A Baby Doll Bandit

In a hamlet so morally warped its own shadow leans left, the locomotive’s weekly sigh is the sole punctuation in a run-on sentence of graft. Lawmen moonlight as highwaymen, the schoolhouse doubles as a countinghouse for kickbacks, and the station platform is padded like a lunatic’s cell to cradle the bodies of travelers who tumble from still-moving coaches. Into this carnival of rot glides Betsy Beautiful—lips painted like manifest destiny, spine straighter than the railroad spike that will soon nail every hypocrite’s lie. The trustee who dispatches her imagines a prim schoolmarm; what arrives is a cyclone in a lace collar, dragging daylight behind her like a bridal train. Her beau, Hiram Biff—equal parts greased piston and pure chutzpah—rides the undercarriage of the same engine, a stowaway inside the town’s only artery. Their rendezvous point is Big Kick Kitchen, a spit-slick saloon where soda fizz masks the metallic tang of impending blood. Even Pineapple Pete, the local basilisk in a straw boater, sips vanilla phosphate while casing the bank next door. But larceny here is a franchised affair: the sheriff demands a 50% corporate tax on all unofficial withdrawals. The heist is theater, the standoff farce, until Hiram vaults from the wings, collaring miscreants with slapstick precision, scooping the loot and the girl in one fluid pas de trois, and sprinting toward a westbound escape that rewrites gravity itself.