Read Online The Old Wolves by Peter Brandvold - Free Book Online Page B

jeering, and he showed his old, yellow teeth under his gray mustache, raising one thigh to slap it, his guffaws staying with Spurr as the old lawman galloped on down the trail to the west, toward the purple and lime-green mountains humping tall above the horizon.
    Spurr snarled, cursed under his breath, and spat to one side.
    â€œYou just keep laughin’ like a mule with a mouthful of cockleburs, Sebastian!”
    He was so angry that he did not look back again. If he had, he would have seen three men leading their horses down the stock car’s loading ramp and staring after him.

EIGHT

    â€œThat’s him, all right,” Collie Bone said, staring after the old man who’d just ridden off on the rangy roan stallion, heading toward the mountains.
    â€œYou sure, Bone?” This from a Wyoming outlaw named Quinn McCall, who was leading his bay Arab down the ramp alongside Bone.
    Both men gained the ground alongside the gravel bed of the railroad tracks, both staring off into the dust kicked up by the old man and the handsome roan. Behind Bone and McCall, the outlaw known only as Tatum to anyone who’d known him in the past ten years came down off the ramp at a trot, holding the headstall of his frisky ex-cavalry sorrel, who’d had one ear half chewed off.
    â€œThat’s ole Spurr, all right,” Tatum said. “I recognized him when he looked right at me, when he boarded the flyer at Union Station.”
    â€œHe looked right at you?”
    â€œLooked right at me,” Tatum said, “but I could tell he didn’t recognize me. My god, has he gotten old! Looks like a side of coyote-chewed mule deer buck behind that scraggly beard and them old duds that hang off his ancient bones. Got more age spots and warts than freckles.”
    Tatum threw a stirrup up over his saddle to tighten the sorrel’s cinch.
    â€œSpurr Morgan—well, I’ll be damned,” said McCall, lifting his funnel-brimmed Stetson to run a hand through his thick, close-cropped, copper-red hair. He wore a thick beard of the same color. “I hope he remembers us. You think he remembers us, Collie?”
    â€œHope so. Don’t matter.” Collie Bone was setting his saddlebags over his horse, behind his saddle cantle and bedroll, and staring after Spurr. “He cost all three of us six years in Yuma pen. I woulda hunted that old man down, but, shit, I thought for sure he’d be dead by now. Ain’t that what we heard, Tatum? Didn’t we hear he bought a bullet in Nueces?”
    â€œI can’t vouch for what you heard, Collie, but that’s what I heard, all right. I remember cryin’ real tears, that night, too. Right in front of a rather expensive Abilene whore, too. Very embarrassing. I’m gonna give him one bullet for that when we run him down, in addition to all the others for Yuma.”
    â€œOne bullet for every month,” McCall said, gritting his teeth as he stared after the small, brown, jostling blur that was the old lawman and his handsome roan. “Or until he dies howlin’. How’d that be?”
    He grunted angrily as he shucked his double-action Cooper Pocket Revolver, an old cap-and-ball weapon, but one that McCall still always carried with two other more modern weapons because it was a double-action piece and had sentimental value in that it had seen him through his early days on the frontier just after the Civil War.
    He quickly checked the loads in the Cooper and was about to check the loads in one of his matched Remingtons when a deep, resonate voice said, “Where you fellas headin’ off to in such a hurry?”
    Tatum, Bone, and McCall turned toward the station agent—a gray-haired, gray-mustached black man who’d been smoking in the shade of a large, dusty cottonwood slouched just west of the stopped train. He was strolling toward them slowly, rolling a quirley in his long, arthritic fingers.
    Beyond him, several young children