Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

time or a choice in the matter. Nothing in it for him, so far as I could imagine. Just plain meanness.

The man driving the mules cussed and spat, whipping his beasts as the wagon trundled on past the huts. I’d been in and out over the night, sleeping for probably a few hours at a time and then slowly coming awake here in the dark, there in the gathering dawn. Now it was mid-morning, and the sun baked the foothills despite the season and northerly location. It could have been back in the New Mexico Territory for all the sweat oozing out of my skin. I tried to turn over to at least shield my face from it, but my wound barked at me and I could only yelp from the pain. The mule driver ignored me, but somebody else laughed.

That God damned Irishman, Bill. He sat upon a white and chestnut roan that meandered with its head down in time with the wagon. Bill looked straight at me, reins in hand, and offered a wink.

“Rise and shine, you Arkie trash,” he trilled. “We’re nearly there.”

“Mornin’, Bill,” I said.

I could hear another rider to the other side of me and at least one or two trailing behind the wagon, but I decided against further aggravating the new hole in my body by trying to get a gander. I just took it for granted they were there and watched as Handsome Frank came fully into view.

There wasn’t much to it, or rather, left of it.

If Revelation was a boom town with its precipitous growth and constant construction, what I was dragged into was the hard bust on the other end of that rope. What passed for the road into and through the abandoned mining town was riddled with dandelions, crabgrass, and chickweed. No one had trodden the road for some time. The town itself comprised one- and two-story buildings of both adobe and lumber, all of them sagging like they were being slowly pulled into the ground. The wooden structures, among them a small hotel, a farrier’s shop, a tiny livery stable, and what appeared to have once been a blacksmith’s shack, suffered badly from dry rot. The adobe ones, mostly former domiciles as far as I could tell, crumbled like their smaller counterparts on the far side of the settlement. Only the hotel and the farrier had ever had windows of glass, and all of them were broken, leaving nothing but tiny, ragged shards sticking out from the frames. For reasons I could not fathom, the three outhouses spaced evenly apart behind the main buildings had fared better than anything else.

Handsome Frank was a ghost town. Maybe ghosts shit like everyone else.

The mule driver pulled tight at the reins and brought his mules to a slow canter up to the hotel, where we stopped. Bill rode a bit ahead to dismount by the hitching post beside the building, where he tied off and stretched his back from the ride. He wore shooters on each hip, visible to me when his coat lifted from the stretching. With a curt nod of his head, the other riders rode up, too. Three of them altogether, rough-looking men I presumed answered to the Irishman. They, too, hitched up. They, too, were all well-heeled.

The only ones who weren’t packing iron were me and the mule driver, who climbed down from his perch and pissed on a cluster of swinecress in the middle of the street. He whistled as he did so. The Irishman rolled his shoulders, flashed a toothy grin at me, and waltzed right into the hotel. His men milled about like cows.

I lay back down and shut my eyes against the glare of the sun. My throat felt like sandpaper and my stomach twisted with pain. All the same, I dozed until I was waked again by a resounding English voice.

“Like most California boom towns,” Stanley loudly announced over me, “this one led a very short life. It exploded from a few prospector’s tents to everything you see here inside nine months, and less than a year after that there wasn’t a man jack in sight. Mines played out, left most with nothing but the clothes on their backs. My uncle got very fucking rich, however.”

A horse nickered over by the hitching post. I licked my lips, which did absolutely nothing, and opened my eyes. Stanley leaned over the side of the wagon, smoking a cigarette and watching me intently through narrowed eyes.

“I wasn’t here yet,” he said. “But I own it now. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll be looking for something else entirely we never knew we wanted, and I’ll find it right here.”

“Guess you do all right with little girls,” I rasped at him.

I hadn’t known one of Bill’s roughnecks was looming just behind me until he hit me in the head. It wasn’t enough to scramble my brains or put me out, but it hurt like six different kinds of hell.

“God damn it,” I said.

“You know I’ve been on four continents and more than a dozen countries? For all the caterwauling I hear about the way this Chinaman or that Negro gets treated here, you ought to see how some of these people treat their very own back home. I never kidnapped anybody, fat man. I purchased commodities, fair and square. More than half the time from their own parents.”

“Must save you a passel to just sire them your own damn self,” I said.

“I have appetites like every other man,” Stanley said. “And because it’s the way of nature, that sometimes results in bastards and half-breeds.”

He spread out his hands before me like he’d just performed a magic trick. His gold teeth gleamed in the bright afternoon sun. It looked like he’d swallowed a lantern.

“Why’d you doctor me up?”

“Don’t tell me you’re that stupid,” he said. “Even a hick like you knows about bait.”

“Never fished much.”

“You shall today.”

“And here I thought this was going to be a bad day.”

Stanley chuckled