Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“By God,” I said, pulling on my mounts reins to let Boon and the girl to catch up a bit closer. “She talks.”

“Shut up, Edward,” Boon scolded me. Then, turning her head as far as she could without knocking the kid off the horse they shared, she said, “It’s all right, honey. You can talk to me.”

“And me,” I said.

Boon shot me a look. I shut up.

The girl pursed her mouth and swallowed hard, keeping her eyes down and hands on Boon’s waist. Both horses slowed to a meandering pace. The cabin by then was far enough behind us that we couldn’t see it anymore, nor any other signs of man or beast.

Finally, with what looked to be no small amount of effort, the kid cleared her throat and tried again.

“It’s a town,” she said, her voice small and hoarse.

“What’s a town, darlin’?” Boon said.

“Handsome Frank is,” said the kid. “Used to be, I mean. I heard miners talk about it sometimes. When they…”

She trailed off, leaving that bit of horror to the imagination. I chose not to imagine it.

“A mining town,” I said.

“Ghost town, sounds like,” Boon added.

The girl nodded at that.

“Handsome Frank, California,” I said, staring at the trail ahead of us like we were already on our way. Which I guess we were, now that we knew.

Boon reached back with one hand and gently patted at the kid’s shoulder.

“Thanks, darlin’,” she said. “I figured you for clever, and there you are.”

The girl sort of half-smiled at that and pressed her forehead against Boon’s back.

I smiled a little bit, myself.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The ghost town was a fair piece north of Grizzly Flats, more or less eighty miles as the crow flies. We got our bearings from a ferryman at Sweeney’s Crossing, which wasn’t anything better than a swing ferry, two posts on either bank, and a rope to guide it across. The ferryman was a disabused old codger who spent his father’s inheritance on coming west to get rich and ended up charging two dollars a head and an extra three per horse to get across the Cosumnes River. I reckoned if the geezer survived another decade, at those prices he might get rich still.

“Hell of a boom town for a minute or three,” he grumbled at us as he took his sweet time guiding us over the water. “Twenty, twenty-five years back. Thousands of folks ran full chisel to get jobs up there in those days. Even declared its independence from the Union before those gray-coated traitors down south ever done.”

He gave me the stink-eye with that bit of information, having heard my Arkansas accent, no doubt. No use telling him I was a coward who hid out in those years. That wouldn’t have been any better.

“Independence didn’t last but a few months, though,” he went on. “Fourth of July came around and there wasn’t nothing to celebrate. Folks didn’t like that, so they gave up on the Great Republic of Handsome Frank.”

The ferryman laughed at that until his laughter turned to consumptive coughing and he was hacking up half his lung meat into the river. So much for getting rich on gouging travelers, I thought.

Boon said, “But it’s a ghost town now?”

“Has been a mess of years,” the old man said, still hacking up phlegm. “Prospectors from Minnesota or some such place set it all up in the Forties and it was as good a placer outfit as any. Trouble was, the whole caboodle kept burning right down to the fucking ground. Sorry, Miss.”

Boon waved it off.

“They’d build it all back up, on account of there was still plenty of color in the place, but then it’d just burn down again. Last big one was fifty-eight, fifty-nine, something like that. Most everybody moved on after that. Reckon some stuck around, tried to get the last of the yellow out of the earth, but if there’s anybody left now, I’d figure them for crazier than shit-house rats. Sorry again, Miss.”

“Sounds like there was always a bit of crazy in that place,” I said.

The ferryman chuckled.

“That’s gold for you, son. Y’all go looking, you’ll end up with fevered brains, too. I seen it a hundred thousand times. Mark my words, some scientist back east’ll have it figured in another twenty years that gold poisons the blood and makes men lunatics. Poison’s so vile just thinking about it too much does the trick. Fucking gold!”

“We’re not interested in gold,” Boon said before he could apologize for his mouth again.

“Then you’re crazier than the ones who is,” he said with a grin.

Eventually, we got to the other side of the river. I was running my hand over my cheeks when we got there, wondering if most of the stubble there had sprouted during the journey. The old man kept chattering at us while we disembarked and stepped up into our saddles, warning us that it was a fool’s errand to bother heading for Handsome Frank and that there wasn’t any gold left in California, no matter what Boon said about our intentions. That ferryman was still talking even as we gigged our beasts into a canter away from him and his flapping jaw. What he had was a lonely way of life, I figured.

The rest of the day’s ride was done mostly in silence. Unsurprisingly, I talked the most, Boon only a bit here and there, and the girl—whose name we still did not know—not at all. We gave Placerville a wide berth and camped cold just north of her after dusk. Boon washed her back wound with some water she’d canteened from the Cosumnes and she rinsed out her bandage as best she could before squeezing it out and wrapping herself up again. There was still a good deal of wincing and grunting while she accomplished these tasks, and I knew it was far from a good idea to keep from seeing a sawbones rather than continue onto some dead mining town. But I never had called the