Golden Riders by Ralph Cotton

Author:Ralph Cotton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

As the four men stood drinking, Prew getting ready to take his brothers and the Bluebird on to meet up with Braxton Kane, they all looked around when the Bluebird stepped inside out of the evening light and stood off to the side. Behind him came Roy Mangett with Joey Rose hanging limp at his side, Rose’s bloody arm looped over Mangett’s shoulder. The men watched in silence as Mangett walked over to a wooden chair where Tillman and Foz sat nursing their rye. He dropped Rose into the chair and stepped back and looked down at him.

“Take a good look,” Mangett said. “This is what a slip of a woman can do with a butcher knife if she takes a mind to.”

“A woman . . . ?” said Ed Dorsey.

“That’s right, Ed, a woman,” said Mangett. “Not a very big woman at that.”

“You men went out to set up an ambush for the Ranger,” said Dorsey.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me, Ed,” said Mangett, his hand falling near his holstered Colt. “I said, this is what a woman can do with a butcher knife. I didn’t mention any Ranger, now did I?” He gave Dorsey a scorching stare. “We never even saw the Ranger.” He looked over at Prew Garlet at the bar, at the two Garlet brothers sitting at the table. “We’re getting Joey here patched up. We’ll take care of the Ranger when he gets here . . . if he even comes here at all.”

Outside the door they heard boots walking across the boardwalk. As they turned and looked, Chris Weidel shoved the white-haired town doctor, Davies Milton, inside the cantina and followed him across the floor. The doctor, red-eyed, his hair disheveled, saw Joey Rose’s bloody, sliced and stitched-up face and stopped ten feet away.

“Yep, that’s your patient, Doc,” said Weidel with a cruel little smile.

The doctor stepped right over to Rose.

“My, my,” he said, “let’s see what we have.” He lay his black medical bag on the table and flipped it open as he studied Rose’s face. Noting many of the slashes on Rose’s face had been stitched shut, yet many were still open and bleeding even though crusted heavily with blood, the doctor asked the two gunmen, “Who did the sewing, and why did you stop?”

“I sewed him,” said Mangett. “I stopped when I ran out of thread.”

“If it needs doing over, Doc,” said Weidel, staring at Rose as he spoke, “we can always pull these stitches out and let you go at it anew.”

Rose groaned and tried to shake his head.

The doctor ignored Weidel as he took off his shiny, black suit coat and pitched it over a chair. He rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“I’ll need some hot water, some soap and some fresh clean bar towels—plenty of them,” he said to Chavez who stood watching from the edge of the bar. Chavez turned to do the old doctor’s bidding. The doctor leaned in and began peeling a wadded blood-soaked bandanna from one of the unstitched wounds on Rose’s chest.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.