Boon by Ed Kurtz (top 100 books to read .txt) 📕

drunk as he was a lunatic. I’d been putting them back for the better part of two hours with Thomas Song before Stamp ever set foot in the place, and within the span of another hour the preacher was drunker than the two of us combined.

I had seen him around, and so had Boon. Once or twice he had shouted at us. But only at a distance.

Thomas said to me, “Just make sure you don’t look him in the eye.”

“Why,” I said, “he going to mesmerize me?”

“You look the Wet Preacher in the eye, you won’t never get rid of ’im.”

That struck me as funny, in the way that things a man wouldn’t normally find all that funny get to be outright hilarious when he’s in his cups. I was in my cups, all right, and it got me to chuckling, and I forgot all about what Thomas Song said near as soon as he’d said it. That was when I turned on my stool and looked that mad preacher right in his wide, rheumy blue eyes.

And Stamp bellowed, “Sinner God damned hell-spawn!”

Which was a hell of way to say hello, to my mind. In lieu of reply, I raised my glass to him and turned back to Thomas, who said, “You’ve done it.”

Before I could ask what exactly it was I had done, I felt the preacher’s hand clamp down on my shoulder and smelled his noxious breath close to my face.

He hissed, “You are riding straight for hell, friend. Say the word, and I can help you.”

I set the glass back on the bar and swept his hand from my shoulder. Stamp grunted, stumbled, and righted himself by gripping the edge of the bar. I turned again, and again I met his bleary gaze.

“I am not your friend,” I said. “And I do not want your help.”

“There are fallen women here,” he said conspiratorially, rolling his eyes around the place. Indeed, like so many taverns of its like I had visited in my days, this one doubled as a whorehouse with a small, if less than alluring, assortment of working girls lounging around the downstairs in search of clientele.

“You don’t say,” I said. “Thanks for the tip, then. I’ll be grateful to you once I’ve had my poke of one or two.”

Thomas Song laughed hard at that, in spite of himself. Red Chester Stamp did not.

“Then I see that you are lost already,” he fumed. “Lost to all the devils of hell, God damn your rotten black soul.”

I could find no reason to further bait the old lunatic, so I kept my back to him and resumed drinking and talking with Thomas. Boon, to the best of my knowledge, remained in her rented room at the hotel across town, studying maps or resting for the journey ahead. From what Thomas Song had to tell us of the movements of cow men and ex-Confederates both, it seemed likely we were to leave Texas post haste and roam northwest, to Wyoming. Men who sounded very much like Arthur Stanley were going there in droves.

Of course, different intelligence quashed those plans in little time, and my night of revelry with the Caddo scout soon went from sour to hellish. Sour because that damnable preacher would not leave the saloon, moving from table to table trying out his act on every cowhand, drummer, timberman, drunk, and whore he could corner. Hellish because the moment he spied me climbing the stairs with my chosen company for the night, a fat blonde with enormous teeth and sparkling green eyes who called herself Billie Lynn, Red Chester Stamp got filled up with his God’s righteous wrath and came barreling toward us.

In his left hand he brandished a worn, water-damaged, leather-bound Bible. In his right, a wood chisel maybe six or eight inches long.

“Whoremonger,” he screeched. “Jezebel! I’ll send the both of you to hell, God damn you.”

Despite what many have heard about the average Texas tavern, it was not always the case that every man in such a place came heeled and expecting trouble. The truth was far less interesting and would never have made the papers and novels back east, for in fact that Bastrop saloon was more typical than not and when that preacher came sprinting at us with the chisel in his fist, everybody within spitting distance was so shocked that nobody said or did anything but watch. Even had any man present wished to draw on the madman, they could not have; the saloon had a strict ordinance pertaining to firearms, which was none were allowed except for the 12-gauge in the lookout’s hands.

This meant, of course, that I was unarmed. I had a rifle in those days—not the Winchester .44-40, but a nice enough Springfield—which was under lock and key alongside everybody else’s iron. Rule of the house was you got it back once you were settled up and outside the doors. To hear the bartender tell it, the proprietor ended up keeping half of them on account of men drinking up more than they could afford on such a regular basis. I hadn’t, not as yet, but that Springfield still wasn’t doing me a lick of damn good where it was. To make things still worse, my Arkansas toothpick was back at the hotel in its sheath. And for a cadaverous old bastard with his sunken face and oily black hair, that Red Chester could move but fast.

Billie Lynn fainted outright. Her great bulk hit the bottom landing of the stairs so hard the railing shook. I had to grab the bannister to keep from falling over, myself. In hindsight, falling might have been the best thing for it. Instead, I seized that bannister with one hand and threw the other one up to protect my face. As strategies went, it was a piss-poor one, but time was not on my side.

While I waited for the chisel to stick me, a dark blur sped between me and Stamp and