the Bounty Hunters (1953) Read Online Free PDF Page A

he's doing here, Flynn thought.
    Maybe we'll catch the Estebans. That would be good. Then we could talk about all those things Deneen brought up and be familiar with them before reaching Soyopa.
    Bowers is honest, though. He doesn't like something and he shows it. He doesn't like this, but he doesn't realize what is involved. He thinks it is dull routine that will keep him out of the promotion light for too long. Probably he has been talking to Deneen and Deneen had told him to keep an eye on me because, well, even though Flynn was an officer at one time, he's not the most reliable man in the world, you see he resigned his commission because he was hotheaded and maybe a little afraid of what was to come. Those things happen.
    Bowers thinks all the time and he doesn't smile.
    And his dad was Division Commander over Deneen during the war. What's that got to do with Bowers being here now? Something. You can bet your best plugged peso, something.
    You smiled most of the time at first, he told himself. You smiled to show you were eager. A smile shows sincerity. Warmhearted, clean-souled, open-minded' and inexperienced.
    Flynn thought of the gray morning in April when he had crossed the Rappahannock with Averell's Brigade. Seventeen years old and a second lieutenant because his father knew somebody. He remembered Deneen, who had been his captain then, his first captain, saying, nodding to the hills, They're up there. Those gray-coated, sorghumeating manure spreaders are up there. We get them before they get us. He had been close to Deneen and he had smiled, because Deneen was a captain and had taken them through training and he talked like a cavalryman was supposed to talk.
    They met Fitz Lee, who was part of Stuart's sabers, and almost cut him to pieces, but they couldn't finish it because the rebel pickets were too close and by then the alarm had been spread. It was a good day and he had thought: This won't be so bad.
    Then Chancellorsville. The third night it had been raining hard, but it stopped a matter of minutes after their patrol came in. The rebel artillery started up shortly after this. Whitworths pouring it down from the thicketed heights.
    His sergeant had appeared to him in the darkness, in the cold miserable darkness, showing the whites of his eyes with his body tensed stiffly.
    My God, I saw him do it!
    What?
    With his own pistol.
    What damn it!
    The sergeant led him back into a pine stand. Deneen was sitting beneath thick, dripping branches, huddled close to the tree trunk. His pistol was in his hand. And the toe of his right boot was missing where he had shot it away.
    They carried him to the rear and said shrapnel to the orderly who was filling out the tag which was attached to Deneen's tunic. The remainder of the night Flynn did not smile because he was muscle-tight in the mud as A. P. Hill's Whitworths continued to slam down from Hazel Grove.
    In the morning he found the sergeant dead; killed in the shelling. And he realized he was the only one who knew about Deneen.
    After that he smiled when he felt like smiling.
    In the army it wasn't necessary. Most of the time it helped, but it wasn't necessary. He had seen men do more than just smile to wangle a post assignment back East. He had accepted this, regarding it as something contemptible, but still, none of his business. He had accepted this and all of the unmilitary facets of army life because there was nothing he could do about them. The politics could go their smiling, boot-licking way.
    There had to be men on frontier station. There had to be men who took dirty assignments and made successes of them. And when he found himself in the role when he found himself in a part of the army which still occasionally fought, he accepted it as quickly and as readily as the politics. Somebody had to do it. Do what you can do best. That's how to make a success. Even if the success is only a self-satisfaction.
    But there was an end to it.
    The beginning of the end was the