Four years of sons. Four years of fathers. Four years of friends and brothers. Four years of lives plucked from the most fertile soil on this Earth and pointlessly ground into misery. John had seen the worst of it firsthand. Fredericksburg, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Chickamauga, he had left a piece of his heart behind on each battlefield. There wasn’t much left of him now. He was like a walking corpse. His body moved as if on its own. Nothing much seemed to matter now. 

When the whole stupid affair was over John had tried to make his way back to that little town on the banks of the Shenandoah where his daddy had grinned with pride at the sight of his boy standing before him, resplendent in his brand-new grey uniform. He told John he looked like one of them knights from King Arthur’s court, and now he was off to go slay them Yankee dragons. How do you return to people like that after you’ve seen what war really is? How do you explain to them that you aren’t a hero, that there weren’t any reason to what had happened to you? How do you ever tell them what you did, or expect them to understand it?

In the end John never did find an answer to that question. He just stood there and looked at his family’s house from the path out front that took folks back to town. That wasn’t his house anymore. He wasn’t that boy that gone off to war, he was the man who came back from it. Best he could figure, they were better off if he didn’t come back at all. So, he kept on walking, and he never looked back. 

Now the year was 1868 and John was living as far away from that little town in Virginia as possible. He had hopped aboard the first wagon train headed west that he could find, but he didn’t quite make it to California as he had intended. The man leading the party was a feller by the name of Samuel Hacker Smith, and evidently, he had served with distinction in the Union army during the war. When he found out that John Callum the quiet loner was actually John Callum the quiet loner that had once fought to kill folks like him, well he was less than pleased.

John got left behind at a little town in the Arizona territory by the name of Glass Cow. It seemed that folks around there were less concerned with who John was than they were with what he could do for them. He tried to make his way as a farmhand for a few weeks, but he didn’t show much talent for it. He tried his hand at blacksmithing but that wasn’t a good fit either. Hell, it turned out that John wasn’t fit for doing much of anything. 

Well, at least it looked that way. See, it turns out that John had one skill which would come to make him quite valuable to the locals. John, and this should not be taken as unwarranted hyperbole, was uncannily good at killing people. Folks found that out one day when a desperate lookin’ feller walked into the town’s general store and tried to rob the place while John was picking up his groceries. The would-be-robber waved his gun around and started hollerin’. 

“Give me the money!” yelled the robber in the direction of the clerk (he was also the owner of the establishment, which should give you some indication that the place wasn’t exactly the most profitable store in Arizona). 

The clerk was in the middle of emptying out his cash register when John made his way to the counter. 

“Here’s my order,” said John as he placed a stack of canned foods onto the counter. “How much do I owe ya?”

“What the hell do you think yer doing?” asked the robber as he pointed his gun at John.

“I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do here, kid. You’re the one acting odd.”

“Don’t mess with me, shit for brains! I’ll shoot you dead right here, right now. Gimme your money.” 

“You ever fired that thing at somethin’ that could shoot back?”

“Course I have. I’ve shot it plenty.”

“Don’t look like it from here. Looks to me like you’re greener than them cactus out front.”

“Oh yeah? You hear about that rancher got shot over in Pleasant Knoll? That was me that did him in.”

“That was you?”

“Sure as hell was.”

“You wanted for that?”

“That’s right, I got lawmen looking for me under every rock in the county. So quit playing with me fore’ I give em’ another reason to hang me on your behalf.”

John turned to the clerk, he hadn’t moved an inch since the two of them had started talking. His face was pale as the moon and the sweat stains under his arms had nearly reached his belt. “How much he worth?” asked John.

“Mister, I think you better just do what he says.”

“How much?”

“A hundred.”

“Dollars?”

“Yes, a hundred dollars.”

“Hmm,” John could really have used a hundred dollars at that point. In truth, he could hardly afford to buy the groceries sitting in front of him, let alone next week’s. That money could get him through the rest of the month, maybe longer. 

If you haven’t seen a man get killed with a can of corn, then you can count yourself lucky. It ain’t a pleasant sight. First of all, it ain’t over quick. Nobody dies from the first time they’re struck by corn. Nor the second. Or the third. Hell, it looked like that robber was still moving around after a dozen hits to the head, but then again, they say the body can keep twitching around for a while even after its soul has left it. So, it’s hard to say exactly when John killed him. 

A few minutes later the shopkeep came running back into the store with the sheriff. John told him what had happened, and he held his hand out for the hundred dollars that was owed to him, but unfortunately it turned out that the ransom on the mush-faced body now laying on the store’s floor was conditional upon him being captured alive. 

There’s a saying that John had heard once in church. This was back when he still believed in the all mighty. Nowadays he had to hope against hope that there weren’t any sort of justice in the world, otherwise he’d have an eternity of damnation awaiting him. But back then he had heard this quote from Reverend Rantston, “When the lord closes a door, he opens up a window.” Well, John found himself a window. See, the folks around Glass Cow now knew that John was a killer, and it just so happened that there was plenty of killing around Glass Cow that needed to be done.