The Wild West

Maybe this all relates back to Fransesco T. Vincent, or Eight Ring Vince as he came to be called. In 1832, he surfaced in New Mexico, a seller of cotton garments turned gun fighter, most notable because he lacked the middle finger of each hand. To hear him tell it, the fingers were shot off during a skirmish in a mining camp at the spur of a mountain in Nevada. However he lost them, his fame was brief as his impairment slowed his perfect draw just enough. A veteran pistolier named Dervis Wertman, a.k.a. the whirling Dervis, put two bullets in his chest on a dusty afternoon outside a dry goods store that August. His mother shipped his body to a cemetery outside New Ipswich and buried him under the epitaph, “Never less the man.”