Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“Can’t say as that’s business as usual here, either,” Willocks said. “But most folks don’t take to dragging a man out into the street the way you done, and as soon as you got here, to boot.”

I said, “He had it coming, sir.”

Boon said, “Shut up, Edward.”

Marshal Willocks chuckled affably.

“Like I told you, Lenny is the sort of man going to end up gutshot in an alley some fine day. There won’t be any charges. Nobody died, and nobody worth worrying about got hurt any. That being said, I would like to know what it is exactly brings the two of you into Darling. If there’s something I can help you with, I’d be more than glad to be of service. But if it’s some kind of trouble you’re after, I would prefer you keep moving.”

“That’s fair,” Boon said. I was not of the view that we should be spilling our guts to the local constabulary so readily, but I’d already been hushed twice. “I am looking for two people. One English, the other from Siam. They are my parents.”

“You from this Siam, yourself?”

“I was born there.”

“Then I reckon you are the first person from that land ever to have graced the Town of Darling, Texas. As to the Englishman, I couldn’t say without more information.”

She gave the lawman some specifics: name, approximate age (sixty or so), taller than average height, probably gone full gray by then. The gold teeth, of course. Willocks rolled it around in his skull for a little while, even looked through a book of truebills he had stashed in a desk drawer, but the name Arthur Stanley held no meaning for him. By that point in the journey, it was hard to feel disappointment anymore. For me, at least. Nobody ever seemed to know much of anything. I’d never said as much, but as far as I could see, we were chasing ghosts. There was no end to the trail we were on, but in the main I liked it just fine that way.

What the hell else was I going to do?

“You certain this fellow is in this part of Texas?” the marshal asked.

“I am not certain he is in Texas at all,” Boon said. “I have been chasing rumors and hunches for some years now, which landed me hereabouts. I do know Stanley likes to deal in slaving, or that he used to did, and that brought me to Galveston after the war.”

“There was some trouble getting everybody on board with the Proclamation,” Willocks admitted.

“Well,” she said, “he wasn’t there, neither.”

He made a thin line of his mouth and sighed through his nose.

“I’m truly sorry I couldn’t have been more help,” the marshal apologized, extending his hands. “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll wire some boys I know in Goliad about it if you’ll write down those names for me. Mayhap they’ll turn something up, and if they do, you’ll be the second to know, right after me.”

“Much obliged, Mr. Willocks,” Boon said. She stood and shook his hand.

He didn’t offer me his hand, and I didn’t want it anyway. I was no great friend of the law, and I guess he could tell that just by looking at me.

“And don’t worry none about that rooming house,” he added as we headed for the door. “Missus Reynold is a terrible old crone, but there’s no ordinance in Darling that backs her up when she tries to keep people she don’t like from taking up a room. You have any trouble, let me know. I’ll straighten her out.”

I went back out into the daylight shaking my head and trying not to fall down laughing. The way that lawman fell all over himself to help out Boon! If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have said the old boy was smitten. Not that any man could blame him if he was. Everyone figured they wanted a submissive and demure woman, the kind the Good Book tells us to search out to be Godly in her service to her Lord and Master, being the husband, naturally. That’s what every fellow thinks he wants, anyway. Before he meets a gal like Boon.

Only there weren’t any other gals like Boon.

I did not much care for Marshal Tom Willocks.

Chapter Four

We took our supper right there in the main room with everybody else that evening, and we didn’t have a spot of trouble from Missus Reynold or anybody else. People stared and whispered, sure. But no trouble.

I guessed the Great Hero of the Plains Tom Willocks had already put his mighty influence to effect in that regard.

What a damn fraud, I thought.

Boon had some kind of soup. It looked watery to me and she barely touched it. She was a thousand miles away, maybe farther. I tried not to stare, and every time I was on the verge of asking her what was going on in that noggin of hers, I all but bit my own tongue off. If it wasn’t Willocks on her mind, then I supposed it was the fact that she wasn’t any closer to her goal now than she was when we first started out. And that was not to mention the years she spent on the hunt before she ever met me with a rope around my neck.

I was on a roan horse with my hands tied behind my back. The rope went up and over a juniper branch as thick as my thigh, where it was secured to the trunk in a double knot that looked like it was going to hold just fine when that roan was shooed away. In front of me, backlit by the afternoon sun so that I could hardly make out their faces, were three riders. The one in the middle was wearing my hat. He was the one who started the whole mess.

Of course, it was his opinion that the fault was mine. We were at cross-purposes, he and I. He had walked into a saloon south of