The Best of the West (Jerry eBooks) by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale [Lansdale, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2015-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

Blunt. Cold. Wordless. Bloodless. That was Carson Reddner. That was the image. It made sense, because the only moments of his thirty-seven years that the Territory had preserved in its collective memory were the twenty-four seconds or so it had taken him to face down and shoot dead nineteen of his own breed.

He had been a miller’s assistant, a powder boy, a sodbuster, a pony stringer, a drifter. He had a mother who still loved him, a father who didn’t. He had put eight years in school, two in the army. He had buried a wife and a baby. And all this was unremarkable and uninteresting. All this hid behind twenty-four seconds of calling out death and the fractions therein of outdrawing it.

It was Easter and it was raining and his hemorrhoids were killing him as he rode up on Three Wells. He couldn’t actually see the town. But it would be there, a little stain of humanity at the foot of the palisade. The other time he had been through he had been unremarkable and uninteresting. Lord Jesus, let me be unremarkable and uninteresting, he prayed fervently, but it wasn’t going to happen this time. If Christ himself had ridden in at his elbow, they would have gotten even billing this Easter, the second coming for each.

The storm played games with its wind-driven veils—white, gray, black—right up until the last. He smelled the blacksmith’s fire and still couldn’t see the town. Despite the rain, he caught that, because the forge was on the eastern edge. He didn’t actually see the forge until he was even with it, and the smith didn’t see him until after he had walked his Appaloosa under the overhang and shed a small lake.

The smith looked like a hippopotamus in a leather apron, but something about his expression got very small as he peered at the stranger. Carson had seen the nuances of that look too many times not to know it. It wasn’t reasoned fear in the face of lethal force, it was an uncertain fear bubbling out of the gut, a fear of snakes and spiders and aberrations in the night. The smith had no right to be afraid like that. The stranger before him was a drowning rat come out of the storm, his guns hidden by a tattered duster, a sodden lump of homespun and leather and weary flesh.

“Hotel’s right up the street, mister,” came out at last. “Reckon you’re soaked through to the bone.”

“Obliged if I could just dry out by your fire a spell,” he answered.

An extra second or two hung between them before the smith’s face lit up with false hospitality. “My pleasure,” he said.

Carson tethered his mount to one of the poles supporting the overhang and moved to the side of the forge. He avoided the smith’s eyes when he stripped off his duster, revealing the mismatched peacemakers—one short-barreled for clearing leather, one long for accuracy. He hovered over the stones that bedded the hot ash then, and for a while the rain made all the noise that was necessary between them.

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