Dear folks,

This was my entry for the KGAF Flash Fiction contest, which reached the Finals but did not get any prize.

Sorry that I could not upload this and other stories earlier on Sulekha. I have come to the conclusion that the Earth is spinning faster nowadays and so everyone of us is getting less and less time.

I have had a 'cornucopia' but this one was full of bad things instead of good ones, a corn on a foot, guests, a fight with Avi, getting dropped in KGAF Finals and so on. I suppose I will have to write a 'corny' blog for that.

So, here is the 'Tall Tale' that reached the Finals.

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The Legend of Phantom Cowboy

The sky was lowering when ‘Cross’ shot the cowboy Marty.

Marty really had no chance. He was just a greenhorn who had recently joined the ‘J’ ranch and ‘Cross’ - so called because he was cross-eyed – was the desperado who was the bane of the sheriffs of three counties and who already had sixteen notches on the butt of his revolver.

However, Marty’s name has passed into the annals of the Frontier history as The Legend of Phantom Cowboy, while Cross is mostly forgotten.

Cross and his henchmen, bandy-legged ‘Bandy’ and tall, thin ‘Beanstalk’ tied Marty’s dead body to a tree. They did not even bother to remove his six-shooter from his dead hands. Then they waited patiently for the payroll to come to the ‘J’ ranch. Cross whiled away the time by cutting one more notch on the butt of his revolver.

The cloudburst took them unawares.

Bandy and Beanstalk witnessed a strange sight in the flare of the lightening that coursed across the sky. As lightening struck the tree, the dead cowboy raised him arm and shot Cross accurately through the heart.

Bandy and Beanstalk were so frightened by this supernatural intervention, that they just galloped away only to run smack into the Sheriff, who was accompanying the payroll.

They were incoherent, but the Sheriff managed to get the gist of the event from them.

Thus was born the ‘Legend of the Phantom Cowboy’ who protected the ‘J’ ranch.

Now, two hundred years after the event took place, the only explanation I can offer is that the lightning’s ‘galvanizing effect’ caused Marty’s arm muscles to contract and squeeze the trigger.

His shooting of Cross was just a coincidence.

I do not believe in superstitions, you see.