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

nigh three years before the moment I met him. Funny old world.

Terrible old world.

I stayed low to the ground and scurried up to her, caking my breeches and shirtfront and beard with dirt. Boon turned her head slowly to flash her huge, shimmering eyes at me. Eyes that fairly danced in the dying firelight. Sorrow and rage. I’d seen it before, and it both frightened me and tore at my heart.

I said, “Boon.”

“Franklin,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “The ball went up. Willocks killed one of them boys.”

“They try to kill you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It was all right. This is murder.”

“Okay,” said Boon. “All right, then.”

She sniffled and breathed in deep through a wide-open mouth, her wide brown eyes leaking tears in runnels before the skull in the fire pit. Gunfire continued the pop beyond the grove, complimented by shouts and cries. The heat from the fire dried the tears on Boon’s face and the lizard in her crept back to the fore as I studied her. She unleathered her Colt as she rose to her feet and said, “I am sorry I walked out on you, Edward.”

It was not what I might have expected in that particular moment, but I offered a sharp nod in response.

That said and done, she pivoted and went quickly toward the gunfire. I seized a carbine from the dead Brute on the ground, checked the chamber, found it empty, levered in a cartridge and followed Boon.

Chapter Twenty-Six

In the short few minutes I’d been away from the fracas, two additional Kiowa raiders were shot dead—one of them with his foot caught in the stirrup and dragged some ways from the grove by the frightened roan he’d taken—and Willocks lay against a gnarled clump of roots with a trunk between him and the remaining Little Rabbits, his left shoulder bleeding badly and ruined right hand soaked through the bandages. Boon reached him first, whereupon he broke into a broad grin and said, “Three down and only some metal in my shoulder to show for it.”

“You dumb son of a bitch,” Boon seethed. “Edward had it all sorted.”

“Sorted? That buck was about to run your fat man through with that lance of his. I saved that Dutch bastard’s life.”

“That’s a God damned lie,” I said.

“Then you don’t know Indians,” Willocks said.

Another shot caromed off a branch barely a foot above his head, sending a shower of bark and leaves down upon him. Willocks shrank away from it. Boon and I fell into crouches.

“What do we do?” I asked her.

She glared hard at the marshal. “A show of good faith, I reckon.”

Her hand thrust out and wrapped around the barrel of the marshal’s rifle, first pushing it up and then snagging it out of his hands. He started to sputter, but she put an end to that by turning the repeater ’round and smashing the butt against his mouth. I could hear his teeth cracking from the impact, and blood ran out of both sides of his mouth as he groaned and fell back against the tree. Willocks put both hands to his face, the bandaged one mixing its blood with the blood from his ruined mouth. And while he did this, Boon pulled my knife from her boot—she’d had it all along, the minx!—and jammed it right into the center of Willock’s bullet wound in his shoulder. He screamed bloody horror. Boon stayed the lizard, unreadable, and twisted the blade.

“That,” she said evenly, “is for Franklin.”

Willocks screeched like a hawk.

Boon released the handle, then slammed the heel of her palm against the hilt, forcing the blade the rest of the way in. The marshal turned away, shaking his wrapped hand in the air and unable to do squat with the other. His face was a mask of terror and pain. Boon then dug her hands into his armpits, hauled him up to his feet, and commenced dragging the moaning Marshal out of the cottonwood copse to where the two living Kiowa still sat their mounts and fired into the trees.

“Don’t,” Willocks whined. “For Christ’s sake, don’t.”

“I know, Tom,” she told him. “Ain’t very white of me, is it?”

I stayed low but maneuvered to where I could see between the trees. She had a hold of him so that he served as a shield, pushing him as he uselessly dug his heels into the dirt. One the two Indians wheeled his horse around, keeping his rifle trained on them but not yet firing. He was, I figured, curious. Curious about why she was marching him out to them, and probably curious about her in general.

I would have been, too.

Once she reached the edge of the grove, where the remuda had been, Boon reached around Willock’s torso and yanked the knife from his shoulder. It took three or four tries, and he screamed the whole time. The Kiowa with the rifle on them watched with interest.

From her shirt pocket, Boon withdrew what looked like a pair of brown cheroots, poorly rolled, and she quickly stuffed them into the marshal’s coat pocket.

“Here,” she said, “take your fingers with you.”

Willocks said, “I hope when they hang you, you dangle there and choke a while.”

“If I see you in hell,” she said, “I’ll let you know how it all turned out.”

That was the last she spoke to Marshal Tom Willocks before shoving him with both hands, causing him to stumble forward and, in his struggle to keep from tripping over his own feet, all but sprinting at the awaiting Little Rabbits. The Kiowa on the mount brought his rifle down hard on the crown of Willock’s skull, knocking him down. The second Indian shouted a high cry that echoed against the escarpment and jumped down from his horse, knife in hand.

The marshal shouted, “God damn you, no.”

Boon said, “Come on, let’s go.”

That she did not wish to observe the scalping surprised me, but I did as she bade and followed her back to the campfire. Only once did I glance