Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

family on their way to the fort up yonder to try him on some trumped-up horse theft bullshit.”

“I thought there was a truce.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Supposed to be. I reckon those troops were jealous they didn’t get to kill Peruvians or Bolivians, so they were going to kill somebody, by God.”

“Maldita sea,” I cursed.

The woman nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”

Taking a blanket from the wall, she folded it in half and draped it over the beast’s back before turning back for the saddle. Once she did up the cinch straps, she rolled her neck and glanced back at me.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Liliana Contreras,” I answered. “Lily.”

“You don’t sound Chilean.”

“Mexican,” I said, which was mostly true.

“Seems to me today ain’t the first time you got to running.” I didn’t say anything to that. She’d already figured it out and wasn’t asking me to clarify. “You can ride?”

“I can ride.”

“There’s a blood bay in the next stall. Saddle him.”

I still thought she looked Mapuche, but she was dressed like an American vaquera, a Western cowboy or gunslinger, and her accent was undoubtedly Americana, as well. But why was there an American woman who looked like an Indian in Traiguén, of all places, stealing some villager’s horse and commanding me to do the same?

“Cómo te llama?” I said. “What’s your name, gringa?”

“Boon,” she told me, and she stepped up into the saddle. I wasn’t sure I heard her right, but I nodded in reply and got the gate back open so that she could get out and I could get moving with the blood bay.

The gunfire was more sporadic than it had been when the fighting broke out, but there was still plenty of shouting and no small number of guns firing in the distance as well as dangerously close by. Oily black smoke choked the air and turned the midday sky an evil reddish-brown, pouring in tendrils from the blazing fort. The bay I was stealing snorted and stamped his hooves once he smelled the smoke, though he was already plenty spooked by the pop, pop, popping of rifles on three sides of us. Ahead and to the left, at the mouth of an alley, I saw two Mapuche men pull a blue-uniformed officer to the dust, where one of them cut his throat from ear to ear, the blood washing over the soldier’s chest like a dark crimson bib. Not twenty feet away from that horror, a line of soldiers—boys, mostly, barely starting to shave—opened fire with their brand-new breech-loaders into a crowd of fleeing Indians, wounding most of them and killing three or four instantly.

Back-shooters. I grunted at the indignity of it all.

It was absolute madness, a nightmare come to life, and there was nothing more I wanted in all the world than to get as far away from it as possible. Boon had the same idea, and she gigged her black with a growled command, wheeling the mount around and falling into a steady lope east, toward the distant, white-tipped mountains looming there.

I followed suit, my eyes spilling tears down my cheeks from the smoke and the terror, and heeled the bay’s ribs to catch up. I never even questioned why it was I trusted in this gringa, a complete stranger to me, when once I was set on that horse I could have ridden in any direction I wanted. I just did.

Because that, I would discover soon enough, was Boon.