A Bullet for Billy Read Online Free PDF Page B

ones.”
    â€œThere’s more women than you might imagine if you like the Mexican kind,” I said.
    â€œI got nothing at all against Mexican women,” he said. “They work hard and laugh a lot from what I know of them. I imagine yours does too.”
    I reached inside my coat pocket and took out the pint bottle of forty rod and handed it to him because he looked like he could stand a drink, and I sure as hell knew I could.
    He looked at it before taking hold of it and pulling the cork, then he put it to his mouth and swallowed. Then he looked at it again and handed it back to me, and I took a pull and plugged it and put it back inside my coat pocket.
    â€œSun’s pretty on the snow on them mountains yonder,” he said.
    â€œIt is, ain’t it.”
    Way off in the distance we heard the train whistle blowing.
    â€œShe’s coming,” he said.
    I pulled my watch and checked the time.
    â€œWay early,” I said.
    â€œLucky we’re here then or we’d of missed it,” he said.
    â€œAin’t we though.”
    He stood slowly as though he had to fit everything into place, all his bones, before he could move properly.
    â€œYou don’t owe me nothing,” he said. “I don’t want you to go on you thinking you owe me because of what happened that time in Caddo.”
    â€œI’m not thinking nothing like that.”
    He stared hard at me then.
    â€œâ€™Cause if that’s the case, I don’t want you helping me. I don’t operate like that, figuring a man owes me anything because of the past.”
    â€œLook, maybe it is some of that, but so what? You saved my skin in Caddo and if it wasn’t for you killing those two bandits, I’d have been planted and no chance to help nobody or eat a nice breakfast this morning or spend my nights with a good woman. So maybe it is a little of my thinking I owe you for something. But it’s not just that.”
    â€œWhat is it then?”
    The whistle grew louder, and you could see the black smoke of its engine chuffing into the air off in the distance like a small dark cloud.
    â€œI guess you already know.”
    He nodded.
    â€œI always just did my job, Jim, keeping you boys alive, you and the others. I didn’t always, that’s a natural fact, but I did the best I couldbecause it was my job, that’s all.”
    I couldn’t say I thought of him like he was my own daddy, which he’d just about had been when I first joined the Rangers. I couldn’t tell him that, nor would he have wanted me to. Men like him and me don’t talk about such intimate things, but it didn’t mean we didn’t feel them.
    â€œYou did more than your job, Cap’n, a lot more.”
    He looked off again up the tracks.
    â€œHere she comes,” he said.
    I held the reins to the stud. He was jumpy at the sight and noise his iron brother was making. I stroked his muzzle and spoke to him gentle. “Don’t raise no fuss and make us have to go through what we did earlier all over again,” I said. The stud tossed his head and whinnied.
    â€œMaybe we ought to have another sip of old Mr. Fortifier,” Cap’n said. “Before we get on that train. Maybe you ought to give that half-broke horse a swally too so he won’t kick out the sides of his car when they put him aboard.”
    I took out the bottle and handed it to the Cap’n, and he bit off a piece and handed it back.
    â€œI used to be a teetotaler when I was married up with JoAnn. She was a righteous woman and wouldn’t let me keep none in the house, and so I just gave it up along with every other wickedness when I got with her. She got me to being baptized standing waist deep in the Canadian River by a tongue-speaking preacher. She cleaned me up pretty good from what I had been. But I never claimed not to miss a good glass of whiskey or a good smoke, and now I just look at it as the best medicine a man