Doubtful Canon Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’s that close to dyin’. Well, no point in gettin’ to all that, now. So there I sat, waitin’ to die, figgered Mr. Giddings was dead by now, and next thing I knowed, I seen him. His head popped up from the rocks, next his whole body, ’em saddlebags gone, but the six-shooter still in his hand. First, I taken it for a mirage, maybe some apparition, but I never heard of no mirage talkin’.
    “Mister Grey?” he yelled.
    Well, I was just too stunned to answer. I lifted my Colt a wee bit, tried to wave him back, but he must have figured I was bad hurt, so, brave man that he was, he come chargin’ back. I won’t forget that. Won’t forget what a gallant man he was.
    Fool, though. Just a fool thing to do. Should have stayed in the rocks. Might have made it out of that scrap alive, but he was comin’ toward me. Comin’ to save me.
    The first arrow hit him in the back of his left leg, right in the bend of the knee, and he fell. He was rollin’ over when a bullet shattered his left arm. I saw the Apache, the one I had seen afore and shot at, rise up, an old Sharps in his hands, grinnin’ like he’d just drawed to an inside straight, and started to fire that big ol’ buffalo gun, but Mr. Giddings beat me and him to it. He put two bullets in that Cherry Cow’s belly afore that Injun knowed what had happened.
    Well, I was thinkin’, he took one of ’em vermin with ’im.
    But that was it. Arrows flied out from all over like a covey of quail, pinnin’ Mr. Giddings to the ground.
    I just sank back down, almost cried, I did, but then I shook some sense into me. Scairt as I was, bad hurt as I was, I wasn’t ’bout to shame Mr. John James Giddings’s memory by bawlin’ like some yellow-livered coward. No, sir. I could die as game as he could.
    So I cocked that Navy of mine, and waited for ’em Apaches to come finish the job.

Chapter Four
    “So, how’d you get away?”
    The question escaped my mouth before I realized I had even spoken. I’d even beaten Ian Spencer Henry to it, and I rarely got a word in edgewise with my best friend nearby.
    “Directly, sonny, directly,” the white-faced man answered without looking at me. He belched, a foul, bean-smelling burp that stunk up the mine’s entrance more than when he broke wind earlier. Next, Whitey Grey fished out paper and tobacco sack and began rolling a cigarette, but his makings were so old and dry, his first two attempts fell into ruin, while Jasmine, Ian Spencer Henry, and I waited eagerly, anxiously, wondering if he would ever finish his blood-and-thunder story.
    At last, the third cigarette survived the ordeal, and he stuck the smoke in his mouth, then patted down his pockets for a Lucifer. To our relief, the cigarette flared up much quicker than it had taken him to roll it, and he leaned back, pulling hard, savoring the taste and smell of tobacco—personally, I preferred the sulphuric aroma of the stricken match over that of cigarette smoke.
    There we sat, as if in some trance.
    “Night come on me,” he said at last, only, just as soon as he had resurrected his story, he departed on yet another detour. “Young ’uns, you sure you ain’t gots no whiskey on you or gots a bottle hidden somewhere close by? ’Tain’t nothin’ like a mornin’ bracer on top of Caroliny-cured tobaccy.”
    “We don’t have anything,” Ian Spencer Henry said, “but there are eleven dram shops and dance halls on Avon Avenue alone, Mister Grey.” My friend smiled in a triumphant brag. “I’ve counted them.”
    Whitey Grey nodded without much appreciation. “Well, don’t matter none. Where was I again, chil’ren?”
    This time, Jasmine spoke first, reminding this stranger of where he had left off, and he repeated that darkness had fallen on him at Doubtful Cañon on that April day two decades earlier.
    “Apaches be scairt of the dark,” he said. “Y’all ain’t afeared of no hobgoblins or haunts in the night, is you?”
    Shakes of our heads reassured him, or,