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

could look up at the big gun, which was no longer manned by my friend. She was gone.

I peered into the fire, looking for signs of life, but saw nothing. Either Arthur Stanley was dead already, or he’d escaped. I didn’t know how Boon had gotten up onto the roof, much less Irish Bill, but I assumed there had to have been a ladder in back. So, I levered another round into the carbine’s breech and got to limping in that direction.

The blaze illuminated a great deal of the otherwise barren foothills bordering the back of the main structures. I could see the outhouses and some frightened vermin scampering into the low brush behind them. So, too, were the horses we’d ridden into Burnside before splitting up. They were hobbled a fair piece from the ghost town. Boon had known exactly how this was going to go down and didn’t want the mounts burned up.

It came as some surprise to me that she’d bothered with bringing along the second horse for me when it could only have encumbered her journey, but I was soon to realize it had little or nothing to do with me at all. Squatting in the brush apart from the beasts was Meihui, her arms wrapped around her knees and eyes wide as double eagles as she surveyed the destruction we had wrought.

I saw her before she saw me. I didn’t know whether I should call out to her or not. Mostly I was just shocked all to hell Boon had brought the kid along with her. The smart and decent thing to do would have been to stash her somewhere else entirely. This was no place for her to be. It was just too God damned dangerous.

And, frankly, so were we. She might have been better off with Boon and me than she had been in the whorehouse where we’d found her, but not by much. The girl needed good folks, decent folks to look after her and keep her safe. Maybe try to heal up some of the scars her short, miserable life had left all over her little heart. Boon most likely had her reasons—she just about always did, whether I understood them out or not—but I didn’t like Meihui being there in Handsome Frank.

Particularly when I knew damned well it wasn’t over yet.

Just then, the girl caught sight of me and went rigid. I stepped toward her and she leaped to her feet with a small yelp of terror.

“Meihui,” I said, but it was too late. She was up and running.

Backlit by the terrible fire, she couldn’t have told me from any other grubby fat white man with a gun. While I stood there and worried myself into a tizzy over her welfare, the best I could do was scare her half to death and push her still further into harm’s way.

And where in the blue hell was Boon?

Somewhere deep in my mind, I half-wished she’d just left me there and gone off somewhere safe with the girl. The thought felt something like an omen, the kind of bad signs I’d heard about Comanche medicine man seeing. This wasn’t a talking crow or anything like that, but the feeling burned in me.

The fire grew rapidly and by the time I’d turned back round to look at the hotel, the roof caved in, taking the Gatling gun with it. The massive contraption fell through, clanging loudly as it crashed through the floor and down to the ground level, smashing everything in its path. Flames roared out from the middle of the ground floor, sending up plumes of black smoke and dancing sparks like stars. If Arthur Stanley was still in there, he had to be dead now.

Only I knew he wasn’t.

I made damned sure I had a round in the breech and went looking for him.

Chapter Forty-One

Boon found me first. She looked more than a little worse for wear. Some of her raven-black hair was singed, which I could smell, reminding me of the smell of our old hound dog, Amy, when she got caught in that barn fire when I was a boy. Boon’s face was smudged black and so were much of her clothes. She sported several new holes, ringed with black, on her shirt and trousers. In one hand she carried a makeshift torch that used to be this or that part of her father’s hotel. In the other she gripped her Colt. Her chest heaved with heavy breaths and she bared her teeth when we first met eyes, back in the street where the mules had bled out and the wagon was starting to burn.

“Where is he,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “But Meihui…”

“I’ve got to find him. Now.”

“Listen,” I pressed. “You oughtn’t have brought Meihui. She ain’t safe here.”

“It’s Stanley who ain’t safe,” she said, and she cocked the revolver with her badly calloused thumb. “He dies today.”

There was no use getting through to her. Her eyes were afire, and it wasn’t just the reflection of the hotel. She had a bloodlust in her something fierce and this was the end of the line for her. Nothing else in all the big, rotten world mattered one whit.

“All right,” I said. “He dies today.”

With a sharp nod, she went by me with long, stiff strides toward the front of the blazing hotel. The farrier’s was almost completely burned to the ground and even the mules in the street were smoldering, giving off a terrific stench. I hurried to catch up with her, narrowing my eyes to look for any hint of our quarry. The incredible heat of the fires made the skin of my face tingle and feel too tight for my skull.

Boon crouched, carefully surveying her environment, when someone coughed to our right. I swung the carbine about to find the drunken muleskinner staggering from the smoking alley between the hotel and the farrier’s shop where he’d previously slouched. He was muttering something low and waving