Winchester 1887 Read Online Free PDF Page B

spoke again. “We can’t stay here.”
    â€œWhy not?” Bells said with a chuckle. “Make it easier on the law. They can use the salt to help preserve our corpses for the trip back to Fort Smith.”
    â€œShut up,” White said again.
    Tulip Bells morosely laughed.
    â€œWhere to?” White asked.
    McCoy had been doing some thinking. “South. We’ll change our duds, become respectable cattle buyers. Buy our tickets in Muskogee and ride down to Texas. Law won’t expect us to ride a train out in the open. Anybody can lose himself in Denison.”
    Tulip Bells cackled again.
    â€œWhat’s so funny?” Maxwell demanded.
    Bells shook his ugly head. “Buy a train ticket?” He howled harder.
    Link McCoy, Zane Maxwell—and even Jeff White—joined in.

C HAPTER F OUR
    Randall County
    As soon as the coyotes began their singsong chatter, James Mann sat up in the straw-tick mattress and held his breath when Jacob rolled over and muttered something. It was too hot for covers, and Jacob said something again. James breathed easier, understanding that his brother was merely talking in his sleep. A short distance away, Kris slept like a rock.
    He rose, moving cautiously through the darkness, found his hat, and the sack he had been hiding for a week. Carefully, he peeked through the slit in the rug. It was too dark to see anything in the kitchen, but he didn’t need to see anything. He could hear his father’s snores through the rug divider. Still, he took a deep breath, held it, and finally exhaled before he slipped into the kitchen and made his way to the open door—open to let in air, not rattlesnakes or skunks—and found the Winchester ’86 leaning against the wall. Even empty, that rifle weighed a ton.
    He leaped onto the ground and waited, listening. Nothing. Everyone remained asleep. He took a step then stopped.
    Regret paralyzed him. Fear. Uncertainty of what awaited him. At seventeen years old, he was too old to run away from home, something he hadn’t done since he was seven. Then, he had wanted to find somebody with a pony he might ride.
    His father and mother hadn’t whipped him when they caught up with him a half-mile from wherever they were living back then. They had merely laughed and walked him back to their house, or tent, or whatever they had been calling a home.
    James looked back at the outline of the boxcar. His memory wasn’t that good, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t lived in something like that when he was seven.
    Uncle Jimmy gave me his badge, he told himself. For a reason. The rifle he could explain. James had wanted a rifle, a Winchester ’86. Maybe not the particular rifle in his hand, but his uncle had promised that he would get a rifle for him and it was what he had found. And paid for. With his life. And the life of Uncle Borden.
    But the badge?
    The way James saw it, his uncle had seen that look, that wanderlust, in James’s eyes and knew that James was not cut from the same cloth as his father. Millard could spend his years working for the railroad, living in boxcars, bossing gangs, laying track, moving from place to place across an endless prairie of nothing. James needed more. He needed to find a purpose in his life.
    Like being a lawman.
    A deputy marshal, just like Jimmy. He owed his uncle that much.
    His right foot stepped forward, followed by his left.
    With each step, he breathed easier, listening to the coyotes, hearing the night birds, and feeling the wind on his back. He kept up a quiet conversation with himself. “Move south to the railroad, but not to McAdam. Too close. That’s all you have to do. Go south. Pa knows when all the trains will be rolling through or at least scheduled to roll through. You’ve studied those maps he always pores over, burning coal oil.
    â€œPick up the southbound at the water stop near the North Fork. Find an open boxcar, and slip in. Make