"Little Man Loved Fire"

(A Tale Of Jubal Early)

by

George Potter

It's my deep suspicion that every man pisses his pants at least once in his life. No matter how powerful or brave or flat out ornery he happens to be. Once in his life, every man who ever lived felt his bladder let go and that awful warm spreading down there where it ain't polite to call notice to. I'm not too proud to admit that time had even come for ol' Jubal Early and he lived through it.

But now it has come for Clarendon Fellows, and he wont.

I got him trussed up in the bridge of his own damn ship, didn't even have to sneak up and board the hard and quiet way. Fellows welcomed me aboard and poured me a drink. We go back a ways, me and Fellows. We go back further than he ever knew. Took me three months and two substandard paying jobs worked for the man before I got him opened enough to tell me a little story about burning down a farming town on Hester years back.

Among the people who died in that fire was a raven haired little girl named Alice Ramirez. Pretty thing, I got a picture of her stored on my ship com, and I've looked at it once a day ever since I made a promise to a man with his guts torn out, on the floor of a cave on a bootleggers moon. I'd only met the man an hour before, but he saved my life when the fugitive I was tailing got the drop on me. I figured that meant the least I owed him was to sit with him while he died, after I'd separated the head and body of the man who killed him while aiming at me, and stored it in my cryochest.

Took him a while to die. In the process, he asked me to do him a favor. He himself had been looking for a man. An Alliance officer who had burned an entire town, including his five year old daughter, back in the war. He had his stats stored on a flexie. That was where I got the picture of Alice too.

I take my promises to dying folk serious. Especially the ones I owe a favor.

Still -- there was something about looking at that picture every day. Even if her da