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

rock with the fallen pine. Tears ran in rivulets down my cheeks, turning the dirt caked in my beard to mud. Gradually my bleary eyes started to make sense of the jumbled colors they were trying to see, and with one last wipe on my shirt sleeve I turned back to look on the camp. Boon had retreated behind a black oak, where she squeezed off a couple of shots at the man I should have killed, who fired one back. No one was hit.

Arthur Stanley, who I was sure I’d heard, was nowhere in sight. Alarmingly, neither was Meihui.

The next time I aimed and squeezed the trigger, the hammer landed on an empty chamber. The butt stock was empty, and I had no more cartridges.

“I am out,” I called to Boon, taking the risk of letting Stanley’s last man know, as well.

By way of response, he squeezed off another shot at me. I dropped to the rock, scraping my chin. As glad as I was to avoid a bullet in the head, my chin smarted terribly and I could feel the blood welling up in my beard.

“I’m out, too,” Boon bellowed from her position on the opposite side of the camp. “Get you a gun if you can. I don’t think I can make it.”

My head might have spun on my neck upon hearing this, but the initial shock wore away right quick. She was playing the part of the frightened woman. She had to be. This man knew little better; it was more or less what he’d expect of her, or of any woman. One learned a thing or two about men when one listened to somebody who looked in from the outside.

On the other hand, she might have truly run out of ammunition and couldn’t reach any of the fallen men’s guns without getting cut down herself. I was betting on the former, but the latter chilled my skin when I dropped the carbine and started back toward the gunman.

“I am unarmed,” I told him. “You got us dead to rights, friend.”

“Fuck you,” he spat. “I ain’t no friend of yours.”

He lifted his Henry repeater until I was looking straight down the barrel.

The gunman half-smiled.

I said, “Boon?”

“God damn it, Splettstoesser,” she said. “Ain’t a ploy, you fool. I’m out.”

“Well,” I said, “son of a bitch.”

I never was any damned good at poker.

Chapter Forty-Two

My knife was up and out as fast as I could pull it, which wasn’t as fast as anyone in my position would have liked. I was along in years and long in the tooth, not to mention fat, exhausted, and in tremendous need of a drink. Nonetheless, up came the Arkansas toothpick, and off went the gunman’s repeater. All in all, it could not have taken more than two or three seconds, but in the thick of it I could have sworn on a crate of sealed bottles of Old Crow that it was much longer. Smoke and fire erupted from the barrel and the blade of my knife struck the man’s hand on the forestock, knocking the rifle upward as one and one half of his fingers dropped wetly downward. The gunman shrieked and his stumps spurted darkly. He didn’t exactly drop the rifle but it wasn’t doing him a lot of good with his one hand mangled and jetting blood like it was. I was so damned proud and glad of my luck that it was another fifteen, twenty seconds before the pain started to make some noise in my brain and it slowly dawned on me that I had, in fact, been shot.

“You bastard,” the man cried. “You bastard, you whore’s son.”

I ignored him for the most part and checked my shoulder, where I found my shirt was torn and the flannel soaking up the blood, and for some reason my head went light and I feared I was about to shame myself no end by fainting right then and there. It was the second time I had been shot in all my life, and both of them within a day of each other. For sure I had been living on time unearned ever since Boonsri saved my neck from the lynch party in Texas, but I had grown cocky and accustomed to continuing life without much fussing about things like injury or death. At least, not my own.

“My God,” I said to no one in particular. “I am finally gone and dead.”

“No, you are not,” Boon said, and I spun round to find the gunman turning in tandem with me so that we both faced her. She had emerged from her hidey place and found a cap and ball revolver, which she shoved hard into the gunman’s belly. “But you are.”

The pistol barked and the man’s shirt caught fire, the flames crawling quickly over his trunk. He dropped the repeater, clawing madly at himself with half a mind on the bullet in his gut and the other half on the fact that he was aflame. The fire died out soon enough, but what remained was blackened skin and a deep, seeping hole in the center of his belly that spelled a slow, agonizing death.

“You fucking witch,” he spat at Boon. “You have gutshot me.”

Instead of answering him, Boon just pushed him over. The gunman collapsed onto his side with a low yowl. She then approached me, roughly handled my shoulder for a closer look, and said, “You’ll live.”

“I been shot twice,” I said.

“This one’s just a graze. Quit your bellyaching and let’s get in that mine.”

She bent at the waist and snatched up the gutshot man’s rifle from his trembling, half-ruined hands.

“The mine?”

“That’s where he went,” she said, pressing the rifle into my hands. “Where he took her.”

“I didn’t see.”

“I saw.”

“The mine,” I said.

“The mine.”

“I don’t know nothing about mines.”

“You wouldn’t. It’s honest work.”

“Fair true,” I said. “You ’spect it opens up somewhere else?”

“Reckon we’ll find out.”

I nodded, reckoning the same. We made for the mine, and the man on