in the show and John Meston, the man who created the character said the same thing. There is more than one dimension to Dillon besides his heroism. He lived the life of an ascetic - isolated, obsessive, watchful and a little lonely.

Kathleen Hite was very good at scripts that showed the different sides of Dillon, in particular, how he was with women who were not Kitty Russell. She was also very good at showing Dillon's vulnerable side.

I acknowledge Dillon and Kitty's relationship but my stories are modeled on their more businesslike interactions in the radio show.

Please note that the age of consent in Kansas prior to 1921 was 12 years old. It was raised to 13 until the 1960s. Presently, it is age 17. My character is 17 in this story.

This story is the one that started it all.

~~After the Gallows

And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed close behind him. –Revelation 6:8

Almost all lies are acts, and speech has no part in them. – Mark Twain

~~Chapter One

If you read the Bible, the only good day to be had in Egypt is the day you leave it.

A typhoid epidemic in Cairo took my mother and my brother Lucien but spared my father and me. When we were barely well enough to travel, Father got us as far away from Egypt as he could. We were sickly when we boarded the ship to America and half-dead when we landed in Boston. We were ghosts by the time we changed trains in St. Louis, wretchedly thin and lungs full of coal smoke, traveling across the prairie on a moonless night, the lights of Dodge City blinking in the distance like fireflies trapped in black cotton.

We brought with us the monsoons, breaking the four-year drought, turning the dirt from the powdery, pinkish gray of incinerated bones to the color of burned coffee. The prairie seemed to rise six inches, the thick mat of grass swelling with juice, the roots streaked blood red and tough enough to prevent the hoof of a horse punching through a prairie dog hole.

My father received an appointment auditing accounts for the War Department. He negotiated the contract by mail, his status as an Anglican priest vetting enough for the Army still doing damage control after the Ridge Town scandal. The position was stationed at Fort Dodge, out on the high plains of southern Kansas. There were no quarters for women or families at the fort but they would allow one fourteen year old boy to share a bunk room with his widower father.

The problem was that I was neither fourteen years old, nor was I a boy.

I suppose the disguise was my idea. I loved my mother and I mourned her as much as any child who loses a mother too soon. But Lucien was my twin. We'd never been apart, not even for a day. Grief cleaved me in half. It was a living thing within me, seizing my heart and wringing the air from my lungs. I began wearing his clothes and when I stuffed my hair under a cap, it was Luc's face that gazed back at me from the mirror. I couldn't let him go.

My father, listless with sorrow, did not discourage my behavior. When the contract came through, I looked at him and said, "It is only one year."

In the end, the prohibition against women was the least of our problems. The Calvary was segregated and there were no Negro troops at Fort Dodge. A black man could not live there, not even a priest. There was nothing to be done for it. It would be months until the Army found another man and they needed someone right away. An embarrassed Colonel Honeyman escorted us back to Dodge City, where no one seemed to care what race we were as long as we weren't Indian.

To the people of Dodge, we were only that Frenchman preacher and his boy.

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Doc Adams took one look at me and knew I was a girl. He said nothing—unless you understood Doc's sign language. He twitched his mustache, tugged on his ear, took off his hat then put it back on. Marshal Dillon studied me with narrowed eyes.

Father and I set up in the storefront below Doc's office and moved into the two-room living space above. We placed a placard with the War Department seal in the window and raised a flag on a post outside the office every morning. When Father lined the walls with shelves and filled them with our books, any thought of us living a quiet, anonymous life in Dodge went out the window. People came in to borrow books and to use the massive dictionary father kept on a wooden podium by the door. Father also wrote letters for illiterate cowboys for two cents a page, there was always a pot of Army coffee brewing and we had the only complete chess set in town. Chester began referring to the office as "the library" and soon, so did everyone else.

My father lost his faith when my mother and Luc died but he still said mass at Christmas and Easter for the few Catholics in town who settled for an Anglican if they couldn't have a "real" priest. He would not hear confession nor would he perform communion. Only once would he administer last rites.

I made extra coins grooming for Moss Grimmick and as a bonus, learned quite a few excellent American curse words. In France, the hunt was also a ladies' sport and I was a crack shot with a small rifle. When I occasionally sat in for Chester as helper companion for Doc when he had to travel far out, I bagged a few guinea fowl for the table. Even as Doc groused about my bringing a gun on his rounds, he was lured by the aroma of French cooking and took supper with us often. He and my father became fast friends and fierce chess opponents.

It wasn't all chess and coq au vin. The streets were ankle-deep mud half the time and choking, sifted- flour dust the other. There were August flies and seed ticks, insane buffalo hunters, shootings and brawls, rattlesnakes, bitter winters, boiling summers, outlaws and Texas cowboys. Sewage ran in streams behind the buildings and shit and garbage drifted in wet piles beneath the boardwalks such that on a hot day, even the stables were a welcome relief. We didn't drink water that Father hadn't first boiled or tinted with whiskey. Drunken trail hands relieved themselves everywhere. The stench of unwashed bodies, full spittoons and leather soured by horse lather fumed from the open doors of saloons and no amount of pine sawdust and scrubbing could cover the smell of wood floors steeped in the blood of a gut-shot drifter. The odor hovered faintly, like death waiting.

There were three other Negro families living in Dodge and there was enough Yankee liberalism and Southern politeness for them to abide in relative peace. They lived side-by-side in rather grand New Orleans Queen Anne townhouses, just far enough from the squalor of Rat Town not to be included in that neighborhood but not quite far enough into New Dodge to be considered part of the gentry. I once saw a tall black man in a finely tailored suit, embroidered waistcoat, buff top hat and smoked glass spectacles in conversation with the Marshal. He rode past me on his Justin Morgan horse without giving me a glance. I only saw the others when Father said the holiday mass. They turned up their Creole noses at my African genetics, even though my family was seven generations in Marseille. My father was Algerian, his skin the rosy golden color of a ripe peach. I inherited the café noir complexion of my mother's Ghanaian ancestry. In France, we were more apt to be identified by my father's profession or his family's holdings than his heritage but Father and I took our cues from the other people of color in Dodge City. We never ate at Delmonico's and I stayed off Front Street when the drovers came during cattle season.

But nights were quiet on our end of Front Street. Dillon's office was across the street, three doors down. We were on slightly higher ground than the rest of Dodge, sewage didn't pool behind our building and the prevailing wind brought with it the hot popped corn smell of drying prairie grass and the sweet scent of night blooming moonflowers. On warm summer nights, I would lie in bed and listen to the distant tink tink of the player piano in the Long Branch, the low, warm murmur of Father and Doc debating Spinoza in the library below and Chester singing "Run Rabbit run/the dog's gonna catch ya/ Run Rabbit run/ you better get away" at the jail. I'd drift on the edge of sleep until the sound of the Marshal's boots on the boardwalk passed beneath my window.

At the end of the year, Colonel Honeyman renewed Father's contract with a substantial increase. I believe he felt guilty for exiling us to Dodge. By then, Father was not only writing love letters for cowboys but was also pulling a tidy side income preparing documents for ranchers and business owners from as far away as Hays City.

I had recurring bouts of fever that Doc Adams would diagnose, not as the remnants of typhoid, but as an immune system compromised by grief. It was more than a year before I could keep a bit of flesh on my bones. Hollows started to fill in and angles started to curve. My breasts went from apricots to peaches. Bib pants and Lucien's shirts hid that evidence, but would not for much longer.

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