Stand Up and Die by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Son of a gun,” Sean Keegan said, chuckling as he watched Breen push the colt into the herd, then ride to the camp Keegan had been left in charge of.

McCulloch rode in with the young Indian kid, who took the first watch and began circling the herd of ponies and mustangs. Breen slowed his horse to a walk, easily dismounted, and began unsaddling his horse.

“Hell,” the Irishman said, spitting into the dirt, and looking back at the outlaw with the scarred face and the buxomly woman who stirred a pot filled with stew. It’s a good thing, Keegan thought, that he wasn’t betting real money. He had figured Breen would come limping in, dead to the world, hardly able to stand after four days of rough riding since leaving Purgatory City. But the son of a gun looked like he had been riding horses in the United States Cavalry practically as long as Sean Keegan had . . . which annoyed the hell out of him.

McCulloch spurred his horse to the covered wagon, but he left his horse saddled. That was fine. He would ride out to spell the Comanche kid after he ate his supper. Keegan turned around and looked at Otto Kruger as he helped Charlotte Platte fix supper.

He raised his canteen and drank. A moment later, McCulloch’s spurs signaled his approach, and the tall, broad-shouldered Texas hard rock with the narrow hips and bowed legs, stood at Keegan’s side. He, too, looked at the killer who used guns and the killer who used arsenic and anything else she could get her hands on.

“You kept an eye on them the whole time, didn’t you?” McCulloch said.

Keegan gargled with the hot water from the canteen and spit it onto a lonely prickly pear. “Hell, Matt, we’ve been out with them four days and we have yet to be taken with sickness and die a ghastly death.”

“I’d like to keep it that way.”

“We’ll do like we’ve been doing, me laddie,” Keegan said as he corked the canteen. “Make them eat first.”

“The poison could be something she rubbed on the bowls.”

“We can shuffle the bowls so no one knows what’s what.”

“Charlotte Platte might be mean enough to be willing to die and kill all of us.”

“Nay, laddie. She likes the kid.”

McCulloch turned. “The kid? What kid?”

“Your adopted Comanch, of course. Wooden Arm.”

McCulloch’s hard eyes tried to weed out the joke Keegan had to be playing, but the old horse soldier was deadly serious.

“She dotes on the boy. Rubs salve over his bad arm, then laces the splints back together. Bloody hell, Matt, have ye not been looking at them all the time since we rode out for Precious Metal?”

“Well, I told Breen . . . well, there’s—Hell, I have enough on my mind, Sergeant.”

“It ain’t sergeant no more, Matt. Ye ought to remember that.”

“I’ve known you too long to call you anything else.”

“Except an ornery old fool and crotchety Irishman. And those are all ye can say in front of polite company.

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