Benedict and Brazos 23 by E. Jefferson Clay

Author:E. Jefferson Clay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gunfighters, colt 45, range wars, western ebooks, piccadilly publishing, old west fiction, action adventure westerns
Publisher: Piccadilly

Chapter Six – A Gun Too Fast

THE SAME BRIGHT sun that turned the Keogh County rangeland green and gold that afternoon shone hotter, whiter, on the border town of Snakebite far to the south.

Snakebite was a mean town, and the dust that gusted down the crooked little main street under the push of the wind didn’t improve things any.

Even so, to the locals grouped on the porch of the battered Hardcase Hotel, it still didn’t seem a good day to die, though the boy with the curly black hair and rain-colored eyes seemed bent on doing just that.

“You must be a little tetched in the haid, boy,” a grizzled old veteran said from around a cud of plug tobacco. “Leastways I can’t figure no feller in his right mind goin’ out of his way to tangle with Kid Silk.”

The boy with the thonged-down gun just laughed. His name was Billy Mack, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the distant figure seated in the lacy shade of a cottonwood tree near the old well.

“You got a grudge agin the Kid?” asked another.

Mack shook his curls. “Nope. It just bothers me that any man can stand so damn tall.”

The men exchanged a helpless look. They knew this kind in Snakebite; they knew the wild boys with gun smoke in their eyes who came riding in from time to time on the hunt for some big name or another. For lawless Snakebite was a haven for men of the fast gun trade. That, and a graveyard for the ambitious boys who wanted nothing more from life than to claim some famous scalp, then see how they fitted a dead man’s boots. Sometimes, like today, the locals tried to talk the boys out of it. But most times they just shrugged and moved away until the gun smoke cleared.

It was a thankless task, trying to talk wild boys out of dying so young.

“Well, gents,” Mack grinned, hitching at his heavy shell belt. “I’ll be back to buy you all a drink after I find out what the Kid is using for gut-stuffin’ these days.”

“Better have that drink now, boy,” the old man called after him as he started off. “On account of I hear tell they’re right shy on good likker in the place you’re headin’ for.”

Billy Mack’s laugh drifted back to them ... and carried clearly to the well where the gunfighter sat in the shade with old Charlie Koe ...

He had come by the name Kid Silk because of his penchant for wearing full-sleeved silk shirts. When he came to the border country five years ago with no name he chose to give, Kid Silk had seemed to fit. He had been a kid then, young and unlined, with a spring in his step. But five years along the wild border had left a heavy mark. He wore his fair hair shoulder-length, and his heavy, corn-colored moustache made him appear much older than his twenty-six years. The eye he had lost in a clash of Colts was covered by a black patch.

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