Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

one of the blackened miners. He hacked a laugh out of the lungs that would kill him soon enough. No one else laughed with him.

Boon stood stock-still a minute longer, taking her time to holster her Colt and watching Beck Hill so closely I wondered if she was unsure she’d killed him. She then swallowed hard, sniffed, and said once again, “Let’s go.”

There would not be another word of Beck spoken until spring, when I followed her back to Cutter, to the cemetery, where Boon Angchuan wept over the boy she had shot dead that night. Those tears cost us some three days of travel out of our way, and she never again betrayed the smallest memory of any of it. The reptile again, her scales all carefully put back in place, her black eyes unknowable.

Her twin, the prairie lizard, scrambled away with the coming of dusk. The Brute had relaxed some, shaving his cheeks with a knife and his own spit. Paddy dozed against the bark of a cottonwood. Marshal Tom Willocks, ever vigilant in his all-possessing drive to avenge his fingers and savaged pride, remained at the vanguard, watching the sunset and studying for signs he’d never see. Now and again he regarded his thickly bandaged hand, as though forcibly reminding himself of the source of his rage. And me? I could not help but grin at the fury written on his august face, for I knew Boon would not cry after she killed him.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The next shot came some four hours after the previous one. The one after that followed seconds later, and then it turned into a volley. Night had come again to our little grove, and there was no doubt among any of us that there was now more than one attacker.

“She got friends, hoss?” the Brute said, diving away from the fire he had built. The site of the previous campfire was abandoned on account of the roasted skull in the middle of it. No one wanted to touch it, so they just built another fire.

It seemed to me the Brute no longer believed in the theory that it had been Boon out there all along. I was no longer sure I bought it, either. She certainly couldn’t fire three or five repeaters all at once, and as far as I knew her only friend in all the lonesome blue world was me. Then again, I’d known nothing of Franklin Merrick before the moment I met him. There were all sorts of things I didn’t know about Boon.

“Impossible,” said Willocks. He rested the barrel of the rifle on his right forearm and squeezed off a shot with his left hand. Blind fire, it hit nothing. Our attackers responded with another volley, four or five shots in a rapid string. Cottonwood bark burst on either side of me and I hurried deeper into the copse. The marshal did, too, but not before we all heard a high, loud yell from the pitch.

“Comanche,” the Brute hissed.

“That or Kiowa,” said the other gunman. “Probably both.”

“They’ll be wanting the horses,” I suggested.

Willocks said, “Well, they won’t be getting any of them. Not while any one of us still lives and can shoot.”

“After they kill us, then.”

“You shut your God damned mouth if you are going to talk like that,” he said.

The three of them—the Brute, Paddy, and Willocks—clustered together and set to levering rounds into the two repeaters they had between them, a Winchester and a Spencer carbine, along with Lefty’s Springfield, which evidently took five hands to accomplish. So too did they load one revolver after another, of little use at distance but good for if, and when, the raiders closed in on us. The only fortunate thing about the whole frightening affair was the fact that most Plains Indians were lousy shots—ammunition was rare enough for them that they lacked the experience. Willocks’ men did not seem to know that, or at least give two shits. I watched their harried faces, ghostly in the orange firelight, and said to Willocks, “How about you toss me one of them hoglegs?”

“You think I am stupider than you,” he said.

“I think three and a half gun hands is better than two and a half.”

“Stuff your half up your ass,” he said. “I am whole and can shoot as good as any man.”

I shrugged. The deputies peered at me and then at the marshal, weighing my words against his. None of them said anything. I listened to the crackle of the fire and the fussing of the horses. Willocks should have posted one of his men closer to the remuda, but I wasn’t going to tell him anything. In the absence of further gunfire and halloos from the raiders, it was a certainty that they were drawing closer by the minute.

It hadn’t been but a few months since the second battle at Adobe Walls, which wasn’t much more than pissing distance from where we were besieged beneath the Caprock Escarpment. That was about twenty-five or thirty men against some seven hundred Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, something I reckoned felt good to remember given how well the white men fared by the end of it all, though I sorely wished for Billy Dixon’s famous Big Fifty Sharps. What I wasn’t so aware of at the time, however, was how high and hot the blood ran amongst the Plains Indians in those bloody days, nor that the indecisive battles waged all across the Panhandle that year were heating up into what the papers and dime novels came to call the Red River War.

And we four—not counting the two already dead—were right in the middle of it.

“It’s that Quanah Parker, you reckon?” said the Irishman.

“Christ, no,” said the Brute. “Probably just boys ain’t even got any hair on their balls, aiming to count coup on us and rob us of our mounts.”

“And raise your fucking hair if you don’t shut up and pay attention,” Willocks growled. “Be quiet and be ready, God damn