Read Online The Last Shootist by Miles Swarthout - Free Book Online Page B

‘My enemies are many, but my sword of retribution is my six-shooter.’”
    The newshound eyed him speculatively. “You’re a real cocked pistol, kid. You get over into New Mexico, stop in Tularosa, ask directions to Gene Rhodes’s ranch, west across the white sands up in the San Andes Mountains. Eugene’s a tough bird. He’s that aspiring fictionist I mentioned. He’s got a weakness for desperados ridin’ the Owl Hoot Trail, so it’s reported.”
    Gillom had the black gelding moving, but he just nodded, leading the dark brown packhorse away.
    Dan watched him go. “ Owe you one! You come back to the Pass, Gillom, I’ll buy the drinks and you tell me your adventures!”
    Gillom turned in his saddle to give Dobkins a hard smile, but he didn’t wave goodbye.

 
    Eleven
    Â 
    Gillom rode north from El Paso aiming for Tularosa, the only destination that stuck in his head from Dobkins’s advice. He knew only that after last night’s nightmare with the alligators he had to get the hell on his horse, or these two stolen ones, and get gone for a long while.
    He still had two hundred and fifty dollars of Books’s inheritance burning in his saddlebag, plus the young Mexicans’ old revolvers and holsters he’d trade for supplies along the way. I hope those crazy boys are still missing, he thought. It was street wisdom among El Paso’s youth that their park’s famous alligators hid their victims underwater in their rocky grotto to gnaw on later for snacks. Hope to God parts of those vaqueros, Serrano’s kin, don’t float up to give me away!
    The black horse was feisty under its new rider, chewing its snaffle bit, shying sideways, but Mose had told him this bar bit with a hinge in the middle was easier on a horse’s mouth. Gillom gave the gelding a little iron of the new spurs he’d also picked up at the Fair store. He nearly lost the reins of the packhorse following as he clung onto the saddlehorn during the bucking that followed. Lucky Mose sold me that breast collar, he thought, so my damned saddle won’t fall off! Gillom aimed the big horse upslope on Mt. Franklin until its consternation subsided.
    El Paso had grown up on both sides of this mile-high wedge of limestone and granite shaped like a horseshoe, and he rode along the rocky foothills of the western side of Mt. Franklin, which gradually sloped down to the big river to the south.
    But Gillom was headed away from the Rio Grande, weaving through patches of lechugilla and yucca, enjoying a morning sun filtering through mountainside stands of live oak and juniper trees. He was confident enough to ask an old Mexican goatherder chopping down a piñon pine, “How far to Tularosa?”
    â€œTularosa? Tres dias, ” the old man answered, scratching his chin hair.
    â€œOne hundred miles?”
    The old Mexican understood English. “Mas o menos.”
    I’ll tire these ornery animals ridin’ forty miles on each of ’em these first couple days and then just ease in that third day for a layover till I get my bearings, Gillom decided. Tularosa’s supposed to be a tough town. Excitin’!
    He rode down the mountainside and out of the coffin corner of Texas.
    *   *   *
    It was dark when he reached a stream leading into Old Coe Lake, out in the lower middle of the long Tularosa Valley. The lake was too big to be anybody’s fenced-off waterhole, but too small to be good for fishing. Even if he knew how to fish, Gillom was too tired to try. His thighs and butt and lower back ached from a full day in the saddle, which this town boy wasn’t used to. He staggered as he pulled the sweaty Navajo double blanket and saddle off the bay horse he’d switched to riding midday, to give each mount a breather from the packed saddlebags and man they had to carry. Taking hardtack from the food sack in his warbag, Gillom led both tired