Texas Gundown by William W Johnstone

Author:William W Johnstone [Johnstone, William W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

He woke up with the sound of piano music in his ears. The tinny strains were accompanied by a considerable amount of loud talking and laughter. Tobacco smoke tickled his nose. Seymour lifted his head and shook it to try to get rid of the annoyances.

That was a mistake.

His head thudded against the table. He left it there for what seemed like an hour, until all the crazy spinning stopped. When he finally pushed himself upright again and opened his eyes, he was more careful about it.

The Black Bull was crowded now, with most of the spaces at the bar filled and poker games going on at several of the tables. Seymour glanced toward the big front windows. One of them was boarded up, and he recalled the drunken cow- boy’s bullet that had nearly hit Miss Maggie O’Ryan the day before. Through the other window, he saw the fading golden light of dusk.

He had been sitting there passed out in the saloon all day, Seymour realized.

His mouth tasted awful, and he was parched. A drink of cool water sounded better than anything in the world. But the thought of it made his stomach clench.

He hadn’t eaten anything in almost twenty-four hours. He needed food and drink. But not whiskey. A shudder went through him at the very idea.

He had to get out of here. His mind reeled at the idea that he had allowed himself to get so thoroughly inebriated. That wasn’t like him at all. He flattened his hands on the table and tried to push himself to his feet.

That made the world lurch to a halt around him and then immediately begin revolving in the wrong direction. As Seymour’s brain spun, he would have fallen if not for the hand that suddenly grasped his arm.

“Let me help you, Seymour,” Pierre Delacroix said.

Seymour recoiled and tried to pull away from the saloon keeper. “You . . . you’ve helped me quite enough!” he said. “You . . . ohhhh . . . you were the one who . . . got me drunk in the first place.”

Delacroix’s face hardened. “No one put a gun to your head and made you drink, Seymour. I provided the whiskey, that is all.”

Seymour wanted to argue with the Cajun, but it just wasn’t worth the effort. He muttered, “Let me out of here. I want to go.”

“Go where?”

That simple question stopped Seymour in his tracks. Sweet Apple wasn’t his home. He had no place here except a dingy hotel room.

But that was better than the saloon. He shook off Delacroix’s hand and stumbled toward the batwings. Some of the saloon’s customers watched him and grinned. Others laughed out loud. Seymour wanted to lash out at them. He didn’t, of course. He didn’t do things like that. He was too civilized and respectable to get in a shouting match with a bunch of half-drunk louts in a frontier saloon. He almost fell again when he reached the batwings. He caught hold of them, swung them aside, and lurched out onto the boardwalk.

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