Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

back, and only briefly. The Little Rabbit set on his mount, a broad-chested youth of maybe fifteen or sixteen, was watching us go. We were done there.

Tom Willocks, however, was not. His screams pierced the dead of night, shredding his throat from the sound of it. We reached the center of camp, gathered as many of the repeaters and pistols as we could carry, and looted the corpses as quickly and efficiently as we could. Boon motioned with her head to the west, on the opposite side of the grove. Willocks screamed his last at about the same time we reached the bay gelding Boon had staked there, alongside a sturdy-looking mule she’d used for a pack animal. Now, I knew, it would be my mount. At least for the time being.

I stepped up into the worn saddle on the mule’s back and said, “Reckon he’s dead yet?”

“I hope not,” she said, and she turned the gelding to point his nose back to where I’d come, at the New Mexico Territory and beyond. I wondered if indeed we were still California bound, but I did not ask. As long as I was back with Boonsri, it did not much matter to me where we went.

After all, I loved her more than I could ever possibly put into words, so I never bothered to try.

At dawn, we encountered a sparse column of U.S. Calvary soldiers, a dozen ragged men riding a dozen ragged, half-starved horses with their ribs showing through their thin flesh. At the head of the procession was a bedraggled lieutenant, by the looks of the chevron stitched onto his blue dress blouse. The officer’s cheeks were sunken and unshaved, his eyes heavily lidded and swollen. The men he commanded looked much worse than he. These soldiers had seen some action and were probably headed back to Fort Union in the Territory. We were all of us moving in the same direction, though Boon and I moved considerably faster than the exhausted regiment.

Boon said, “Don’t go spilling your frijoles to anybody.”

I parted my lips to protest my innocence, but only shrugged. I could not make any convincing argument that I didn’t talk too much.

A few of the men tensed up at sight of us, but most couldn’t have cared less. The lieutenant eyed us cagily until we were within hailing range, when he said simply, “Ho.”

Boon gigged her horse and caught up to the officer, riding past the enlisted men who mostly stared at her and ignored me as I struggled to keep pace.

The lieutenant looked her over with narrowed eyes and said, “You talk English?”

“Better than most,” said Boon.

“Scout?”

“I am not.”

“What tribe?”

“I am not Indian.”

“Hmm,” grunted the lieutenant. “Whether you are or ain’t, this here territory is mighty dangerous for travelers these days. Expect we’ll have most of the rogues killed or penned back in by spring, but there’s still a mess of savages crawling about these parts looking for mischief.”

“Hmm,” grunted Boon. “Almost seems like they’re mad about something.”

“They’re breaking treaty.”

Boon canted her head to the side. “If you mean Medicine Lodge, the buffalo hunters broke it first.”

The lieutenant frowned.

“Seen any sign, Squaw?”

Boon’s mouth formed a tight, thin line and she glared so hard at the man I thought her eyes might bore holes through his skull. White men are not great listeners, she’d told me from time to time. And she was right about that.

She drew in a deep breath and, as if it hurt to do so, took her gaze away from the lieutenant and looked out over the great, flat, bone-dry expanse of New Mexico laid out before us.

“We seen some bodies,” she said at some length. “Four or five white men. Not soldiers. A cluster of cottonwoods maybe five, six hours east of here, along the Caprock.”

“Christ,” the officer hissed. “Them Comanche fuckers, I’ll bet both balls on it.”

“Could be,” Boon said. “Could be they killed each other. White men are strange.”

She shrugged her shoulders at him and took her horse from a lope to a trot, riding out ahead of the column. The lieutenant sat in the saddle and watched her with something like wonder and maybe irritation. He hadn’t anything else to say.

I rode up beside her, the mule getting more stubborn by the hour, and glanced back over my shoulder to find the regiment wheeling around to go back east. If they managed to keep the same pace they had been riding, I reckoned they’d come across Willocks and his men by noontime or thereabouts.

Them, and the scorched skull in the firepit.

“Why not let the buzzards and bugs have ’em?” I asked her.

“Don’t know much of shit about most of those men,” she said. “Could be not a decent soul among them, but I don’t know for sure. Might could be there’s kin back home, be wanting to know what became of them. Decent burial ain’t too much to ask.”

“Decent burial,” I said, shifting my rear on the mule’s back. I was thinking of the Dejasu brothers, but also the cowboys we’d brought into Red Foot. Some dead got a little respect, others didn’t. I couldn’t suss it out. I said, “I don’t tend to understand you, Boon.”

She said, “I know, Edward.”

Part Three

Barbary Coast

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I was worrying the pit in my gums where Les had knocked my front tooth out, poking and prodding with my tongue. Across from me on the facing bench seat, Boon stared out the window with the cowboy’s watch clutched in one hand, watching the territories flit by as the locomotive trundled west. She’d had to waste the tickets she’d bought the first time and spend a considerable chunk of her poke to get her hands on the bay gelding and pack mule that carried her out to the Staked Plains, and once we made it to another stop along the tracks—not Revelation, of course, which would not have rolled out a welcoming party complete with brass band—she sold those animals and reinvested in new tickets.