Boon Ed Kurtz (the little red hen read aloud txt) 📖

the spine of the mare he was ruining, but the proud old girl held her own and beat the North Texas earth to dust, closing the gap between us. I heard, but did not see, Boon fire another shot from her Colt. That only left one more round before she would have to reload. She always kept five in the chambers, one empty. The empty one was so she wouldn’t accidentally blow her own toes off when the thing was holstered. The way things were going, she’d be buried with all of her original toes before long.

It had long been my belief that I would go down this way, though cut down by law or outlaw, not some stripling drovers from Nowhere, Texas trying to live out their favorite dime novels written by some Easterner never been farther than Tennessee. I must have blushed from embarrassment at the thought of it, even as I slammed my boot heel into my poor mount’s short ribs to put a few more inches between me and the man aiming for my brains. I stopped thinking about it when a ball took the hat off my head.

It was a good hat, and I never did get it back.

But I did manage to free my .44-40 from its scabbard lashed behind the cantle of my saddle, twisting my back painfully as I did so. My attention was split and my mount went pounding off the trail and into the tall grass, where I levered a cartridge into the breech and slammed the round through the fat drover’s nose.

Before I could rein in and get back the way I’d been, I heard four more shots split the air. I hoped to Christ one of them was Boon’s, because only one could have been. The first thing I saw when I got my horse pointed back north was Shitbrains the Cow. She was standing in the middle of the trail, watching the show like she was in a St. Louis opera house or somesuch. I never had feelings about a particular cow one way or another, but by God Almighty I hated this one.

The second thing my eyes lit upon was Boon’s palomino, Pim, her saddle empty, trotting and snorting with the tall drover’s horse not far behind. The other horse was free of its rider, too. They’d killed each other between those four shots. I was sure of it. There is no pride in confessing that there were tears in my eyes as I abused my poor mount to get across the road faster, but it was how things were.

I just couldn’t stand the thought of losing her.

My pitiable creature caught up with Boon’s beast in time for me to notice movement in the grass, which I had only just passed. I leapt down and chased after it, never thinking, needing to know. There I found Boon kneeling beside the corpse of the tall drover, his sandy blond hair streaked red with blood. She looked like she was praying.

“Boon!” I hollered. “Thank God!”

I ran to her. She held a pocket watch in her hand, a cheap little thing probably made of tin, open to the face.

“Just a boy,” she muttered.

On the inside of the cover, a tiny image was pasted. It was cut from a photograph, and it was some schoolmarm-looking woman. When Boon looked up to me, I saw that she was crying.

“His mother, most like,” she said. “I don’t ’spect he ever saw twenty years.”

I could hardly see how such things mattered when somebody was sending hot lead flying at your head. God created Man but Sam Colt made them equal, as the saying went. What did it matter if the man who killed you was nineteen or ninety-nine?

But it mattered to Boon. She closed the watch and slid it into the pocket of her open vest. She said, “His mama will want to know.”

“That ain’t our concern,” I said. “We didn’t start none of this.”

I thought about the portly corpse some distance away, its skull mostly a gaping hole now, and whether or not that fat bastard had a mother, too. All we’d done was look fair friendly to an addle-brained pile of steak on hooves. Those boys never asked a single question; they just started shooting.

Over one damn cow.

In the years I had known this peculiar woman, I had seen her put lead in a number of men—not to mention a couple of women—and send more than a few of them to their judgment. And yet this was only the second time I ever saw her shed a tear over any one of them. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. What was a woman to do when strangers came gunning for her for no damned reason?

In Boon’s case, cry.

I said, “Hell’s bells, Boonsri Angchuan, I never did see you act so womanish.”

To this day, I wish I hadn’t ever said that. She knocked me flat with one fist to the chin. First time I ever saw so many pretty stars in the middle of the damn day. When the stars faded, I found her looming over me like an angry goddess, her pink eyes spilling tears on my face and teeth bared like a wolf.

“You rotten motherless son of a bitch,” she seethed, “don’t you dare ever tell me who or how to mourn or by Christ it’ll be you I’m mourning.”

I half-expected her to draw on me. She didn’t, but she didn’t have to. It felt like she did, just from the words. Hell, just from the words, I felt like I’d been shot six ways from Sunday. I was cut down.

“Now,” she said, “’less you got more to say to me, Edward Splettstoesser, you had best get your horse and help me load these boys up to bring to town, you hear?”

I heard. And I hadn’t more to say to her. Even if I had, I would have been too self-preservational to do so, which is to say