Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

From where I stood in the moonlight at the edge of the grove, I concluded that Boon had been right the first time. There were five of these Little Rabbits, two of them sitting on paint horses and the three laughing boys afoot. In short order, one by one, their laughter simmered down and died out. Then it was just me and them, all regarding one another as seriously as though the mirth never started at all.

I heard a scuffle behind me, in the cottonwoods, and fought the urge to turn and see. Boon surely had it in hand. I did not want to ruin whatever it was I was doing, the specifics of which seemed so clear moments ago but were murky as cowboy coffee now.

One of the handsome boy’s friends absquatulated his flank and leapt gingerly into the saddle of the dead Brute’s gelding. He raised his lance at the moon and spoke in words I could not understand, stern and serious and directed at me. He talked for a short while, a little speech, I guessed. Whether he assumed I could not make any of it out or not, I couldn’t say. But I paid rapt attention and listened as if I could.

When he was done speaking, the Little Rabbit on the gelding wheeled the horse around in a circle and gestured at the handsome boy and the other Kiowa afoot. Shoulders slumped, they went like they were bored back to the remuda and climbed on horses, a paint and the marshal’s piebald, and the handsome boy took up the string slung ’round the Irish deputy’s mount. Between the five of them they took four mounts and left the nag dying in the dirt. Only one of the original remuda remained, along with the pack mule. They would not leave us with nothing, which I respected a very great deal.

The Little Rabbit with the lance gigged the gelding and took off at a trot, riding a length away before turning about and loping right back at me. I dug my heels into the loam and set my jaw, watching that lance go up, the feathers at its tip shaking gorgeously in the sparse, silver light, and then swing down when he reined in of a sudden and touched the end of the lance to my left shoulder. He held it there and I did not move an inch. We met one another’s gaze for what was probably a few seconds but felt like ages and ages. The Little Rabbit’s considerable eyebrows drew together into a tight knit and he pressed on the lance just enough to put a little pressure on my shoulder. I resisted, stayed on my feet. The Little Rabbit relented, raised the lance, and turned his mouth down at the corners with a sharp nod.

He cried out; a war whoop, I guessed.

He had counted his coup.

One of his brethren whooped loudly, too, as the others pulled into a cluster of horseflesh and stamping hooves, preparing to take their bounty and light out, away from our little camp. I stepped back, slowly, three or four paces, keeping my eyes trained on the Kiowa who’d counted coup on me. He opened his mouth to speak, tilting his head back slightly, when a gun boomed behind me and the young man’s nose exploded in smoky cloud of blood and bone and skin. His left eye went wide as the right one sank into its cavity, and the Little Rabbit dropped away, off the left flank of his stolen pony, dead when he hit the ground.

Boon yelled, “No!”

I think I may have, too, but all the world was spinning by then, my skull a hazy puzzlement of shock and confusion. One thing and one thing only rang clear and true in my mind: Tom Willocks had killed that boy in cold blood.

And, in what can only be understood as a reasonable response to such an atrocity, the dead boy’s compadres drew down on us all, rifle barrels glinting in the meager moonlight, while they shouted and raged. I could not blame them one whit. It was what anyone would have done, white, Indian, or Siamese.

Which is not to say I was prepared to die that night. Rather, I dove for cover, away from the gunfire and into the brush. At my age and size, grace was long behind me if ever I knew her at all, so my move was clumsy and painful, and in the end, I slammed my spine on a series of sharp rocks jutting up from the cottonwood roots. I felt blood welling up on my back and I could hear the Kiowa shouting as they fired their rifles again and again into the copse. My anger at Willocks trumped my fear of the Little Rabbits. I had no doubt that once they were close enough to determine that we were not the buffalo hunters they sought, they had no intention to harm us unless absolutely necessary. As was so commonly the case with white men in those parts, Willocks made it necessary. It was to my amazement that I could hate him still more than I did already.

“Red fucking devils,” Willocks hollered, and his boots tramped past my head, through the brush and to the edge of the grove. More gunfire, his and theirs. Boon was not with him. I belly-crawled away from the fracas, back toward the guttering fire, and that was where she was, crouched and weeping.

She had found what remained of Franklin Merrick’s skull, burned black as pitch among the rocks and cinders. Had it been me, I might not have deduced it was him, but it wasn’t me. It was Boon. And Boon knew.

Her cry of no had nothing to do with the murderous shot Willocks fired into that Kiowa boy’s face. She was insensate, elsewhere, drowned in grief for the loss of man I’d never heard her mention in