The first time Orpheus ever saw him was in the Corvus system, preaching hellfire and damnation from a pulpit, and daring anyone in his audience—which included some pretty notorious characters—not to make a donation to his personalized, monogrammed poorbox. The next time was two years later, out by the Quinellus cluster, where Father William was serenely blessing the departed spirits of four men and a woman he had just killed. Orpheus ran into him a third and final time on Girodus II and watched, fascinated, as he shot down two outlaws, turned in their scalps for the reward (the taking of scalps was unnecessary, but nobody felt obligated to argue that particular point with Father William), donated the money to the local church, and spent the next two days spreading the gospel to the elephantine natives of the planet.

Orpheus tried to find out more about his past, but it was a fruitless quest. The only thing Father William wanted to talk about was God, though with a drink or two in his massive belly he’d be willing to segue into a discussion of Sodom and Gomorrah. He was a fabulous figure, standing just under six feet five inches, weighing close to four hundred pounds, always clad in black. He wore a pair of black leather holsters, each equipped with laser pistols which he insisted contained the purifying fire of the Lord. He had forsworn all pleasures of the flesh except gluttony, explaining that a weak evangelist was an ineffective evangelist, and that he aimed to run through a lot of calories bringing Christianity to the godless worlds of the Frontier. It was his earnest belief that any world that played host to a wanted killer was more in need of salvation than most, and it was his intention to bring those worlds into the fold by eradicating the evil and spreading the Word among the survivors. The already damned would simply start serving their infernal sentences a little early, and the remainder, freed from their evil influence, would be snatched from Satan’s avaricious grasp for all eternity—or until such time as the government issued paper on them.

Father William wasn’t as famous as he might have been. Black Orpheus only gave him three verses, a third of what he’d given to Giles Sans Pitié, who wasn’t anywhere near as colorful or interesting, but that was mainly because Orpheus figured the Bible-toting bounty hunter was so much bigger than life that there simply wasn’t a lot more that could be said about him. And since the stanzas were brief and muted, and the ever-growing epic was now well past two thousand verses, people who hadn’t heard Black Orpheus expound upon him could be forgiven for having overlooked his exploits.