The Legend of Caleb York by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Author:Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins [Spillane, Mickey & Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Westerns, Fiction
ISBN: 9781617735950
Google: KCJjBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2015-04-27T12:00:00+00:00

Willa, in the recession of the barbershop doorway, watched as the stranger unhitched his horse with his left hand, the shotgun stock clutched in his right. He was looking everywhere, listening intently for any hint of sound over the muffled fun from the Victory.

Nothing.

She left the recession of the doorway and stepped across the boardwalk and down into the street, approaching him. He spun toward her, swinging the shotgun her way, making her jump back a little.

Then he let out so much air that he might have collapsed. “I told you stay back, woman.”

She gestured to the quiet, dark street around them. “You’re imagining things. Who are you meeting, anyway?”

He took a step closer to her. Softly he said, “You. I want to ride out to your father’s ranch for a talk.”

This news widened her eyes, threw her off balance. “Well . . . that’s why I came to town. To talk to you.”

A tiny click froze them both.

Just the smallest little noise . . .

. . . a gun cocking?

Swiftly the stranger shoved her to the street, where she landed whump in a dust cloud of her making, and he ducked down to where that desert rat was napping, pulling out from under Tulley the seed bag that had been the old boy’s mattress, and slinging the thing over the saddle of his horse, whose rump he slapped, sending the animal charging down the street, galloping in the direction of the hotel.

A dark-mustached man in a black vest emerged fast from the alley across the way, to aim a pistol at what he must have figured was the stranger on horseback, trying to get away.

But the stranger was in the midst of the street now and the shooter turned in surprise and got a bellyful of buckshot for his trouble. Blown onto his backside, the openmouthed ambusher stared at the sky, but wasn’t seeing it.

From the alley off to her right came another attacker, a smaller man but burly, on the move, firing a pistol at the stranger, three shots cracking the night, but his target had hit the street in a roll and came up in a crouch, letting loose the other barrel of the shotgun with a boom that sounded like dynamite exploding.

The smaller man was lifted off his feet, then fell back and splashed onto his own spilled blood and innards.

Now she could smell it.

Gunsmoke in the air like gray-blue drifting fog, the stranger was getting to his feet, slowly, looking all around him.

She stayed down, trembling, wondering what might come next, and from her vantage point she could see men pouring out of the Victory down one way and people coming out more tentatively from the hotel down the other. The glow of lights came to windows of second-floor living quarters here and there, folks leaning out for a look, as the stranger calmly, almost casually walked first to one corpse, kicking it, then to the other, and doing the same.

A cowboy, who’d come out

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.