Bobby Roy 4 (cont'd)

Bobby Roy 4 (cont'd)

      

       By Dianna Might

Saltpeter was readily available, but niter, as they called it then, remained scarce. A group of reformers had quietly infiltrated government inner circles for some time and they knew of the potential for damage of this new chemical mixture. One of their circle, a brilliant Irish alchemist by name of Sean Nautilas, devised a way of procuring sufficient nitrogen from potatoes and the rest is history. A mountain of gunpowder was manufactured under strict supervision in certain warehouses owned by an uncle of Nautilas, away just then on a continental tour. It was transferred into forty-five gallon wooden barrels and delivered to the servants’ entrance of parliament and from there carried by Fawkes into the dungeons below the very floor on which parliamentarians were set to begin discussions on reforms the next day. Fawkes, being a huge  man of immense strength and endurance, lugged them down the stairs one by one on his shoulders. Fawkes did the grunt work though his brain never dreamed up the idea nor passionately believed in any of it since it was till the day it died, under terrible circumstances (not of syphillic torture, though he did have that, too), of substandard activity.

       The day arrived, November 11, 1696. The spark was struck. The explosion rattled cutlery for miles around. In Stafford Upon Avon the local glover swore he heard a sound, a rumbling like a distant explosion, but he kept at his stitching and spoke to no one, not even his wife, about the matter, afraid of being thought a clairvoyant around town. Parliament dissolved. Fawkes found himself eventually arrested and put to death. To the end he appeared to know little if anything about the severity of his actions. He mumbled something about never again touching another tankard of rotten Willingstreet Black Ale and fell through the trapdoor singing ‘Lor.’

       Good old Billy, lordy what a dilly. Good old Billy, lordy he was silly. What I remember about him from a comic book my neighbor had concerned a cat under a floor. Billy walked around on a wooden floor for half an hour, quietly, listening, feeling with his whole being, appraising the various places the cat might be under his feet, sneaking along sensing everything, looking with his body more than his eyes, and finally shot twicet through the boards and said to Sally, the lady of the house, “That’s it. I’ve shot it. It won’t be pothering you no more, Mam.” Billy lived in the Hole in the Wall with the Dalton gang for a time when it became apparent that he had run out of hiding places. Here he had to fight against a man every now and then who was jealous of his fast draw and wanted to test him. Some imp of the perverse pestered these men to do it even if they knew he was too good for them. He was the gunslingers’ high water mark. And they often were not above getting buddies to help them by posting them up on rooftops or around corners with rifles to shoot him in the back just as the standoff began. He never got hit in any of these ambuscades until Wyatt Earp gunned him down while he slept in Sally’s house. I never believed the stories I read about him. Why would a sheriff bushwack anyone. It just don’t make no sense.