Roy Bean's Gold Read Online Free Page A

gold wedding band, and perfectly mummified. That pitiful packet also held one of the new-fangled tintypes. The picture’s oval frame dangled from a rawhide string around Big Wolf’s neck.
    â€œHe says,” Jeff interpreted, “he got that hand and pitchure the spring of Eighteen Forty-Two. Says that dead hand is sure mighty big medicine, and there ain’t been a bullet molded to puncture his hide since he’s got that on him.” I looked at the tintype. A little girl peered out of the tinted picture. With wide blue eyes in a sweet, delicate face, framed by long blonde curls, she looked to be no more than seven or eight.
    â€œWhere in Hades did that ugly murderer get ahold of this?” I asked, while a chill rippled through me as far as my boots. That girl, young as she was then, would be sixteen or so by now—if she would have lived through the bloody butchery of a Comanche raid.
    â€œOld Big Wolf here, when a young warrior, had a medicine man who told him that if he aimed to become a great killer and a taker of lots of coup, he’d need to get ahold of the left hand of a white woman who had a gal child. but he never got the chance for such big medicine until he went with a war party nigh to the California line,” Kirker reported. “His bunch got the bulge on an emigrant wagon train over there, and plumb killed off all the folks and burnt the wagons. While he was rummagin’ through the shambles, he found a little white kid hidin’ in a half-burnt wagon. the one in that pitchure. Then he up and cut off the kid’s maw’s hand and would have sliced her up and run a spear through that gal child, but some Mexican troopers showed up and the Comanches all run for it. They know when to run and when to fight, like the rest of us.” He gave a short laugh and shrugged as if the story had got to him, hard as he was.
    â€œSo he got the hand and the picture from that dead woman . . . but what about the little girl?” I asked, but Big Wolf wanted to do some talking with me and clamped shut about that wagon train or its people. I had a feeling that he or someone in his band of butchers had killed the little girl before they left on the run, and, looking at his broad merciless face, I was sure of it.
    When the Indians could see the bottle was finally dead, they got up and made for their ponies. Big Wolf and a skinny Comanche with one eye and black stripes across his ugly face stood muttering at each other, then the Big Wolf turned back to us and said something.
    â€œLike I said, he wants to know if you’ll trade him for the pitchure of that little gal child,” said Jeff. “Must’ve watched you when you saw the tintype. These devils don’t miss much. He’d admire that Walker Colt in your belt, or the big Tige rifle stuck on my hoss there.”
    So while the rest of the Comanches, back aboard their nervous, little ponies, waited and belched and grunted at each other, Big Wolf and I made trading powwow. I wasn’t about to add to those Indians’ firepower, for their three big flintlock horse pistols and a pair of U.S. percussion rifles made them deadly enough for any bunch of wild men.
    At last the Comanche chief settled for my Bowie knife and a cheap Mexican campaign medal and got on his horse after handing over the tintype; then the whole bunch galloped south without a backward look or a thank you for the whiskey.
    â€œDamned cheeky devils,” Kirker growled as we rode up the great mesa he called Mars Hill in the direction of Zuñi Jack’s place.
    As we rode along, the purple-tinged San Francisco peaks reached up over the skyline all the way around to the Coconino Plateau where we were headed. “Hopis call them mountains the High Place of the Snows. They say they’re so high that when the sun shines on one side, the moon’s shinin’ on the other,” said Jeff, making talk, which seemed his way anywhere near a