Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

had kept things running, it seemed, while the men and the one woman were out carousing, setting fire to stagecoaches and abducting nice folks like me and Boon.

All told, there were fewer than thirty of them in the camp. I knew the Army was giving the Indians of every tribe an honest-to-God drubbing, but I hadn’t heard of any legitimate bands reduced to such small numbers. These, I concluded, were some manner of outlaws, off-agency and off-treaty.

Not that the treaties were worth the paper they were written on. But still.

We were fed some sort of roasted meat. I could not place the flavor and I did not want to. I was hungry enough that I ate everything I was given without waiting until it was cool enough to not burn my lips and gullet. I had a sense it was wolf meat, and had it not been such lean times, I might have had an issue with it. Wolf meat tastes vile. The way things were, I wished for more.

“What happens now?” I asked Boon, as if she’d know.

She chewed her meat without complaint.

“Hard to say,” she said, her mouth full. “Never heard of any Apache filling your belly before killing you, though.”

“You heard a lot about Apache?”

“No.”

I was not reassured. Boon was clutching at straws. Neither of us had the first clue what was to happen next. I wondered if the Mescaleros would let me have some paper and the pencil I kept in my saddlebag to write a last letter, but I dismissed the idea when the only person I could think of sending it to was Boon. I could just tell her my final thoughts before I was killed.

They were: “Should’a left that stagecoach alone.”

“It was a trap, all right,” she agreed.

The woman watched us intently while we spoke and finished eating. Soon thereafter, old square-face re-emerged from the buffalo-skin entrance to his wickiup and strode stiffly to the fire. I guessed it was time and thought about praying. It wasn’t much of a thought. If God thought it was okay for us to be in this position, I wasn’t going to beg him to get us out of it. There just wasn’t any talking to people like that.

Square-face spoke to the woman, and the woman took Boon by the forearm to guide her up to her feet. I stood up, too, but square-face barked something harsh and one of his men pushed me back down on the ground. Someone laughed. I really amused them with my antics, it appeared. I ought to have been in the circus.

Once Boon was up, the woman stepped aside to let square-face look her up and down. He said something in a low voice I couldn’t hear, so I wouldn’t have understood it even if he was talking American. But Boon nodded—just the once—and together they went back through the buffalo hide. She looked back before she disappeared into the wickiup.

I said, “It’s been a real pleasure riding with you.”

Boon said, “Don’t be a moron. I’ll see you in the morning.”

It must have been going on midnight by then, though I could not say for sure or for certain, and I was awake another two to three hours by that fire, well past the time it died down to nothing but cinders and ash. And all that while, the woman from the raiding party sat across from me and stared like she could see into my future, to the moment of my demise. For a while I thought perhaps she would take me to another of the slapdash wickiups scattered around the periphery of the camp, but she only gazed at me without expression until I got used to it and fell asleep under the starlight.

At first light, Boon woke me with a nudge in the ribs from her boot. I opened my eyes to find her with the reins to her palomino in hand, her gunbelt reaffixed to her waist. The camp was cold and otherwise vacant, apart from my horse staked some twenty feet distant.

“We lost a day’s riding,” she said. “Come on.”

“What happened?” I asked her.

“Saddle up.”

It was half an hour before I caught up with her on a thin, barely recognizable trail snaking up the Texan side of the Big Bend toward El Paso. The band leader’s Springfield was tied behind her cantle. I didn’t ask her about it. I didn’t ask her about anything. We rode silently until making our own camp that night, and she sold the rifle in El Paso the following day. Boon always preferred working with short guns.

Maybe she just didn’t want to look at it and remember anything. I never knew. I just assumed she’d saved my life again, somehow.

Now that we were roaming through the middle of Comanche country, I couldn’t help but ponder on whether she’d have to do that again. Whatever it was that she’d done.

We put that camp smoke behind us and I kept alert, scanning the horizon on all sides for signs of new friends, but I didn’t see another living soul the rest of the day, unless beeves and prairie birds have souls. I knew for a fact mosquitoes did not, and I saw plenty of them, too.

After an early supper of salted venison and cowboy coffee that just about knocked the boots off my feet, Boon retrieved the paper on Dejasu and opened it up on the ground to the back side. There, Willocks had scrawled a rough map of the Panhandle with dotted lines for trails he could conjure from memory. Said trails led to a point in the state’s upper northwest corner where it met with both Indian Territory and the New Mexico Territory. The marshal made an X there, underneath which he’d written the words RED FOOT.

I’d never heard of it. I hadn’t heard of Stiff Neck, either, until we were in it. Mayhap Red Foot was a cholera town, too. Or mayhap it only existed in Willocks’s imagination. There was