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

Could be Earl lets you go if you get back to Texas. I seen him do things like that sometimes.”

“Wrong way to go,” I told him. “I’m heading to California.”

Les chuckled.

“Right smart late for the rush, don’t you think?”

“Got business,” I said.

“With that woman?”

“With that woman.”

“You’re a strange fellow,” Les said. “But she seems even stranger.”

“She is,” I said.

“What’s her story, then?”

I took in a deep breath, holding for a spell while I pondered whether or not I felt like telling Les about Boon. Then I let it out, and then I told him. I told him about her saving me from getting my neck stretched and about some of the things we’d seen and done in the three years we’d ridden together. I told him she was searching for her folks but I didn’t tell him why. And I told him that was why we were headed California way.

“’Cept now you ain’t,” he said.

“She might still,” I said.

“Just left you high and dry.”

I shrugged.

He said, “Well, I’m right sorry I said words agin’ her to you.”

“I’m sorry I put my knife in you,” I said.

Les nodded. So, at least that much was put to rest.

Chapter Nineteen

The sheriff of Revelation, Earl, never did come back all the rest of that day. Some deputies came and went, milling about like cows and playing cards, swapping dirty stories about the whores they’d known. The stories stopped cold when the preacher’s wife came back to the jail for her baskets. She looked offended that mine was still full, but she didn’t say anything about it. Les said, “That was real tasty, Missus McKenzie.”

She smiled at Les. She scowled at me. Then she left.

I dozed on and off throughout the night. At some point I woke to Les making use of the bucket in his cell left in lieu of a privy. If he smelled bad before, I was starting to wish I was born without a nose then. Instead of thinking about that, I tried to think about Boon, which mostly came down to wondering how far away she’d gotten by then, whether she’d made it to Arizona or if she maybe squirreled off somewhere else. Plans had a way of changing at the last minute with her. You sort of had to let the current take you and not worry about it when riding with Boonsri Angchuan.

Matter of fact, that was how it was just about as soon as we made one another’s acquaintance. Though we ended up staying in Texas for the most part all that time, at first it was her idea to go farther east, through Arkansas and up to Tennessee. Seemed my being an Arkansan appealed to her more logical instincts and she figured I’d be of some use around those parts. More to the point, she’d met a drummer in Abilene, not long before she met me, who claimed to have had some dealing with a Briton by the name of Arthur Stanley. Said drummer told Boon he was absolutely, positively certain this Stanley was headed for points east.

We loaded up on provisions and spent a few days in Longview, a railroad town on the Southern Pacific line that was so new there wasn’t any paint on the buildings, and we holed up in a hotel to plan the journey. The bigger towns were our focus: Texarkana, Little Rock, up to Memphis. We’d spend at least two or three days in each, get what we could get, and plan accordingly.

Third night in Longview, I wandered down to a little watering hole with BLACK’S SALOON painted on the front and two heavy doors made of the same lumber as everything else in town. Boon stayed behind in the hotel, studying a map. I sat alone for a while, drinking warm beer, and when the crowd started to thin out I switched over to whiskey. There was a lookout perched in a chair by the big front doors, a shotgun across his lap, but he was asleep and snoring something fearsome. Once in a while the bartender would give the lookout a disapproving look, then go back to cleaning glasses or whatever else he did to appear busy. Eventually it got to where there wasn’t anybody left in the place except the boys playing faro in the back and a drunk passed out on a table by the windows—and of course me.

The bartender said, “Town’s growing some fast.”

“Looks like it,” I agreed.

“You with the railroad?”

“I am not.”

“Just passing through.”

I nodded. He noticed my glass was empty and filled it back up from the bottle. I hadn’t asked him to, but I wasn’t unhappy that he’d done it, either.

“See all kinds come through here, what with the railroad,” he mused. “All kinds.”

“Englishmen and Siamese women?”

The bartender scratched his chin and thought it over.

“English? Sure. Can’t speak to the other one. Lots of cattlemen come from England for some reason.”

“That right?”

“English and Irish,” he said. “Sure.”

“Ever heard of one called Arthur Stanley?”

“Mister,” he said, “I heard so many names since I came to Longview I’ve forgot almost all of ’em. Ain’t enough room in my head for that many names.”

“Too bad,” I said, and I finished off the whiskey.

I laid what I owed in coin on the rough timber bar and rose to leave. The bartender took the money and called after me before I made it to the door.

“But if it’s a cattleman you’re looking for,” he said, “the Association has an office right here in town. Just across from the municipal building that houses the marshal and the jail and the mayor and all that. Be open come morning. Maybe they’ll of heard of him.”

I said, “Obliged.”

Naturally, I reported this to Boon when I got back to the hotel. And naturally, she was for checking with the Cattlemen’s Association in the morning. And just as naturally, our plans—which is to say her plans—got shot right to shit as soon as we went about that particular piece of business. The