Weird West Quick Draw Flash Fiction Contest 2025 Second Place Winner
White Tree
by Jacob Seinemeier
The town of White Tree has only one law- and he just broke it.
I’d tracked the kid down to a shitpoke hamlet called White Tree, Colorado. He might have been a murderin’, violatin’ weasel- but the little fucker sure could run.
By the time I stepped onto the porch of the local saloon, it was four in the afternoon, and the main street shivered under the shadow of the fossilized oak that gave the town its name. Eighty feet tall and dead so long, it had turned bone white, looming from the top of the hill. Thick branches had twisted in its long, slow death, and from where I stood, it looked like a man screamin’. I wondered why they hadn’t cut the damn thing down.
Maybe they was scared to. I woulda been.
There was a sign on the wall before I walked into the bar. NO GUNS ALLOWED, it said. THIS MEANS YOU! I’d seen another sign at the town limits. Only reason the first sign caught my attention is ‘cause it didn’t have no bullet holes in it.
I didn’t pay it no mind. There were plenty of ways to subdue a man.
I stepped into the bar. It was mostly empty- just a couple ranch hands drinking, some ratty trapper sitting with his head in the lap of a young lady in a shiny red dress, and an old man sitting alone. I didn’t see a bartender.
I walked over to the old guy. He musta been sixty, weathered and thin…but thin like snakes are thin. He had a thick mass of twisted scars running the side of his neck and wore a tin star. He looked at me without expression.
“I’m looking for a man,” I said. “Got a bounty on him.”
“Is that right?” he grated. His voice was so soft I had to lean in to hear him. “What he do?”
“Raped and murdered the daughter of a Ute chief,” I said. “He paid me a hundred bucks to look for him in the places his kind aren’t allowed to go.”
“And what’ll you do when you find him?” The Sheriff said, in that low voice.
“Well.” I looked over at the trapper lying on the couch. “The chief was mighty specific about what I was to bring back to collect my reward. And it weren’t no scalp.”
The kid bolted, shoving the young lady to the ground. He scrambled for a side door. I followed. The old guy grabbed my arm. “No guns,” he rasped. “You hear?” I noticed his holster. There wasn’t one. Just a huntin’ knife.
I shrugged him off and went out after my hundred dollars.
The kid was already in the street, but I guess he’d had a few drinks already, so he fell in the dirt. By the time I got to him, a young preacher had reached down to help him up. The kid drew a knife from his boot and stuck it to the priest’s throat. He spun to face me.
“You back away!” He cried out. His voice echoed from the storefronts. The ranch hands and Red Dress entered the street from the saloon, and they approached the kid, drawing skinnin’ knives from their belts. The young lady slipped a stilletto from her garter. They didn’t shout, didn’t call for him to drop it- just moved on him, blades drawn. Damn eerie.
I reached for leather and drew my Colt. The kid was using the preacher for a shield, but he wasn’t too good at it- too busy watching every which way. The bullet took him in the left eye.
The gunshot echoed in the silence.
He dropped like a rock, sendin’ the preacher tumbling. Everybody froze.
“You goddamn fool,” the old man hissed.
“So what?” I grunted, holstering my piece. “I just saved your holy man from being sent early to his Lord. A little gratitude would-”
The shadows in the street- moved. The afternoon sun glinted off the pool of blood around the trapper’s body. I looked up. The top of the hill- it was empty.
The white tree- it was walkin’ down the hill towards us.
It was bigger than I thought, towering over the town as it covered the distance in no more than a half-dozen strides of its long, thin legs. Its arms swung by its sides. A few moments later and it was looming over me, the dimming sun behind it in an orange halo.
The old man stepped in front of me.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “He didn’t know the rules. It’s not his fault.”
The terrifying figure crouched down to stare at me. As it drew nearer, I saw it and how could I have thought it was a tree? Its skin looked nothing like wood, more like dried, cracked bone, and its face- this pointed flat wedge of a head- didn’t have no eyes. Just a blank space with no mouth, no nose. Like a flat, cracked, pale stone.
“It was a simple mistake,” the old guy insisted.
The horror nodded once, then stood to its full terrifying height.
It clenched one massive stony hand in a fist and struck the Sherriff on the top of his head and smashed him into the dirt.
The townsfolk didn’t scream. Just one rancher drew in his breath real sharp- whooooosh– and Red Dress put a hand to her mouth.
The thing from the hill turned its back and made its loping way back up to its perch. It never looked back once.
I stood frozen, looking down at the ruin where the old man had once stood, a tangled bloody mess.
Red Dress stepped past me. She reached into the pile of bloody limbs and guts and plucked something from it. A tin star, spattered with gore.
She took my hand and silently pressed the badge into my palm.
I looked down at it. I looked up at the hill. I took my gun from its holster, tossed it into the dust.
I walked into the saloon without a word.
About The Author
Jacob Seinemeier is a Perth-based English teacher, voracious reader and avid writer of speculative fiction.
For the last year he has been sitting on a beach in a bottle, throwing stories into the ocean. He may have misunderstood the assignment.
Recently, he had a novella shortlisted in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, a drabble selected for the Happily Never After Anthology and a short story accepted in the horror anthology More Monsters Next Door. When not telling tales out of school, he can be found online at
