“I’ll see you in hell first!” Bat shouted and his hand leapt down to his holster.
The gun had cleared leather and the barrel was swung up into an arc to blast across the room at Larsen, when a sliver of quicksilver flashed through the air.
Bat gave a choking gasp and the gun dropped from his hand. His fingers plucked ineffectually at the hilt of the knife buried in his throat for a moment, then his knees gave way underneath him and he fell to the floor.
Thus the internal history of the United States of America fell into an abyss of fiction from which it has never recovered. It simply wasn’t possible to make an acceptable film about folk out west in the nineteenth century without the hero slapping on a six-gun the way hardly anybody actually did. And the myth became substituted for the reality, not just of the past but also the present, with disastrous results. The US lost its way the moment it developed a heritage based on events that never happened.
“You’re all under arrest, you dirty rotten rustlers!”
“Zed, how many times do I have to tell you not to bring your gun to the dinner table!”