Daniel’s body swung gently from the tree in the hot breeze of the Colorado Territory, as the rope tied to the tree branch held his bulbous body. Ernie had hunted down the man who had killed his wife and daughter and found a morbid sense of pleasure watching the man swing. Forgotten were the laws of men the moment he had found their bodies strewn across the land before his cabin. Gone were his senses the moment he laid their bodies to rest. Hell would follow him, leaving behind a trail of blood and bodies until he caught up with the fiend who took his family.

               “I figured I would find ya here,” Jacob’s voice said from behind Ernie; a marshal in the Colorado Territory, he had met once or twice during his hunt.

Jacob’s horse seemed to move like a specter across the dead grassland, or perhaps Erine’s mind was too occupied to hear the clops of hoven feet approaching; either way, it spelled trouble as he knew the marshal was there to take him in for murder—of which there was plenty, as Daniel’s core of friends were reluctant to give the man up, even to satisfy a revenge sought by a surviving husband and father regardless of how the gang didn’t agree with his decision to heartlessly kill a farmer’s wife and daughter over a few dollars found on the premises.

               “Kindly leave me be, Jake,” Ernie said, looking up at the body hanging from the rope.

               “Law says I can’t, Ernie.”

               “My family is gone because of this piece of shit,” Ernie said in protest, spitting a wad of chewing tobacco at Daniel’s feet.

               “No one blames ya fer killin’ Daniel, here, but that wasn’t the only fella you put down, was it?”

               “Of course not.”

               “Put the scattergun down, Ernie.”

               “Quite the mess that I’ve gotten myself into, isn’t it?” Ernie asked, looking down at the shotgun in his lap, his finger resting on the trigger. Reality started to set in to what he had done to capture his quarry, and the people he killed to do so. Sanity was a luxury he had given up the moment he placed that last shovel of dirt over the burials.

The marshal stepped down from his horse and walked over to the broken man on the ground, his hand resting on the handle of his Peacemaker. Unknown birds called in the distance as the sun began to sink into the mountain range of the west. Viscous puddles of old, dried blood formed under the feet of the hanged man, as Jacob saw the multitude of lacerations from a knife, as well as bullet holes in the arms and legs.

               “Why did you bother hangin’ the man?” Jacob asked, stopping just behind Ernie. Xanthic splotches long began forming on Daniel’s skin, giving the body an ungodly presence, as it appeared more yellow than the normal, tanned hue of human skin in the Colorado sun.

               “You should leave,” Ernie said, standing to his feet, pointing his weapon at the marshal.

               Zippered across Ernie’s face were recent cuts, possibly made by a knife, and quite possibly made by Daniel. A ticking clock would have died in silence, as the two men stared into each other’s eyes, waiting for the other to make a move, but Ernie’s gun was already drawn, and the Peacemaker was comfortable in its holster on the marshal’s hip.

               Brays from distant donkeys startled Ernie into pulling both triggers of the shotgun, as if taunting the man to spur into action, sending the body of the marshal back and onto the earth before him. Calmness swept over Ernie, like the gentle wind caressing the body behind him—comfortable in his fate as he had nothing left to lose or gain—awaiting the posse that would surely see him on similar gallows, or perhaps even that same tree.

In this assignment, I had to write an abecedarian story without using sentence modifications to start with a gerund form. And one of the sentences had to be exactly 100 words long. Can you find the long sentence in this one?