Hart the Regulator 4 by John B. Harvey

Author:John B. Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: wild west, old west, outlaws, gunslingers, texas rangers, frontier fiction, john harvey, piccadilly publishing, hart the regulator, western pulp fiction, wes hart
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Eight

The Silver Giants needed one more score to win. The game against the Green Belts had been going on for something over three hours. The crowd were drunk and furious or drunk and ecstatic – depending upon who they supported and just how drunk they’d managed to get. A short bear of a man stepped up to the mark, flexing his arms to test the bat gripped in his hands. A smile of triumph was already beginning to light up his bearded face. The pitcher tossed the ball from hand to hand, confident of victory. A roar rose on the back of the throats of the spectators and grew and grew in volume until it threatened to obliterate everything else. The bearded man held his bat at the ready, moving it fractionally, watching, watching ... the ball was released from the pitcher’s hand in a high, wicked curve and the bat flashed, the sound of their meeting was clear and hard and then the ball was soaring away and the man was running, running, straining to pass the bases, the noise of the crowd dinning his ears as the hard ground slapped against the undersides of his feet and he strained every muscle in his body to…

There was a thump and a crash and a single, alarmed shout as the bearded man fell to the floor and lay sprawling. His hands fumbled for the bat that was no longer there and only became tangled in a mess of blanket.

R. G. Fowler groaned and rolled on to his back; opened his eyes gingerly and closed them again at once. The bed that he had fallen from loomed large and high above him and he saw no way in which he would be able to crawl back into it. Instead he pulled the blanket up around his head and went back on to his side, curling his legs up towards the soft bulk of his belly.

After less than five minutes he knew it wasn’t going to be any good. He wasn’t going to be able to go to sleep and he wasn’t able to penetrate his dream; he would never know if he’d scored the winning strike, if the game had been won or lost.

Fowler groaned and pushed the blanket away, wobbling up into a sitting position. He poked his fingers into the corners of his eyes, licked his furry tongue around his mouth and yawned. His head felt as if someone had been hitting it with a baseball bat. Not once, but steadily through the night. In fact, it felt the same as it did most mornings - which was why Fowler always tried to put off waking up for as long as was possible.

From a sitting position, he fumbled on the floor close to the bed for the bourbon bottle he’d set down there not so many hours before. He lifted it to his mouth and a few drops trickled forlornly on to his tongue.

‘Shit!’

Fowler tossed the empty bottle up on to the bed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.