A Big Sky Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

back in a chair and stretched out his long legs. “People talk about that fella MacCallister like he was Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and Kit Carson all rolled into one. He didn’t look so dang special to me. Just another old man who ain’t had the sense to die yet.” Swint downed the drink and licked his lips.
    â€œYou must be joshin’, boss,” Three-Finger Jake Lucas said. He was a handsome young man with a quick, cocky grin and a full head of brown hair under his tipped back hat. The last two fingers of his left hand were gone, pinched off cleanly when he got them trapped between his rope and saddle horn as he took a dally to stop a runaway steer during a drive up the trail from Texas. It was a mistake many cowboys had made, which was why many of them were missing a finger or two.
    Jake had taken the accident hard. It had embittered him, and when the herd he was with reached Abilene and the Texas crew started home, Jake hadn’t gone with them. He had stayed in Abilene, spent all his wages on a monumental drunk, and vowed never to return home in his mutilated state.
    In the four years since then, he had fallen in with bad company, as they say. His best friend Bodie Cantrell knew that . . . because he was a member of that so-called bad company himself.
    Bodie was sitting at the table with Swint, Jake, and three other men, all of them drinking heavily. Bodie had a pretty fuzzy glow going from the liquor. He didn’t like to get drunk as much as some of his companions did, but from time to time he gave in to the urge, anyway. The whiskey usually helped him forget what had happened in Kansas a couple weeks earlier.
    It wasn’t helping so much that night.
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    â€œ It’s just a little flag stop out in the middle of nowhere,” Eldon Swint said. “There’s only one man on duty at night. He’s the telegrapher, ticket agent, and baggage clerk, all in one. When we throw down on him, he’ll put that flag up, you can bet a hat on that.”
    â€œYeah, but will the train stop?” one of the men asked.
    â€œIt’s not an express. It’ll stop,” Swint said confidently. “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
    â€œWhy would they ship all that money from the mint on a train that’s not an express?” Bodie asked. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”
    â€œBecause they’re tryin’ to be tricky. They don’t think anybody’ll suspect the shipment’s on a local like that. They got a whole series of ’em set up to get the money from Denver to St. Louis.”
    The outlaws sat their horses on a slight rise looking north toward a small settlement on the rolling Kansas plains. The railroad tracks ran straight as a string east and west, disappearing in the distance in both directions.
    A small depot sat next to the tracks on the north side, and behind it was the settlement’s short, single street with half a dozen businesses on each side. At the far end of the street stood a whitewashed church that doubled as a schoolhouse during the week. Maybe two dozen residences were scattered around haphazardly.
    Bodie didn’t know the name of the place. It was so small it didn’t really deserve one, although he was sure it had some sort of official designation on railroad maps since there was a station there.
    One of the men said to Swint, “You’re sure you can trust the fella who told you about all this, boss?”
    â€œI’m sure,” Swint said with an ugly grin. “He thought he was sellin’ out the government for a share of the loot, so he didn’t have any reason to lie. He sure was surprised when he found out that his share was a bullet!”
    Swint’s haw-haw of laughter made Bodie’s guts clench. He was well aware that he wasn’t riding with a bunch of choir boys, but Eldon Swint making a joke out of cold-blooded murder rubbed him the wrong way.
    Bodie