The Eleventh Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

what the minefield had done.
    "What a hell of a thing to go through life like that." Eyes reflective, Tom Harry wiped slowly at the bar wood after Ben told him. "Known that kid since he was a pup." He flicked a look at Ben. "Weren't you here for funerals the last couple of times?"
    Ben gulped more of his drink than he'd intended, unsteadied by having something like that attached to him. O'Fallon's and Havel's, those were. The mouthy mick left guard and the taciturn baby-faced center. Tepee Weepy wanted every drop of drama from the Supreme Team; it had sent the Pulitzer judges his piece about the Butte slum wake held for O'Fallon. He hadn't even liked O'Fallon.
    How much does history rehearse? he had to wonder. The first funeral of all was Purcell's. The entire team in that tumbleweed hometown cemetery. Coach Bruno piously delivering the eulogy into the radio microphone at graveside. Didn't it set the pattern, the team's every movement on the airwaves and in the headlines from then until—
    All at once he realized Tom Harry still was eyeing him speculatively.
    "There's a war on," he managed to say evenly. "Things happen to people."
    "Must get kind of old, is all I'm saying." The bartender slung the towel aside. "Drink up. The Packard is out back."
    The long black car, its grandeur a bit faded from ten years of imaginative use, seemed to fill half the alley behind the saloon. Ben circled the streamlined old thing as Tom Harry stood by, proprietorially. "How are the tires?"
    "What do you think?" the Packard's beset guardian barked. "Thin as condom skin. Here, throw these in the trunk." He rummaged in the shed room piled high with amazing items that Medicine Lodge customers with more thirst than cash had put up as collateral, and rolled two spare tires toward Ben.
    "Reinking." Tom Harry tossed him the keys to the car, then the packet of gas ration coupons. "Tell Toussaint for me I'm sorry his grandkid got it that way. If you can find the old coyote."

2
     
    How did you ever stand it out here in hermit heaven, Vic?
Looking around from the height of the river bluff at the silent miles of prairie in three directions and the mute cliffs of the Rockies in the other, Ben reconsidered. Make the question, how did his best friend ever stand being crammed into Army life after an existence populated only by wind, buffalo grass, and a wraith of a grandfather? Military routine could tie a person's guts in knots; he knew the feeling himself.
    Impatiently he checked his wristwatch again; half the morning was gone just getting here. Cass was curious, the other night, why this had to be circled in on, phony days of leave and the bus ride home and all, and he couldn't blame her. In between kissing him silly she had asked why he couldn't just requisition a motor pool car for a day and get back in time to attend to business in bed. The answer was not a damn bit more satisfying now than it was then: because that wasn't how Tepee Weepy did things.
There's the easy way and their way.
    Leaving the Packard on what passed for a road along the rocky upper gorge of the Two Medicine River, he picked his way on foot through the braid of ruts that led down to the Rennie ranch buildings huddled at the river's edge. The log house did not show any activity as he approached, although all too plainly a visitor was a rarity.
    There was a bad sign, literally, the moment he stepped into the dooryard, a blotch of something written in red on the rusty weathered door, like lipstick on a witch. Walking up to it with a sinking feeling, he found it was a shingle tacked to the doorwood and lettered on it in barn paint the message: ELK SEASON.
    Incredulous, Ben squinted west, met there by half the mountains in North America. Hunt a hunter in one day, in all that? It was too much, this whole deal of Quick Vic and a roving grandfather old as the hills. Toussaint Rennie must be crowding eighty-five. He didn't have any business going after elk alone.
    While Ben stood there