Thief of My Heart (Watty Awards Finalist 2012)

Prologue

Into the west came many men. Some were good men and some were bad men. Some were good men with some bad in them and some were bad men with some good in them. This is the story of two pretty good bad men. Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry. The two most successful outlaws in the history of the west. Together, these gentlemen substantially altered the course of America's frontier. They did a lot to change railroad schedules too. And in all the trains and banks they robbed, they never shot anyone. This made our two latter day Robin Hoods very popular...with everyone but the railroads and the banks. Because unlike Robin Hood, Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry robbed from the rich and kept the money for themselves. It was a good life. But times were changing. Safes were getting better. The posses were getting bigger. Sheriffs were getting smarter. And modern communications made it only a matter of time until they would be captured and maybe even killed.

And so with a ten thousand dollar price tag on each of their heads, and wanted posters with their descriptions in every sheriff's office, train station, telegraphers office and stage depot, they sought out their old friend and former outlaw, Sheriff Lom Trevors of Porterville, Wyoming. With his help they hoped to be granted an amnesty from the governor.

"The governor can't come flat out and give you amnesty now. First you gotta prove you deserve it."

"So all we gotta do is just stay outta trouble until the governor figures we deserve amnesty?" Heyes asked.

"But in the mean time, we'll still be wanted?" Kid asked.

"Well, that's true. Until then, only you, me and the governor will know about it. It'll be our secret."

So, for the following year the west's two most wanted men would lead model lives. Lives of temperance, moderation, tranquility. Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry would cease to exist. In their places would ride two men of peace. Alias Smith and Jones. ** 

Northeast Texas, near the Arkansas border September 7, 1880

The oldest child of Nate and Lilly Webb looked out of the opening in the tarp covering their wagon. The only home she had ever known was growing smaller and smaller as the wagon moved slowly westward away from the little ranch here in northeast Texas. This wagon would be her home for the next month.

She would turn nineteen years old on the twenty-seventh of this month. She was so close to being an old maid. A spinster. Several of the girls from church were already married and expecting children. Molly Sinclair, who was now Molly Sinclair-Johnston - she loved to gloat of her married status by always using her maiden name with her married name - was only twenty-one and she was expecting her second child. Over-achievers like her were what made it so hard for a girl like Evangeline. It wasn't that she didn't want to get married and have children. She did. But she just wasn't interested in any of the young men she knew. And it wasn't that they hadn't tried to court her. Many young men had tried. But all had failed to live up to what she imagined in her mind that her first and hopefully only love would be. Many people thought her foolish, some stubborn, others had called her snobbish and aloof. But none of it was true. She simply longed for so much more than what she had felt with any of those young men. Her rejection of so many of the young men from the surrounding area and her perceived snobbishness had not made her very many friends. But she was alright with that, too. As long as she had her family, nothing else mattered.

And thank goodness, Daddy and Mama hadn't forced her to marry, like poor Eloise Hunter. When Eloise had failed to find a suitable husband by the age of nineteen, her father had chosen one for her. She remembered the last church service that Eloise had attended. When the service had ended, the newly wed Mrs. Paul Gentry had to have her hands pried from her mother's skirt hem and be dragged by her husband to the awaiting buckboard that was loaded with all of her belongings. The same buckboard that had carried her away, sobbing and begging her father not to make her go. Evangeline often wondered about Eloise. What if Eloise met the man of her dreams after she had already been married off to someone else? It just didn't seem fair.

She turned her attention to her thirteen year old brother, Gabe, who was busy shooting a rock from his sling shot at a bird that was roosting on the fence. The last of the fences that marked the edge of their small ranch property. Their ranch house was now only a tiny dot on the horizon. Laughter from the front seat of the wagon caught her attention and she turned to gaze at her parents who sat close together. Could there be another couple more in love than her mother and father? That was the kind of love she longed for. All you had to do was watch them awhile to see the devotion and desire they shared for one another. They were always anxious to be together, always finding any excuse to touch or cuddle or kiss. She smiled as she watched her petite, blonde mother laugh at some silly thing her darkly handsome father had said, then lean up to kiss him and finally rest her head on his shoulder.

She picked up the small book resting in her lap and lovingly touched the golden embossed words on the worn cover. "Evangeline." This story by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was her namesake. Her mama's favorite book had provided the names for both of her children, Evangeline and Gabriel. She opened the book and the pages automatically fell to the page that it had been opened to so many times. Silently she read her favorite lines:

Fair was she and young; but, alas! before her extended,

Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway

Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered

before her,

Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned,

As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is marked by

Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine.

Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished;

As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,

Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended

Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen.

Sometimes she lingered in towns, till, urged by the fever within her,

Urged by a restless longing, the hunger and thirst of the spirit,

She would commence again her endless search and endeavour;

Sometimes in churchyards strayed, and gazed on the crosses and

tombstones,

Sat by some nameless grave, and thought that perhaps in its bosom

He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him.

 

Evangeline, separated from her lover, Gabriel, had searched years and years to find him. That's the kind of love she wanted to feel. The kind of love her parents shared. The kind she had never yet experienced and would always feel empty without. She would bear the stigma of the word "spinster" before she would marry just for the sake of marriage and children. So perhaps she was stubborn and foolish. But she would bear the burden of those labels as well.

She looked again out of the back of the wagon and she could no longer see their little house in the distance. Her life here was over and a new life awaited. "I hope my Gabriel is out there somewhere," she thought to herself as the wagon carried her further from the familiar and into the vast unknown.

** From the pilot episode of the series "Alias Smith and Jones" written by Frank Price

Disclaimer:  This is a fanfiction story.  I do not own the rights to any characters from the original series owned by NBC/Universal