The man with no name (and a mantis shrimp).

[baloonworld]

xanthipe

The man walked into a bar, light pack on his back, heavy, water-filled aquarium slung across his chest. He put the thick glass container down carefully on the bar and ordered a drink. In the greenish depths of the tank, the mantis shrimp swiveled its freakishly complex eyes around, so that each part of the hideously complex array of light receptors on its retiners could register an opinion. The barman looked best through the top band; his motions with the whisky optic smooth and deft while his coloration was dull and uninspireing, even UV and IR, where humans normally dressed like colourblind peacocks.

As he came in, a number of locals glanced up, lapsed into silence for a few seconds and then returned to their talk; he smiled slightly and sat back to see what would happen next.
"We know you're in there! Come out with your hands up!" The posse was made of the normal collection of toughs with guns and tacky badges that passed for law enforcement in the `civilized' world.
The locals dived off their chairs and began squirming for the back door. He threw his drink on the floor, and scooped up a glass full of water and four inches of stomatopod from the aquarium. Holding them both carefully, he hurried to the door and peered around the frame. Five of them. The leader had a rifle, the rest pistols. All had horses and large hats.

He put the aquarium on the floor and lay down behind it, head pressed to the glass. The last of the locals was out, and the shooting started. After a while, it stopped. The bar was a wreck; the aquarium had a few new roundish lumps of lead decorating one side.
He hurried back to the door, grabbing a barstool, and ran out, throwing the pint glass underarm. Four of the posse were still reloading, the sixth man got a shot off at the glass as it flew into the leaders lap, and the leaders rifle was just too slow a weapon to react in time.

Th mantis shrimp climbed through the wreckage of the glass- its was semi amphibious, but its short rear legs were too weak to support it well without positive buoyancy.

He ran between the horsemen to deny the rest of them a target, and swung his barstool with freakish speed, connecting with one of the mens' elbow, hard enough to shatter bone.
The mantis shrimp found the leader's crotch and struck with its tiny club-claws and the brutal force that meant that its tank had to be bullet-proof. The leader doubled over, incapacitated by pain and hemorrhaging internally.

The man swung under the belly of a prancing horse and straight-armed the seat of the barstool into the face of a second man, knocking him off his horse with a broken nose.

The mantis shrimp rolled off the leaders lap and onto his horse's back, which it then attempted to break via successive applications of its hideously powerful clubs. The horse reared, throwing rider and salt-water crustacean to the ground, pranced angrily about, and generally got in the way of the remaining members of the posse who were trying to fall back, to get some distance and a better angle to fire at the man, who was now hidden from sight between two riderless horses.

With many a backwards glance, some in spectra completely alien to the the remaining combatants, the mantis shrimp smashed in the skull of the leader and then began the long roll back towards its tank. A four inch crustacean has to pick its fights, and the desert sun was not good for the soft flesh of its forth-and-lower segments.

He put a foot in a stirrup, grabbed the saddle-horn and hung beside his new horse. He waited for the remaining two men to turn before galloping up to them and beating them with the barstool.