Wainwright Smith Rides Away, Part Ii

...What he saw there made blood run cold, His sister naked in the light, Chained to a bed, soiled and stained Her stomach swollen and tight. She was covered in refuse and blood, Her eyes saw him but didn’t see, She said no words, just babbled on, And endless, painful mumbling. A twig cracked, and he swirled around, Seeing the scarred face of his foe, Mays went for his pistol, Wainwright fired And the thug stumbled back from the blows. Wain kept firing, long after he was dead Emptying his entire magazine, He turned Mays’s face into a red ruin, And let out an anguished scream. The whole town was shocked by the affair, By the sheer depths of Mays’s cruelty, They left his body for vultures and crows, A sent poor Henrietta back to the east. It was said that her mind was too far gone, She knew not even when she gave birth, Spent her days locked-up, stark raving mad, Until a fever took he from the earth. The child was raised by an uncle and aunt, Never the truth of his father to know, But Wain never came back, after all he’d seen He moved north to trap in ice and snow. After what he had seen he couldn’t return, Couldn’t buy into mankind’s illusions, He married a squaw and lived in the woods, Free from civilization’s delusions…