Part Two: The Revenge of Hobart
Last year was when I started hearin' the rumors. An old prospector'd disobeyed the government's "No Man's Land" restriction on Oilfield and gone back to check out the mines, only he never returned. Then that famous flier, Archibald Redletter, crashed some three miles outside of Oilfield and was never heard from again. Finally they tried to build a railroad going past Oilfield's northern border until some workmen went missing, and Governor Gratch himself got involved.
Fifty tons of oil we shipped out to Oilfield. Old Gratch wanted to reason with the beast, maybe ask it if it could oh so kindly stop killing off our railway men one by one, but I knew there was no reasoning with something as crazy as an amusement park sculpture brought to life. There never was no reasoning with carnival folk.
Seven government agents went down before it was decided negotiations weren't going as well as we'd hoped, and that old machine went limping off into Old Man Stitch's barn.
This is when we found out how old Froggy'd been keeping alive all these years. That barn was swarming with dozens of buzzards, all haggard and hell-bent on keeping Froggy alive with oil cans and used rags. Perhaps they fed on the remains of Froggy's victims, or perhaps a half-crazed killing machine and a buzzard have a lot in common. Who can say?
We waited until nightfall, as nightfall is the only right and proper time you can enact revenge in the South, and charged in there with as much noise and commotion as we could muster. Beaks stabbed at us in the darkness and warbling birdcalls rang off into the night, but there we took our stand, and we fell many a buzzard, I can tell you that.
Gratch found the beast in a bale of hay, and as the shots barked out around us and the old barn creaked from its own weight, the two squared off. Froggy had seen better days, but so, I wager, had the Governor, and though he shot that old automaton to oblivion with his trusty .48, an old man is no match for a crazed, bloodthirsty machine.
The Governor was no more. I had come prepared, of course, toting my trusty army flamethrower from World War II and enough gasoline to set fire to the whole country, if need be.
I lit the support beams first, and sprinkled as much gasoline on the walls as I could, all the while buzzards were pecking at my hide and swooping down from the roosts. Finally I turned my attention to Froggy himself, but before I could get a good spray of fire going, the whole barn collapsed in on itself, and I blacked out.
When I woke up, smoke was all I could smell, and the intense heat from the fire was lapping at my neck. Then I saw the beast, a great collection of twisted metal and clogged gears, dragging itself across the dirt toward the big tanker truck on the edge of town.
Inch by inch it crawled, and I crawled, too, with a pickaxe in hand and a healthy amount of hatred in my heart. But before I could strike the final blow, a man in a well-worn suit touched me on the shoulder and said, "Now, now. There is no need for that."
He clicked a switch on the side of old Froggy, and the machine fell, dead. He had turned it off.
"I'm very sorry for the inconvenience," he said. "This was my invention, you see. I thought it could be put to some use."
"What use?" I said, bewildered.
"Well, I never really got around to figuring that out," he said. Then he pointed to a strange domed vehicle in the distance. "I'm from the future, you see. I visited one Biddy Farmer and thought I would program her old sculpture to clean up all the oil you've got lying around your town. Looks like I've made a bit of a mess."
"You mean to say this whole thing was some future time-meddler pokin' his nose in our hometown business?" I said, and hobbled to a stand. "I'll have you know, sir, you've made more than a bit of a mess. Why, our whole town is in ruins because of you!"
"Now, now," he said, as if I had offended him, "there's no use in trying to blame me if my machinery went awry. After all, I left instructions Biddy never to allow the machine to develop a taste for human blood!"
Just then I heard a click, like a door clicking open, and saw old Stumpy the mule himself standing in the doorway of the vehicle.
"Why, Stumpy!" I said. "What've you got yourself into this time?"
"My time machine!" the man said. But before he could do anything, the machine whirred to life and disappeared in a flash. His time machine was gone.
No one believes us, of course, no matter who we tell. After all, I'm just a crotchety old farmer who's not long for this world, and he's just a man who claims to be from the distant year of 2147. But some say, hundreds of years from now, in some old, rundown museum, there is a single mule tied to a post, and around that mule's neck is a plaque that reads, "Stumpy the Mule, Last Remaining Survivor of Froggy the Automaton's Reign Over Oilfield, Circa 1947."
Stumpy the Mule by Tim Collins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.