Two-Gun Bob, they called him, which is the kind of name a man collects when he is big, loud, and heavily armed in a town with nothing whatsoever to shoot at.
So he sent somebody else. Solomon Kane, sour as vinegar and twice as unwelcome, walks out of Devon in a black hat with no commission, no king, no wage, and no earthly reason to be in Africa, and he goes to Africa anyway. The Hills of the Dead. The Moon of Skulls, where a queen keeps her court on a staircase built out of the previous applicants. Wings in the Night, where the winged things have been farming a village the way you or I would keep chickens, and have been at it a good long while, and are frankly a bit put out to be interrupted.
Ask him why. He can't tell you. There is no employer. There is only the standing conviction that somewhere ahead of him something abominable is operating entirely unsupervised, and that this is HIS to correct — a lifetime of unemployed righteousness with a rapier attached.
And the man who marched him across two continents never left Cross Plains, Texas. Sat in one hot little room with the windows shut and hammered it out, shouting every line aloud as he wrote it, so the neighbors got the swords for free.
