Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

Plains Indians commit depredations the likes of which curled the short hairs of every man jack reading about them back East? Well, surely. But none so grim as what was done to them, year after year, generation after generation. In those days, it was mostly about the buffalo, near as I could tell. Whites just about wiped them out, never a care that so many of the people that already lived around there depended on them for pert near everything in their lives. You take everything a man’s got, he’s liable to take something from you, just to get by. And you get to pushing him around on account of that, well, we’ve been over this already. Things got hairy. There was plenty of hate to go around. And sometimes, if you were on the unlucky side of the fence, you ended up pinned down in a grove of cottonwoods somewhere along the Caprock with half a dozen Kiowa raiders moving in for the kill.

The times were just like that. But I can’t say as any of the three of us—me, Boon, or Marshal Tom Willocks—was pondering the finer intricacies of politics there in that copse, surrounded by Indians and Willocks’ dead men.

“I should rather not kill if it can be avoided,” Boon said, narrowing her eyes to slits at the darkness.

“That’s a hell of a laugh coming from you,” said Willocks.

“Po-Lanh-Yope,” she said.

“That Siamese?”

“Kiowa. Little Rabbits. Warrior society for boys before they are men. They are only trying to prove themselves.”

I listened to her intently, amazed that she held this kind of information in her head. Sometimes Boon just knew things. Her brain was like a sponge.

“You will hack off a man’s head,” Willocks said, “but you will not kill redskin pups.”

“That’s about the size of it,” she said.

“She got a moral code all her own, Marshal,” I said. “You come to get acquainted with it.”

“Even if it’s them what killed those hunters you saw?” he said.

“Even if,” said Boon. “Didn’t know them. Not my business.”

“Well,” he said, “it is my business. This may not be my jurisdiction, but I still stand for law and order, by God.”

“That’s what Judge Dejasu thought, too,” she said, and she gave the marshal a cool stare. She only broke it when one of the Little Rabbits emitted a high yelp and the horses got to stamping their hooves. Willocks swung around, leading with the repeater, and squeezed off a shot as Boon reached out and knocked the barrel upward with her wrist. The shot went wild, the marshal aired his lungs with a volley of foul curses, and the Little Rabbits responded in kind with shouts and gunfire. We all three hit the dirt.

From where I lay, I could see that the shot was not as wild as I’d thought. The poor, scrawny nag I had been assigned at the jail in Revelation was on the ground, still breathing but getting badly trampled by the other horses. Willocks had shot the suffering beast in the ribs.

I also saw a colorful and beautiful array of armaments among the tramping hooves and scrabbling moccasins; long lances and war-clubs, a pair of shields made from the hides of buffalos and stretched taut over those beast’s massive skulls. Furs and feathers and bird’s claws adorned everything, a wild display of reds and browns and yellows that lent a decidedly ritual bent to the entire proceedings. These boys were going all out, and the ceremonial aspect to their gear drove into my mind a rare notion.

“This ain’t got nothing to do with killing,” I said. My voice was low and soft, and I wasn’t sure they heard any of it, so I pushed myself up to my knees and got unsteadily to my feet. The boys cried out some more and the horses continued to trample that unfortunate nag and strings were thrown to collect those that were doing the trampling. “I said this ain’t for killing, y’all. It’s what Boon said. Proving theyselves.”

“Get your head down, you God damn fool,” Willocks barked.

“You wouldn’t want to lose the privilege of killing me yourself,” I said, and with that, I set my .44-40 on the ground, let my hands dangle free at my sides, and walked slowly out of the grove toward the remuda.

“He has gone loco,” said Willocks.

Boon snorted.

“Sometimes he is more clever than I give him credit for,” Boon said. “Not often, but sometimes.”

The shadows grew thicker the farther from the fire I walked, but the silvery moonlight gave something of a path once my eyes started to get used to the difference. One of the mounts—I couldn’t tell which one—reared back on its haunches and kicked its forelegs up into the air. A Kiowa boy had a string around its massive neck and spoke quietly in his own tongue to calm the horse he was aiming to steal. Another boy, one of the two with the extraordinary shields, went ramrod-straight at sight of my advance and called out to his comrades, wide-eyed and dumbfounded. He wore breechclouts with leather leggings, his torso bare, and his raven-wing black hair hung long and loose on his shoulders. I thought he was the handsomest lad I was like to ever see in all my days, like a brown Adonis cut from stone. I also thought there was a chance, however insignificant, that I was making a terribly stupid mistake that would end with metal in my heart and my scalp on a lance.

I showed him my palms, then reconsidered and let my hands drop again. I slowed to a stop, about twenty feet away from him. Two of his friends stopped what they were doing, having taken notice, and gathered on either side of the handsome lad. They all beheld me with wonder for a heavy minute before erupting into peals of throaty laughter. I didn’t know what in particular was so funny about me, but I got laughed down often enough that I wasn’t too surprised about