The Trainer

Wild Bill Hart sat looking at the thirty-three notches that lined the edges of the wooden grip plates of his colt revolver. He wasn’t proud of them. He had put them there to remind him of the seriousness of his chosen profession. He had been a gun for hire until he was thirty-two years old, but at his mother’s dying request, he had attended a brush arbor meeting and had gotten religion in a serious way. No one had to tell him that killing for hire was not a Christian occupation, so he put aside his gun and went back to the farm he had known as home all his life.

Now he was taking up the gun again, and his emotions were, to say the least, stirred and mixed. Sheriff Jack Roberts Jr., son of the late Sheriff Roberts, had come with a request Bill knew he could not refuse.