Venom of the Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Mule Gap

“I’ll buy your horse from you,” Boyd Evans, the manager of the livery stable, said to Smoke as they were standing over Seven’s body.

“You want to buy Seven? Whatever for? Why would you pay for a dead horse?”

“Horses have a lot of collagen, and the glue factories pay well for that.”

“No!” Smoke said. “Seven is not going to be used to make glue! This is my third horse named Seven. Number one is dead, but number two has been turned out to pasture.”

“You’ve had three horses named Seven?” Evans asked.

“I’m about to have another horse named Seven, and why not? If England can have eight kings named Henry I can have as many horses named Seven as I want.”

“Wait. Are you telling me that England has eight kings, and all of them are named Henry?”

“No,” Smoke replied in an exasperated tone of voice. “What I am telling you is that I want Seven to have a respectable burial.”

“Where do you want him buried?”

“Where in Mule Gap are horses buried?”

“There’s a place out behind the livery where some of ’em are buried. And some folks bury ’em on their own land.”

“I can’t take him back to Sugarloaf, so we’ll have to bury him here.”

Evans brought out a team of mules, connected a harness to Seven, and pulled his body to a place behind the livery stable. There, he hired four men to dig a hole big enough and deep enough to inter Seven.

Smoke watched until the grave was closed, then he went back into the livery to pay the bill. “And I want to rent a horse for the time I’m here.”

“You want to rent one or buy one?” the stable owner said. “I have some fine horses for sale.”

“No, my next horse is already back at my ranch. He’s a two-year-old, the son of Seven, and he looks just like him.”

“All right. You can pick out the one you want to rent.”

Smoke chose a bay with four stockings and a blaze. He ran his hand over the horse, feeling for any abnormalities in its configuration, but found none. “All right. I’ll take this one.”

“For how long?”

“Until I bring him back.”

“In that case, I’ll take a hundred dollars to hold until you bring him back.”

Smoke agreed.

He returned to the doctor’s office a short while later and found Pearlie sitting up in a chair, fully dressed. “What are you doing up? I thought you would be in bed.”

“I’m up, ’cause I wasn’t really hurt.”

“What do you mean you weren’t hurt? You were shot. I saw the bullet wound.”

“Well, yeah, I was shot, but like I said, I wasn’t really hurt. The doctor himself said I wasn’t hurt.”

“I said no such thing,” the doctor said, coming into the waiting room of his office. “I said that none of your vital organs were involved and that, if you are careful, this wound won’t give you any trouble.”

“You also said I could leave,” Pearlie said.

“I did say that, but you may also recall that I said you couldn’t leave until I saw Mr.

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