One Door From Heaven

malefactor?"
        "As far as I can understand what you might mean, sir, I don't think l am."
        Curtis is comfortable with a lot of languages, and he believes that he could conduct conversation easily in most regional dialects of English, but this one is challenging enough to rattle his self-confidence.
        The stranger lowers the flashlight, focusing it on Old Yeller. "I seen dogs sweet like this here, then you dares turn your back an' they bite off your co-jones."
        "Jones?" Curtis replies, thinking maybe they're talking about a person named Ko Jones.
        With the bright beam out of his eyes, Curtis sees that this man is none other than Gabby Hayes, the greatest sidekick in the history of Western movies, and for a moment he's as delighted as he's ever been. Then he realizes this can't be Gabby, because Gabby must have died decades ago.
        Frizzles of white hair, a beard like Santa's with mange, a face seamed and saddle-stitched by a lifetime of desert sun and prairie wind, a body that appears to be composed more of leathery tendons and knobby bones than of anything else: He is your typical weathered and buzzard-tough prospector, your weathered and cranky but lovable ranch hand, your weathered and comical but dependable deputy, irascible but well-meaning and weathered saloonkeeper, crotchety but tender-hearted and banjo-playing and weathered wagon-train cook. With the exception of a pair of orange-and-white Nikes that look as big as clown shoes, his outfit is totally Gabby: rumpled baggy khakis, red suspenders, a cotton shirt striped like mattress ticking; his squashed, dusty, sweat-stained cowboy hat is slightly too small for his head and is parked on his grizzled skull with such desert-rat insouciance that it looks like a growth that has been with him since birth.
        "She goes after my co-jones, I'll plug her, so help me Jesus."
        Just as you would expect of any cranky citizen of the Old West, regardless of his profession, this man has a gun. It's not a revolver of the proper period, but a 9-mm pistol.
        "Maybe I ain't so well-appearanced, but I sure ain't no useless codgerdick, like you might think. I'm the night caretaker for this here resurrected hellhole, and I can more than do the job."
        Although he's old, this man isn't old enough to be Gabby Hayes even if Gabby Hayes somehow could still be alive, and he isn't dead, either, so he can't be Gabby Hayes brought back to life as a flesh-eating zombie in another kind of movie altogether. Nevertheless the resemblance is so strong that he must be a descendant of Gabby's, perhaps his grandson, Gabby Hayes III. Flushed with excitement and awe, Curtis feels as humbled as he might feel in the presence of royalty.
        "I can shoot me a man around the corner, by calculated ricochet, if I got to, so you keep that flea hotel in check, and don't you try to run nowheres."
        "No, sir."
        "Where is your folks, boy?"
        "They is dead, sir."
        Bushy white eyebrows jump toward his hat brim. "Dead? You say dead, boy?"
        "I say dead, yessir."
        "Here?" The caretaker worriedly surveys the street, as though hired guns have ridden into town to shoot down all the sheep ranchers or the homesteading farmers, or whoever the evil land barons or the greedy railroad barons currently want to have shot down. The pistol wobbles in his hand, as if it is suddenly too heavy to hold. "Dead here on my watch? Well, ain't this just an antigodlin mess? Where is these folks of yours?"
        "Colorado, sir."
        "Colorado? I thought you said they was dead here."
        "I meant they was dead in Colorado."
        The caretaker looks relieved, and the gun doesn't shake as much us it shook before. "Then how'd you and this biscuit-eater come to be here after closin' time?"
        "Runnin' for our lives, sir," Curtis explains, because he feels that he can tell at least a portion of the truth to any descendant of Mr. Hayes.
        The caretaker's wrinkle-garden face sprouts a new crop where you would have thought he had no room to plant the seeds for any more. "You ain't tellin' me you run all the way here from Colorado?"
        "Run at the start of it, sir, then hitched most of the time, and run this last piece."
        Old Yeller pants as if in confirmation.
        "Who's the damn scalawags you been runnin' from?"
        "Lots of scalawags, sir. Some nicer than others. I guess the