“Now, Bill dear, we’ve arranged for the money for the debt payments to be put in our joint bank account, so make sure you pay it on the first of the month, okay? Don’t be late! If we have any late fees…”
“Pshaw, don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it! You just enjoy your trip, okay?”
Sally looked worried, but Lily was excited!
“Yeah, Papa, we’re gonna catch those cattle rustlers and fix the price of beef!”
“Ah, Lily, you shouldn’t say things like price fixing…”
“Huh?”
Lily was confused.
Wasn’t that a good business thing to do?
“Anyway, good luck! Stay safe! Gods bless!”
“Gods bless, Papa!” Lily hugged and kissed her Papa, and then her Mama and Papa hugged and kissed, and then they got in the car with their driver, Dale!
Dale was Henry’s chauffeur, and normally drove him and his wife around the villages!
He was one of the best drivers around!
Lily scooped up Mr. Cat and put him in the car, then climbed in herself. Her Mama climbed in as well and made sure they were all buckled in while Dale loaded their luggage into the trunk, and then they set off!
It was a crisp Monday morning, with cute cotton-ball clouds dotting the blue sky!
They were going to ride with the top down!
Convertible style!
And of course, they were dressed appropriately.
Lily was wearing a riding outfit!
It was Junior’s old riding outfit from when he was little!
Lily wore a leather helmet, and driving goggles strapped to her head, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail! She had on a long sleeved shirt with the cuffs rolled up for her shorter arms, and driving gloves! And she was wearing leather pants!
She looked really snazzy and cute!
Her mother was wearing a more normal blue dress with white polkadots, but she also wore a leather helmet and driving goggles, and driving gloves, and she had tall leather boots on.
Safety first, but also fashion!
Mr. Cat, on the other hand, wasn’t wearing any clothes at all!
That was normal for cats, of course.
He had a box he could rest in on the floor of the back seat of the car, or he could sit next to Lily, who was in the center next to her Mama.
“Alright, we’re pulling out!” Dale called once he got the motor started.
Rumble rumble rumble…
Vroom!
They smoothly accelerated and got on the road heading west, up and over the Appalashian mountains!
For a good hour they only kept going up and up and up, climbing high into the sky!
At the top they stopped for a few minutes and marveled at how far they could see!
“Look, there’s Three Creeks Village: you can see the creeks and the river,” Dale pointed out.
Dale was a good tour guide!
“Ah, and there’s Stone Pit!” Lily cried, pointing.
“Oh, so it is,” Lily’s Mama agreed.
“And in that forest over there is Lumberville, and that hill over there…”
“Grassy Hill!” Lily shouted, jumping up and down.
She was having a blast!
“Mrow,” Mr. Cat meowed.
“And that big town over there is Charleston, and out over the horizon, past where we can see, is The Great Swamp City, the capital of the Kingdom!”
“That’s where the King lives, right?”
“Yep, him and his family, who run the Kingdom.”
Then, they looked the other way!
And what they saw was…
A whole lot of emptiness.
The mountains turned to hills, and the hills turned to large swathes of flat prairie land, full of wild grasses and crisscrossed with rivers.
“And beyond the Great Prairie is the Great and Everlasting Free State of Texas.” Dale pointed to the South.
“What else is out there?” Lily asked, eyes sparkling.
Dale pointed more directly west.
“Farther out west is the Glorious Sun Kingdom of France,” he said, and then he pointed more northwest. “And closer, but more to the north, is the Friendly Commonwealth of Wisconsin, near the Big Lakes.”
“Oooh!”
Sally put a hand on her cheek. “Hopefully someday Bill and I can see them…” she said wistfully.
“Mrow!”
Everyone got back in the car, the engine having cooled off while they took a break, and Dale drove them speedily (but safely) down the winding road through the hills, and then south, to the Great and Everlasting Free State of Texas!
Up in heaven, the Gods and Goddesses were making their plans!
“Cattle rustling, cattle rustling…” Hades, the God of Death, muttered.
Homer, the God of Literature who had lent Lily his Words of Power, was busy!
The Goddess of Finding was busy tracking down the God of Tricks and Trials!
And the God of Gaming was shaking his head!
“That Bill…”
Lily’s Papa was working through a book of chess puzzles, but he was really slow!
“He needs to pray more…”
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His Piety Points were low!
But Bill persevered anyway…!
Justitia, the Goddess of Justice, pulled up her blindfold and stood next to Hades, who was going through…
A rolodex!
It was a spinny thing full of business cards!
“I’ve already committed my blessing to Lily on her quest for Justice,” she said, capitalizing the J even as she spoke out loud. “But with Sarah, the Goddess of Finding preoccupied, how is Lily going to find those heinous criminals?”
Justitia was really mad about Connie and Blyde!
Those two no-good baddies had been causing a lot of problems!
Bank robberies!
Train heists!
Cattle Rustling!
Dine and dashing!
Littering!
Just about the only bad thing they hadn’t done was cheat on their taxes, because the Great and Everlasting Free State of Texas didn’t have those!
(In some ways, the Great and Everlasting Free State of Texas was a paradise, at least for business-people!)
“Aha!”
Hades found the card he had been looking for.
He turned to look at Justitia now. “Well, haunting her has worked so far, so I’m going to keep doing that!”
His skull face grinned, like it always did, given that he was just a skeleton, and he sent down the ghost he had picked out!
“This guy’s dealt with tons of problems in the Wild West! He’s a pro!”
Justitia looked at the card more closely.
“Uh, Hades…”
“What?”
Justitia sighed.
She looked down at Lily, her cat, her Mama, and her driver.
How was Lily going to deal with this…?
Back down in the mortal realm, Lily and her adventuring party arrived at the capital of the Great and Everlasting Free State of Texas!
It was a big city, situated on a river, with a shiny white capitol building on a hill overlooking the rest of the city! There was a big dome on top, and that was where all the representatives lived and worked!
They had a weird system of government where the leaders just argued with each other all day, and everyone else did what they wanted!
The ideal state of liberty!
Because they couldn’t pass any more laws, there were no taxes, so everyone kind of did their own thing, voluntarily!
“First things first,” Dale said as they pulled up to their motel. “We’ll want to get a guide and a bodyguard.”
“Huh?!” Sally said, shocked.
“Well, we could also just rent some guns ourselves, but I’m not a great shot,” Dale admitted.
“Guns?” Lily asked.
“Yeah, everyone has a gun in Texas.”
“I want a gun!” Lily cried, excited.
“Meow! Me too!” Mr. Cat said. “I want a shotgun!”
“Absolutely not,” Lily’s Mama declared!
“But Mama…” Lily whined.
“Meow meow…”
“Nope, not happening.”
“Well, then we need a bodyguard. Remember, we’re gonna be helping track down the notorious villains, Connie and Blyde.”
So they went inside. The motel was styled like an old western saloon, with swinging doors, and a bar and a room filled with tables where people were playing cards with six-shooters on their hips! They all wore cowboy clothes: jeans with leather chaps, long-sleeved shirts with vests, bolo ties and ten-gallon hats.
Lily’s eyes sparkled!
“Mama, Mama, I wanna dress up too!”
She was already dressed in her driving clothes, but she wanted to be a cowgirl now!
“Meow,” Mr. Cat said.
“And Mr. Cat needs a little hat!” Lily misunderstood!
“I’m getting hungry… meow…”
Mr. Cat didn’t care about hats, but Lily really cared!
Dale and Sally strode up to the bar, where a bartender with grizzled features and the beginnings of a beard on his face was polishing a glass with a piece of cloth.
“We’ll take two rooms,” Dale said.
“And we want your best bodyguard!” Sally declared.
Suddenly, the room fell silent.
All the card players slowly lowered their hands of cards.
A woman who had been sitting in the corner, in the shadows, tilted her hat up, revealing…
A really pretty face!
“If you want the best, look no further,” she said.
The bartender slash motel concierge nodded.
“Aye, you won’t find better than Annie.”
“Annie?” Lily repeated.
“Aye, Annie… Elmly.”
“Annie Elmly…”
“That’s right, I’m the Annie Elmly!”
The woman walked up, with a rifle on her back and pistols on her hips. “I’m the best sharpshooter in the West!”
The card players slowly resumed their games, and the din of conversations once more filled the room.
“How much?” Lily said.
She was putting on her business thinking hat!
She knew about hiring people!
“Ten dollars a day,” Annie said.
Lily tilted her head.
“Isn’t that a little low?”
The bartender snorted. “Annie’s in trouble, after talking a big game about finding Connie and Blyde, and she didn’t find nothin’…”
“That, that’s not my fault! They’re too good at hiding!” Annie protested.
“Did you try praying?” Lily asked.
“Sure did!” Annie said. “I say my prayers to the God of Shooting every night!”
“Pray to other Gods sometime,” the bartender muttered.
“Why?” Annie asked, honestly unable to imagine why anyone would do that.
Her Piety Points were super specialized!
“Still,” the bartender ignored Annie’s question. “You won’t find a better bodyguard, a better shooter, nor a better deal than Annie Elmly here.”
“Deal!” Lily said, and reached out her hand for a handshake. “I’m Lily, and I’m gonna find Connie and Blyde!”
The bar fell silent again, and then everyone laughed.
“You’ll never find them varmints!”
“Connie and Blyde skipped town days ago!”
“Gods only know where they’re holed up!”
“It’s crazy how good they are at hiding with hundreds of head of rustled cattle…”
“Bit unbelievable, come to think of it…”
“That’s why they’re such renowned villains!”
The people playing cards sure had a lot to say about Connie and Blyde!
The bartender gave them a copy of the wanted poster.
Connie and Blyde were drawn on it, scowling and looking villainous!
The reward was five hundred dollars, and another ten dollars for every cattle recovered!
Lily did some quick maths!
If they had hundreds of cattles they’d rustled…
And each one was ten dollars…
That was thousands of dollars!
That was a lot of dollars!
Annie, as it happened, had a map of the area around the capital, and they ate a steak dinner while they planned their search.
“You’ll need to borrow some horses, too, since you can’t take the car off-road,” Dale said.
He was just there to drive!
“And we’ll need new clothes!” Lily exclaimed.
Sally sighed. “Alright, so tomorrow we’ll go get clothes and horses, and then you’re going to look?”
“Yeah!”
Lily and Annie high-fived, already fast friends.
Mr. Cat was drinking from a saucer of milk.
“Mrow.”
That night, Lily said her prayers while her Mama unpacked their luggage.
And in the morning, there was a new ghost at the foot of her bed!
He was an older man, with a tough expression on his face!
Lily rubbed her eyes. “Uh, hello, did the God of Death send you to help me?”
The new old man frowned.
“Yeah, he did, but I’m not sure why…”
“I’m Lily! What’s your name?” Lily introduced herself.
“I’m Marion M Morrison, but you can call me Duke,” he said.
“Are you a cowboy?” Lily asked. He was wearing cowboy clothes!
“No, I’m an actor.”
Did the God of Death make a mistake?!
