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

was at that moment aimed directly at the juryman’s head, which split open at the sound of a shot once she pulled the trigger. I got a mouthful of blood and pushed the dead man off of me. He rolled into a fresh pile of cow slop on the floor and Shitbrains stepped on his eye. I didn’t think he much minded.

The fat padding the judge’s windpipe protected it enough that he was still uttering any number of blue oaths that would have made Squirrel-Tooth Alice blush to beat the Dutch. Most of the remaining jurymen either lit out or hid under tables after Boon’s timely shot, though the barman was still standing and still screaming his fool head off. That set the heifer to moaning, though I couldn’t tell if she was frightened by the ruckus or just thought she was accompanying the barman’s song.

I picked up the dead juryman’s pistol and might have put an end to the cow that started the whole miserable business, but Lawyer Bob Laramie came tramping down the stairs with a scattergun bigger than the judge he sought to rescue. I hadn’t noticed him going upstairs in the first place and wouldn’t have worried much if I had; he didn’t come across the sort to worry about. I was plenty worried about that scattergun, though.

Boon said, “Edward!”

I replied by way of swinging the pistol away from the cow and around half the saloon to Laramie, who by then was charging Boon and weeping from terror.

“Don’t you hurt the judge!” he cried.

He took aim at Boon’s chest, so I shot him in the neck. The shotgun went up and he fired at the same time as he was shot, missing me but taking off most of the rest of the barman’s head. The heifer’s accompaniment turned into a solo. Lawyer Laramie slapped at his ragged, bloody neck and dropped backward, flat on his back.

Conscious of the possibility of other surprise avengers, I took stock of the rest of the room. The air was filled with smoke that burned the eyes and scratched in the throat. Beneath the picture where the judge had earlier dined, one of the appointed jurymen stood with his hands out like he was being robbed. I turned the pistol toward him.

A working girl seated comfortably nearby, looking a little bored, said, “Aw, let Pete alone. He’s gone and pissed his Levi’s.”

I motioned with the pistol for the batwings. Pete bolted for them and staggered out into the night. That left only one member of the original jury, who cowered with his hands over his head beneath a table in the back by the stairs, and two whores, including the uninterested one. The other girl took advantage of the relative calm and, gathering up her threadbare skirts, went running up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. A door slammed shut somewhere up there. I didn’t reckon she’d be going for another scattergun—she’d have left the door open otherwise.

Boon took her boot off the judge’s throat and hauled him up to his feet by his whiskers.

“I’ll hang you yet,” he said. “You and Arkansas Edward, both.”

“You got a chance to keep your head attached to your body,” Boon told him. “Don’t go lousing it up with that talk.”

The judge emitted a hoarse laugh.

“Take you to my brother, that it? I’d sooner cut my own head off than give Barry to you.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and she pushed him hard to the floor again. To me, she said, “Go back to the undertaker’s we passed by. He’ll have a saw for cutting timber.”

“You’re bluffing,” said the judge. “I been a judge long enough to know a liar when I see one.”

I said, “You don’t know Boon,” and went back out to break into an undertaker’s storefront. The place wasn’t far, as Red Foot wasn’t but a pile of wood and adobe in the middle of nowhere, and I had to kick the front door in to gain access. It was dark, naturally, and although I did find a lamp, there were no matches in sight, so I fumbled half-blind for a quarter of an hour before finally finding what I wanted: a steel saw with a smooth wooden handle and teeth as sharp as the day it was sold.

The whore was asleep in her chair when I returned, despite the judge’s ranting and raving, which I could hear long before I passed through the batwing doors for the fifth time that day.

“If I could hang you twice, I’d hang you three times,” he said. “You ought to be burned for a witch and buried face down in cow shit.”

“Just for that,” Boon said evenly as I set the saw down on the table formerly used as the judge’s bench, “I ain’t going to shoot you first.”

“You’re mad,” he said.

“Judge Dejasu,” she said, “I’m madder than hell.”

She kept her Colt trained on the little man when she picked up the saw.

Chapter Eleven

I once met a man in a watering hole in some little border town who claimed to have been a sharpshooter during the war. He still wore the tattered gray coat and kepi cap of his fighting days and told me he’d killed more than a hundred Yankees from no closer than a hundred and fifty yards with the same .451 Whitworth rifle. I asked him if that was the reason he was gathering dust a foot and a half from old Mexico with a belly full of mescal, that the guilt of so many untimely deaths had taken its toll on his conscience and was he trying to drink the memories away. The old boy laughed himself hoarse at the suggestion.

“I never even saw their faces,” he told me. “It was easier than shooting woodcock back in Tennessee.”

I never met a Butternut who couldn’t shoot, but I’d never met one who’d killed a hundred men, either. This one wasn’t fussed about it, though.

“There’s a world of difference ’tween shootin’ a