Read Online A Bullet for Billy by Bill Brooks - Free Book Online

who shot him. The fellow was arrested and a quick trial was held and the fellow was found innocent of murder in the first degree and every other degree because nobody could prove one way or the other whether it was a justified shooting or not, seeing as how the horse in question actually had the bloat and in fact died only one hour before Jardine was himself shot.
    So there he now lay in a cold dark grave with nothing but Billy and Sam’s memory of him photographed in their minds, this mild-mannered fellow with eyes blue as ice water, closed forever against the stain of the world wherein men couldshoot you over practically nothing at all and get away with it.
    â€œWhere would we go?” Sam asked when Billy suggested they leave Tascosa. “And what about Ma?”
    â€œMa can make out a lot easier she don’t have our hungry mouths to feed. We’d be doing her a favor.”
    â€œHow’d we make a living and feed our own hungry mouths?” Sam asked.
    â€œHell if I know, but we’ll make out one way or the other.”
    Billy was nineteen, and growing up as he had, with a mother who couldn’t pick the right man till she picked Jardine, or rather, Jardine picked her, had made him grow up fast.
    He passed the whiskey bottle to Sam, and Sam took a hit off it while Billy rolled them a shuck and smoked it first, then handed it to Sam when Sam handed him back the bottle.
    â€œYou know that son of a bitch Longly that killed Jardine and got away with it ought to pay something for his sin,” Billy said.
    â€œHow you mean?”
    â€œI mean he ought to pay something.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI don’t know, but we ought to ride over there and make him pay something to Ma, and to us.”
    â€œHow we gone do that? We ain’t even got no horse to ride over there with.”
    â€œWe got the keys to the padlock that holds the gate to those horses Jardine was trading for that man in Uvalde.”
    â€œYou mean steal us some?”
    â€œYou think that fellow from Uvalde when he gets here is just gone give us two horses for showing up and asking him?”
    â€œNo, I don’t reckon he would.”
    â€œWe got Jardine’s pistols,” Billy said. “We’ll need ’em.”
    Sam remembered the Remingtons Jardine kept in a red velvet–lined case made of mahogany he’d shown them once from his old days of being a town marshal in Dallas. The citizens there had given him the set for his faithful duty of keeping law and order. They were even inscribed on the backstraps with J. R. Frost.
    â€œHis prize pistols?” Sam said.
    â€œYou think he’s gone need them anymore?”
    â€œNo, I reckon not.”
    â€œTime we went out on our own, became men,” Billy said. “Pass me that shuck.”
    They drank half the whiskey before Sam puked up his portion and slumped down green. Billy, nearly fallen-down drunk, laughed at his little half brother.
    That night after they’d all gone to bed, Billywoke Sam and told him to pack some things and off they snuck out the back door with Jardine’s prize pistols stuck inside their belts and walked clear to town where Jardine kept the man from Uvalde’s horses locked up in a corral with a big brass padlock.
    Billy undid the lock with Jardine’s key, and they slipped inside among the horses, some of whom slept standing, their heads down. Billy picked his way through the small herd to where some saddles and bridles were kept next to a big grain bin.
    â€œPick you out one,” Billy whispered.
    The each took a bridle and saddle and picked them out a horse and slipped the headstall over their horses’ heads and the bit between their teeth and saddled them up, then walked them out slow through the gate, with Billy dismounting and locking the gate again before remounting, telling Sam to take it slow, to walk up the back alley behind the town’s buildings till they hit the