The Drop Edge of Yonder Read Online Free Page B

woman sat behind a three-plank table in patched red long johns, pointing a shotgun straight at them. In front of her a torn deck of cards was spread across the table for a game of solitaire. Brown streaks of tobacco juice ran down her chin, and a thin curtain of gray hair fell over one side of her ravaged face.
    "I thought it was your Pa come back," she said to Zebulon. "I was lookin' forward to smokin' the old grizzle-heel straight to hell."
    She looked him over top to bottom. "A bit off your graze, ain't you, son? Last I heard you was hangin' out with flatlanders and gold-suckin' Argonauts."

    "I was, Ma," Zebulon said. "No more."
    "You sure are a sorry piece of used up sod," she went on. "You look like a damn ghost. Beat-up and thinner'n a snake on stilts."
    "I'm comin' around," he reassured her.
    "You might be comm', but you ain't yet around."
    "Howdy, Ma," Hatchet Jack interrupted.
    "Howdy yourself," she replied, spitting a thick stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of a copper spittoon. "And don't Ma me. Use my Christian name or put your scrawny halfbreed ass back on the trail."
    "All right, Annie May." Hatchet Jack picked up a bottle of whiskey from the table and took a long pull, then handed the bottle to Zebulon.
    "You got some big fat cojones comin' back here," Annie May continued. "Last I heard you was down on the Brazos rollin' steers and makin' mischief"
    "No future in steers these days," Hatchet Jack said.
    "I'll vouch for that," Zebulon said, pulling off his bloody shirt and dropping it on the dirt floor.
    "I'll just bet," Annie May said, shooting him a weary glance. "Vouchin' bein' a particular specialty of yours. That and poochin' stray women."
    She turned her head towards Hatchet Jack. "What brings you here?"
    "I need to get square with Pa," Hatchet Jack said. "I mean, Elijah. Finish my account with him."
    "You gone to Jesus, or just loco?" the old woman asked.
    "He's become a healer," Zebulon explained.
    Annie May cackled, slapping her arthritic knees with her palms. "Well don't the sun just shine. You're too late, Mister Healer-Dealer. He took his sorry ass to Californie. Who knows where? Now you got me to deal with."

    "It ain't the same."
    "The hell it ain't. The horse and traps you stole were mine the same as his. By rights I should plug you for thievery and be done with you."
    Hatchet Jack shrugged. "That's up to you. I still got a horse to give back, even if I lost the traps."
    "We'll eat," she said firmly. "Then speculate."
    She sighed, shifting her gaze to Zebulon, who was slicing up a pair of his Pa's pants with his bowie knife.
    "To think you're all I spawned," she said. "All that I care to recollect an\ways."
    She picked up the bottle of whiskey, studying his bloody chest. "What happened to your pump?"
    "I guess I been shot."
    "You guess?" She hobbled over to him and poured the rest of the whiskey on his chest, an act that made him howl more from witnessing the last of the bottle than from the acute pain. He shuddered as she carefully wrapped a strip of pant leg around his chest.
    "How come there ain't no bullet hole?" she asked.
    "I wondered about that," he said.
    "Might be the slug passed through you. Who done it?"
    "Most likely a pecker-head sneakin' a card off the bottom" He nodded at Hatchet Jack. "That's what he says, anyway"
    "You was there?" she asked Hatchet Jack.
    "I come in after the show was over," Hatchet Jack said.
    Satisfied with her nursing skills, Annie May stood up. "Don't neither of you burden me with your sad stories," she cautioned. "Or what you done or ain't done or what you're goin' to do. I'm too old for that bullshit"
    She took down a tin of biscuits and a slab of jerky from a sagging shelf. After she dropped the food on the table, she sat down, lit up a curved ivory pipe, and watched Hatchet Jack and Zebulon eat.

    "Raise many pelts this winter?" Hatchet Jack asked, chewing hard on the jerky
    Annie May shrugged, then let loose another streak of tobacco juice,