Weird, Weird West by Shannon Harry

Author:Shannon, Harry [Shannon, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FICTION / Westerns
Publisher: SEP IRA Songs
Published: 2012-01-06T04:30:00+00:00

THE RECKONING

He woke up to the sound of far away spurs. Spooked, Wade Lee Hardin shivered in the dead man's clothes. They were stiff with frost, drenched with frozen blood, most of it not his own. It was time to move on. It was a harsh world, and full of reckoning. He'd slept sitting up, pistols ready, done without a fire for a host of nights, stayed alive by jawing down dried beef and a bit of stale biscuit

At daylight he urged the gray on through the high desert boulders, staying off soft ground so as to avoid leaving tracks, always aiming west, slowing only to seek fresh water or a stretch of decent grass. Hardin found such a place near sundown that day, when he followed birds and happened on a stand of Cottonwoods. The gray mare nickered thirst, so Hardin he knew he'd likely found water to boot. For the first time that day, he allowed himself to look back, over his shoulder for a spell, one hand covering the squint.

The horizon taunted him. A po' boy cooed in a fist of manzanita. Grasshoppers buzzed and clicked. The ridge line looked clear. No injuns hunkered dawn trying to pretend they was rocks, no Comanchero bastards trying to pretend they wasn't injuns. Most of all, no Mexicans. So far, so good.

Hardin swung his aching legs over the gray, dropped heavily to the ground. He opened the Army canteen, poured into his palm and let the horse have the last of the tepid water. He could already hear the fresh supply humming along, the stream not too far off, a bit to the west and south. Figured, If got that much all to myself, and if we drink up and keep moving, played my hand pretty well. I'm a mean fucker for certain, and will maybe stay alive.

It would be good to make Nevada. California, even better.

During the day or night, whenever his eyes closed even for a moment, Hardin could hear the jangle of Mexican spurs, steadily approaching. They were always coming slowly, patiently, no hurry to them. The high pitched tinkling sound had a hollow quality, like an echo deep in the woods, something enough real yet also existing in another world. Then Hardin would smell the Mexican, whose friends called him Oso, The Bear. A skunk-stupid trapper, doomed to reek of scraped hides and gore, of cheap tequila and wet campfire farts. Smell him close by. Always as if the man were just upwind, in the shadows of the previous dusk or the coming dawn, grinning, squatting patiently out there next to a fist of dried sage.

The goddamned fight had been over nothing, a look one of the overweight whores had flashed Hardin while still in Oso's lap. The Mexican had lashed out with his skinning knife. There was time to walk away. Or shoot, and that could have been the end of it, just plugging him for being dumb enough to pull a knife on a

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