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

Comanche to find the love of his life seated on my lap, and he saw red. Thing was, the place was a crib house and his beloved was in its employ. And I might have been a paying customer had the fellow not dragged the poor girl off of me and hauled me outside by the front of my shirt. I had only been in Texas for five days.

The heartsick idiot demanded I fill my hand, which was a request I declined. I had only my rifle, which did not at all suit the situation he was trying to put into place. He then commanded one of his two pals to give me his revolver. This turned into an argument between them, during which I started for the alley between the crib house and the gambling den next door. The third fellow cracked off a shot at me, slamming lead into the corner of the building not three inches above the crown of my skull.

“If he won’t fight like a man,” said the heartsick idiot, “then I ’spect we’ll just hang the son of a bitch.”

I weighed the two options, but I was wasting my time. The first idea was off the table already. The girl who’d been on my lap was on the porch now, clasping her hands to her breast and gazing lovingly at the man who had just decided to lynch me. I thought bitterly about how something like this wouldn’t have happened back in Arkansas, but it probably would have. Honestly, it was only a matter of time.

That was the sort of luck I had.

I got tossed onto a mount with the grubby fellow who’d taken that potshot at me and the four of us went loping out of whatever lousy little cow town we’d been in, in a westerly direction, where they sought privacy and the right tree for the job. Once I was strung up, I asked as politely as I could that the fellows look after my horse. The heartsick idiot said he was going to kill my horse and let it rot in the desert next to me. It didn’t look like we were going to be friends. I said as much, in a manner sufficiently colorful to excite their rage. Though I was about to die, I couldn’t help but laugh a little. It must have been what I said about the heartsick idiot’s mother. Tough jaspers like him were always mama’s boys in the end.

I couldn’t quite make out what he was doing, but it was quiet enough out there in the still, hot air that I could hear the click of the hammer as he eared it back. The usual chain of events in tights like this, at least according to the dime novels, was that he’d fire a round into the air to startle the roan. The roan would then move off, leaving me to hang. That would be that, until the next poor bastard met his beloved whore at the crib house, anyway.

And a shot did indeed come. It echoed out over the cacti and scrub brush and I squeezed my eyes shut to wait for death. The horse fell away from beneath me, and I dropped toward the earth, but my neck stayed in the noose that was now choking the life out of me while my toes scraped the dust. Well, old man, I told myself, I expect this is the end, then. I felt unusually calm, given the circumstances, and tried to hold my breath for some reason but my lungs weren’t having it. Three more shots followed, one right after the other, pop, pop, pop. I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to a whole lot of commotion in the ensuing seconds. Shouts and hooves beating the dirt, what sounded like sacks of grain falling to the ground from a reasonable height. My eyes opened again but by then I was half-dead already and couldn’t see much, or what I could see was as that esteemed disciple said, as through a glass but darkly.

The rope broke. I hit the ground, hard. Had the heartsick idiot had a change of heart? If so, that certainly did nothing to explain the three shots that followed the one that spooked my horse. My face was full of dust and there were hooves beating perilously close to my head. Nothing was going the way I expected it to that day.

When I did finally open my eyes, I found myself staring at the heartsick idiot, who appeared to be staring back at me. Our faces were lined up perfectly there on the ground, only his sported a fresh hole right in the middle of the forehead which leaked blood onto the dirt. A horse nickered nearby and boots hit the earth. I tried to roll over but my back barked at me and my hands were still tied.

The first thing Boon ever said to me, the knife she used to cut the rope still gripped in one hand, was, “You ought to stay away from whorehouses.”

To my credit, I did.

Most of the time.

She gave up on her soup and lay the spoon down on the table. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her look quite as tired as she did that first evening in Darling, Texas, and for reasons I couldn’t seem to pin down it made me feel sad to see it. To tell the God’s honest truth, she was the only friend I had in all the world, and though I knew she had a rough go of life, when it piled up on her mind there was rarely anything I could say or do. At the end of the day, I wasn’t ever much help to her. I was just there.

“Turning in,” was all she said before rising from the table and going purposefully to the stairs.

I signaled the bartender for another drink, but he only pursed his lips at me and shrugged. With a sigh,