Friends Read Online Free PDF

fault," I told him. "I'm not hired to be on his hind pockets all the time, am I?"
    "Not what I meant," he said, sitting again. "I never saw anything like it, that's all, and I don't like not knowing what happened to a patient. Makes me look stupid and it lowers the fee I can charge."
    I saw he was trying to help me out with the way I was feeling for letting Clete get hurt, and I appreciated it and reminded myself to try to do a good tum for that peppery old sawbones when I could. "Don't you have any idea, Doc?"
    "Well, it's not a gunshot wound, that much I know. There's nothing left inside, I probed it twice clear to the bone. Looks more like a tear a cannon ball would make than anything else, but that can't be. Gave him one hell of a whack on both his jaw and his skull, too, whatever it was."
    Right then I knew what had done this to Clete. "Like a cannon ball, Doc? You mean like a solid ball or like an exploding shell?"
    "Why, like pieces of iron thrown out when one explodes, of course!" he hollered at me. "Solid ball would've taken his damn head clean off. Weren't you in the War?" he ask.
    "Well, I was, but I never saw a man hit by cannon fire. I have got to go look at something now," I told him. "You sure he ain't awake in there maybe?"
    "I doubt it, but you can go see for yourself if you want to," he grumbled, picking up his newspaper.
    Clete was a sorry sight. He had bled a little through the bandage that was wrapped all the way around his head and down under his jaw. Both his eyes and most of his cheek on the side he was hit was swelled up tight and bruised nearly black. He was breathing, I could see, but real slow and not deep enough to suit me. I touched his hand and called his name a time or two, but his eyelids didn't even twitch.
    Doc had nothing to say when I left the sick room, didn't even look up from his paper, so I went over to Clooney's. While I was standing there trying to figure it out, Tubbs come down and set a shot of rye on the bar in front of me.
    I had started to reach for it before I thought. "What's this?" I ask him.
    "Why, that's what you always have!" he said. "I can't give you nothing stronger, if that's what you're looking for."
    "No, it ain't," I told him squarely. "Take this away and bring me a couple hard-cooked eggs-and a cup of tea, I guess." That's what my grandma'd always give me to settle my stomach.
    I thought for a minute he was going to fall over. "Tea? We don't serve tea in here!" After he picked up the shot and drank it himself, he looked me in the eye while he wiped the bar with his rag. "I'll get you the eggs, but we got no tea." He started into the back and then turned around. "I got a pot of coffee I made for myself. You can have some of that if you want."
    I nodded and he went to get it.
    The coffee helped some, but I could only get one of the eggs down. I knowed if I ate the other one I'd lose them both. After going up to my room and washing my face and putting on a cleaner shirt, I went back to where Clete'd been hit, blood all over the place. That piece of lead that'd hit him had to be somewheres, but after an hour or more I still couldn't find it. I don't know what made me drift toward the livery, about three rods off. There, half of it wedged into one of the weathered boards, stuck in about as high as your chest, was a bright shiny sliver of metal so sharp I cut my finger trying to pull it loose. It was a little more than an inch long and as wide as your thumb nail. Thicker than a slice of bacon and sharp as a razor on three sides.
    I took it straight down the street to John Tate's store.
    "This here's a piece of one of those musket shells, ain't it?" I ask him right off, plunking it down on his counter.
    He looked it over real careful before he spoke. "Looks like lead," he answered, "but I can't be sure. I never saw one before you and the sheriff brought those in the other day. Where'd you find this?"
    "Stuck in the side of the livery," I said. "About fifty feet from where