Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF

hand got so sweaty on my gun butt that I moved to wipe it off on my britches.
    “Give him time, Shell. Whoever he is, he’s standing in the rain yonder between the buildings. He’ll get tired of it before we will.”
    “I ain’t movin’,” I said. “I’m fixin’ to spend the night—only that gent over there don’t know that.”
    “You ever been shot at before, Shell?”
    “No, sir. Not really. Had some Injuns one time who cut loose at the house. They were shootin’, all right, but not at nobody in pa’ticular. That gent yonder was mighty pa’ticular, I’m thinking.”
    So we waited. My rifle was close by, but I hesitated to reach for it, although I doubted if it was where it could be seen.
    “Crawl around close to the wall, then through the kitchen door. I’ll cover you.”
    After I started to crawl I could reach my rifle, so I latched onto it, and when I got into the kitchen I stood up in the dark doorway and looked out at the rain-sodden street. I could see nothing but the slanting rain across the window.
    Con crawled the other way and joined me.
    We heard the cook stirring, saw the glow of his cigar. “You boys always pack trouble with you? Or is this here somethin’ new?”
    “You got a back door?”
    “Yonder.…If you boys was figurin’ on havin’ breakfast, there’s a good restaurant on the other side of town.”
    “You’ll never get rich sendin’ business away,” I said. “We like your place.”
    “I might not get rich,” he said dryly, “but I’ll live a lot longer. Well, come back if you’ve a mind to. On’y, if you boys don’t mind I’ll stand my ol’ Sharps alongside the door. If anybody shoots into my kitchen I’m goin’ to shoot back.”
    “You don’t sound like a restaurant man,” Con Judy commented.
    “Hell, I cooked for m’self nigh onto twenty year, an’ for cow camps and the like. Seemed to me it was a sight easier than sweatin’ it out down in one of those mines.”
    At the back door we waited a minute and studied the layout. I reckoned the risk was mine so I stepped out first. But I’ll own to it…I was scared.
    Con Judy followed and we slopped down the alley, circled back of a couple of buildings and went to the livery barn. We didn’t want to go hunting a place to sleep when the very place we found might be where our enemies had holed up, so we got our bedrolls and crawled into the haymow.
    When we stretched out Con said, “Do you still have it in mind to hunt those boys down?”
    “I got it to do,” I replied. “I’m not anxious to get my head blowed off, but pa surely would have hung on, was it him. I can’t do any less.”
    “They’ll have divided it up by now.”
    “Maybe. But you got to think about that girl. She won’t want any divvying done, if she can help it. She won’t want to see all that money getting away.”
    Another thing worried me. The jingle of money in my jeans was a disappearing sound. Those few dollars were about gone, even with riding the grub line part of the way, and spending careful. Leadville was a town where folks lived high, and money wouldn’t last long. I had no idea how Con was fixed, but it was enough that he shared trouble with me, without carrying the load of feeding both of us as well.
    Lying there, hands behind my head, staring up into the dark and listening to the rain on the roof, I studied the situation I was in.
    In most places there was no law that extended beyond the limits of a town, although county governments had been formed here and there where they had a sheriff who would chase criminals if he felt like it. Jim Cook was, according to Con, making an effort to get marshals and sheriffs to work together against the bad ones.
    But when it came right down to it I had no legal case against anybody. They had found a lost horse, and even if two of them knew who the horse belonged to they could deny it, and I hadn’t any proof the horse and money was mine.
    What lay between us was a simple matter of