The big gundown Read Online Free PDF

find out just how much he could do.
    “All right, but take it slow and easy,” Frannie said with obvious reluctance.
    With the cane in one hand and the other hand on Cyrus’s shoulder, The Kid walked slowly to the door. By the time he got there, his heart was pounding and he felt dizzy. He stood there looking out and catching his breath for a moment and then turned to make his way back to the bed. Frannie was there to take his arm and help him lie down again.
    “You tried to do too much, didn’t you?”
    The Kid answered without hesitation. “No. A man’s got to push himself. If he’s satisfied with what’s easy, that’ll never be enough.”
    She smiled down at him. “You’re talking to a woman who married a man determined to start a ranch in the middle of nowhere. I know all about a man pushing himself.”
    The Kid tried to keep his eyes open, but the lids sagged closed anyway. Next time he would walk farther and do more. And the time after that, and the time after that…
    He dozed off with that thought in his head.
     

    By the time three more days had gone by, the pain in The Kid’s leg was almost gone. Using the wolf’s-head cane, he could get around everywhere in the ranch house and in the yard outside. With Cyrus keeping an eye on him and helping him if necessary, he walked over to the barn to check on his horse and was glad to see that the buckskin was being well cared for. He hadn’t expected anything less from Sean and the ranch hands, but it was good to see that with his own eyes.
    Cyrus never went far from his side, and the boy was full of questions. One thing he wanted to know was where The Kid was from.
    “Oh, here and there,” The Kid told him.
    He didn’t mention that once he had been an Eastern-born-and-raised businessman named Conrad Browning. Nor did he say anything about his real father being Frank Morgan, the notorious gunfighter known as The Drifter, or explain that he had once been married to a beautiful young woman named Rebel, who had been taken from him tragically because of greed and a lust for vengeance. All those things had gone into shaping the man who was now known only as Kid Morgan, who had developed a reputation of his own as a gunfighter. Only a handful of people knew the truth, knew that he had turned his back on a whole other life, and that was the way The Kid wanted it. He was content to drift, a loner who wasn’t headed anywhere in particular.
    But even a loner could not live totally isolated. He had to run into people from time to time, just as he had come across this ranch, and where there were people, there was trouble. The Kid knew that, and he felt a nagging curiosity about the man called Colonel Gideon Black. It was none of his business, of course, but he wondered why an ex-army man would team up with a bunch of gun-wolves like the men who had accompanied him the other day…not to mention the ones now buried in that arroyo, who had planned to meet the colonel in Bisbee.
    A youngster like Cyrus wouldn’t understand any of that, so The Kid didn’t try to explain it to him. He just gave noncommittal answers to Cyrus’s questions about who he was and where he had come from.
    There was the time Cyrus asked, “Can you teach me how to use a gun like you, Mr. Morgan?”
    They were standing by the corral fence, watching one of the vaqueros work with a balky horse, trying to get it used to wearing a saddle. The Kid looked down at the boy and said, “It ought to be your pa’s job to teach you to shoot, Cyrus.”
    “Yeah, but Pa can’t shoot like you do, Mr. Morgan. I never saw anything like it when you killed those four men! That’s what I want to do.”
    The Kid shook his head. “You don’t want to kill anybody, Cyrus. Not unless you have to, to protect your life or the life of someone you love.”
    “Well, then, I want to be able to do that.”
    It was certainly a worthwhile ability to have, The Kid reflected. Even though civilization had made a lot of inroads