Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

Dutch oven over the fire. Other men spoke in hushed voices, men I couldn’t see from where I was. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, either. I wasn’t close enough.

Somebody laughed. I heard the small voice whine again. The fingers of my left hand tightened around the forestock. My right forefinger grazed the trigger. I knew what to do next, and that was wait for Boon to make the first play. After that was anybody’s guess.

I held my breath and moved around the rock a few feet. Then I could see that the camp sat right at the mouth of what looked at first like a cave, except that there was timber framing the mouth and tracks leading out from inside. It was no cave, but rather a mine. In all likelihood, this was the motherlode that led to the construction of Handsome Frank, for what little time it lasted. I wondered briefly just how much gold they’d hauled out of that hole they blasted out of the Earth, but I quit pondering gold when I saw another man—this one tall, bony, and wearing a long, black beard that trailed down to his sternum—lurching for the mine. He was dragging Meihui by one arm, and despite her struggling to get free of him, he only chuckled and overpowered her.

“No,” I whispered. My heart got to slamming against my ribs. I was sweating considerably and felt a tremor in my hands. I knew I ought to wait for Boon, like we always had done, but I knew still better that this man needed killing.

I raised my pilfered carbine back into position, drew a bead on the bearded man’s skull, and squeezed the trigger. His head jerked back in a dark spray and Meihui shrieked. The ball was up, so there was no sense hiding anymore. Jacking another shell into the breech, I called out, “Meihui, over here!”

Frantically, she looked around in every direction as the other men shouted and one of them fired a wild shot in my general direction. I burst out from behind the rock and swung the rifle at the campfire, where the cook had abandoned his biscuits in favor of a Henry rifle that he pointed at me as he lunged and aimed.

“Edward,” the girl cried.

I shot the cook. I only struck him in the shoulder. It was enough to make him lose his grip on the Henry, but he didn’t drop it and he didn’t go down. Instead, he growled like a bear at the pain and pushed through it to get the gun back up to try again. Ornery cuss.

A second later, he and I were drawn down on one another. The next few seconds passed slowly, like long minutes, while we each tickled our triggers and sweated through our determination to kill and not be killed. In the end, neither of us got off a shot. A knife appeared out of the shadows and slit the cook’s throat, the metal gleaming in the sparse firelight and the blood falling like a red curtain over the man’s neck and chest and belly.

“Jesus Christ,” cried another man, who I recognized as the other fellow at the fire earlier. He’d run off, but now he was back with a rusty old Navy Colt in one hand. “Fuckin’ Apaches.”

I could have laughed at that. Boon did not. Instead she drew her .44 with her left hand and drilled a hole through the man’s skull. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her shoot with her left before, but I wasn’t altogether surprised to find she was damned near as good with it as she was with her right. The man she’d shot dropped into some brush and she knelt by the man whose throat she cut to wipe the blade on his shirt.

“Three down,” I said as I approached. She looked up at me, the fire dancing in her huge brown eyes. “They got Meihui.”

Boon gasped and leapt to her feet, but she saw the girl soon thereafter. Meihui was standing apart from the center of camp, her arms wrapped around herself and avoiding eye contact with both of us. The poor kid shivered, from the chill or just plain fear. Probably both.

“God damn me,” Boon said. “God damn me to hell, I am sorry, Meihui.”

The girl sniffed, rubbed her nose. She swallowed hard, twice, and gradually raised her face to us, having to swipe a lock of dirty black hair from her eyes to see us. Then, just as she was about to say something, an errant shot cracked the silent night air and by matter of instinct, all three of us ducked. Boon cocked her Colt and I rushed to jack another cartridge into the carbine’s breech. She and I were crouched, but Meihui had full hit the dirt, laying on her belly.

“Come to us,” Boon told her. “Slowly, now.”

The kid started to crawl through the brush and dirt, but stopped cold when a man swung out from behind one of the canvas tents and fired another shot at us. The round slammed into the ground not fifteen inches from my face, kicking up a passel of dust that stung my eyes and filled my mouth. I was temporarily blinded, but I’d seen who it was—one of the men who’d ridden to Handsome Frank with me, and in point of fact the one I thought I’d killed back at the adobe huts right before Stanley’s secret contingent of men came racing out after me.

If it hadn’t been for them, I would have gotten him, too. I cursed every man jack of them in my head and scrambled to get out of sight while I rubbed the grit out of my eyes.

“Don’t let the fat man go,” I heard a deep voice command. An English voice.

Another shot caromed over my head and struck somewhere close by. I dug the butt plate into the ground and clumsily catapulted myself out of range, back to my position behind the