Well, great! There's hope yet for scale modeling...

Mostly you get guys in their 40's, 50's, and 60's. Heavyset guys with glasses and big fat fingers, squinting painfully and desperately trying to handle tiny little parts and struggling with photoetched aftermarket add-ons.

And now, back to the westerns....

The main street of Deadman's Butte lay bare and silent before Frane's eyes, as he squinted against the unrelenting August sun. Not a horse nor a man was moving. A few idlers could be seen, not moving either, but scattered in little knots in front of the hotel and the Avalanche Saloon. They waited in unspeaking anticipation for the confrontation that all knew was now unavoidable.

Then Frane saw the Culligans step forth from the shadows. He knew these two all too well. Jed Culligan, dark and brutal in his features, renowned for his merciless speed and accuracy. Bolt Culligan, taller by at least an inch, broad across the shoulders, but almost catlike in his movements, as deadly as an angry rattler on a hot day.

The time of decision had come. Frane walked forward, step by measured step. The taut silence on Main Street seemed to grow and expand into an enveloping cloud, a harbinger of unavoidable fate, a portent of doom.

With every tread of his foot Frane was walking, he knew, into the jaws of an uncertain destiny that could only end in the demise of himself...or of the Culligans. But there was no time for regrets or second guessing now. The die was cast.

At last they stood within range.

"Is this whar yuh want it?" sneered Jed Culligan.

"If'n it is, we aims to oblige," added his brother, Bolt, running his tongue indelicately over his yellow teeth and thick, broken lips, as if licking his chops at the thought of destroying Frane once and for all, and leaving his bones for the buzzards.

Frane regarded them calmly. He felt strangely at peace for the first time in weeks.

"Make yer move!" he replied.

Jed Culligan's eyes narrowed, but he did not draw. A bead of saliva dropped off the end of Bolt Culligan's tongue. The air was electric. The fire hydrant was only inches away. Still Frane waited.

The play, when it came, was more sudden than a lightning bolt from a clear September sky. Jed's massive, dark-haired frame reared up before the hydrant with a speed that was both terrifying and unexpected, and Bolt was only a fraction of a second behind him...but to their disbelieving astonishment Frane was even faster!

Jed and Bolt had never seen a leg lift that fast before. They had not even given water by the time Frane irrigated that fire hydrant from foot to crown with a devastating stream of acrid yellow liquid that staked his claim to the Main Street of Deadman's Butte in terms no hound could deny!

"Yuh'd best leave now," growled Frane in the stunned silence that followed, and he pulled himself proudly up to his full height of 7 and a half inches.

The Culligans glowered back morosely, but they knew they'd been beat fair and square. Slowly they turned, tails between their legs, and slouched off to the shadows whence they had emerged.

Folks afterward said it was the first time in the history of Deadman's Butte that a dachshund had outdrawn a Black Lab and a Weimaraner.

- LH