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

his hand in front of his face to ward away the smoke that was choking him. I lowered the rifle, uninterested in him. But Boon raised her Colt and shot him in the chest.

The drunk sighed and dropped to his side. He died in the dust, and he didn’t seem too bothered about the whole thing.

“He was only a mule driver,” I told Boon.

She ignored me and rose back to her full height.

“One less to worry about.”

“Sure,” I said.

She walked right over the dead drunk’s body and disappeared into the smoke. I followed.

The horses she’d brought and ground-tied were still there. No one else was. I decided to try raising the issue of Meihui again, since this was where I’d last seen her.

“Boon, the kid.”

“A man like Stanley is always a coward underneath all that bluster,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “He’s scared now. He’ll try to get shucked of this place if he can. How many horses did you ride in with?”

“Three,” I said. “But he wasn’t on any of them. He was already here, and six or more men besides. The ones you cut down with that big God damned gun on the roof. Might could be more. I don’t know.”

“In other words you don’t know shit.”

“One way to say it.”

“Then what fucking good are you,” she said, and she moved on, alongside the back of the hotel with her eyes on the foothills.

I let her get ahead of me and watched her back. Probably my mouth was hanging open. I had a hundred things I’d have liked to say to that, but none of them wanted to make their way to my mouth. So I said nothing and kept on after her. Like always.

She got away from me again, out of my line of sight, but I found her some minutes later. She was on her knees by a shallow creek, fussing with some grass. I came up beside her and knelt down, too. She didn’t say anything to me, so I cupped my hands to scoop up some water. Before I could get it near to my mouth, Boon slapped my wrists and made me lose all of it.

“Don’t drink that, it’s gyppy,“ she said. “Big operation like this ruins the water. You’ll be shitting like crazy for days.”

“Thanks.”

“Look at this,” she said, her voice low. She grabbed a fistful of the grass she’d been bothering and held it out in the palm of her hand. We were far enough away from the blazing ghost town that I couldn’t easily make out what she was trying to show me. “Grease and fat in the grass. Somebody was scraping out a pan here.”

“Camp nearby?”

She pointed into the trees, black oaks and gray pines. The men who’d already been here had staked out for a spell, I reckoned. Probably there were more of them. And if these were the last of Stanley’s forces at Handsome Frank, that’d be where he went, too.

“You ready?” she said in a whisper.

I nodded soberly, wishing to hell I was neither ready nor sober.

“Been studying on what I said to you a ways back,” she said.

“Said what?”

“That I don’t trust you.”

“Been a while since then.”

“Been studying on it a while.”

“That a fact,” I said.

“I’m harder than I want to be,” Boon said, dropping the greasy grass and wiping her hand on her trouser leg as she stood up. “Things don’t always come out right. Trust is something you got to treat like fine china out here. Or anywhere. With anybody, I guess.”

“Hard to come by,” I said. “Harder to keep.”

“I trust you, Edward Splettstoesser,” she said. “You are the only man on the whole face of this world that I do, and I am sorry I said that I don’t.”

She held out the hand she’d just wiped and I accepted her offer of a handshake. I wasn’t sure I’d ever shaken hands with Boon before, but I was pert near certain I’d have recalled if I did—her hard grip was like to crush the bones in my fingers.

I said, “Let’s us go see about that camp.”

The firelight was visible in another twenty feet or so through the grove, and as soon as we saw it, we both crouched and watched. Figures were definitely moving between us and the fire, but there was no telling who they were or how many of them were around from our position. Boon signaled for me to move around to the west side, then gestured to the east where she would go. I nodded my agreement and slowly made my way through the brush, trying not to make any noise despite the piles of dry detritus underfoot. Ahead of me I could make out a jutting gray rock upon which a dead pine trunk lay black and rotted. I could not have asked for better cover, so I went directly for it. The moment I reached the rock, I heard what I could have mistaken for the small yelp of a kicked dog.

I could have, that is, if I didn’t know for a fact that it was Meihui.

Shit.

Rifle in one hand, I maneuvered around the rock to where I could lean against the pine and get a good line of fire without being seen. My lungs burned and my body ached. I was getting old and I’d been fat, and being injured did not much help that mix. I decided to worry about it later and pushed my mind through. I had a decent view of the camp, which consisted of three canvas tents, probably Army issue, with half a dozen horses hobbled to the north side of them. Beyond the mounts, I saw a massive contraption, half-grown over with weeds and vines; iron-shod stamps fixed to a rotting wooden frame by way of cams and shafts. Around the fire a pair of men slouched on the ground. One sucked idly at a clay pipe while the other worked with a mess of biscuits in a