The Last Shootist Read Online Free Page A

Gillom unbuckled quickly and folded holster and guns to lay on the counter. “Trigger’s a little touchy.”
    â€œAre they even yours ?” The shop owner was angry at how scared he’d shown.
    â€œYes! J. B. Books himself willed ’em to me … after he died. They’re special Remingtons, custom-made.”
    â€œBooks, huh? You’re the kid mentioned in the paper today.”
    Gillom nodded. Jim Dandy eyed him with new appreciation.
    â€œBooks prob’ly had ’em sweetened. Gunfighters like to file down the notch on the hammer, loosen the spring on the trigger so it’ll pull sweet. Damn trick guns’ll go off if you breathe on ’em. Oughta get those fixed, before you blow your toes off.”
    â€œI’m sorry.…” Gillom paid with clean bills folded in his pocket—Books’s money left for his mother, which he’d stolen. He didn’t dare complain when Mr. Dandy charged him another dollar each for the saddle soap, bottle of gun oil, and tin of silver polish.
    Gillom left the leather shop in a hurry, his ill-gotten goods wrapped in burlap. His mother was right. He couldn’t be seen wearing these famous guns around El Paso, at least until some of the trouble stirred up by Books’s fatal gunfight had died down. Gillom had only John Bernard’s word he could have these weapons, regardless of the outcome of the bloodletting. Books’s letter to his mother that Gillom had found in his room, leaving her a sum of money, $532, he’d destroyed, so that the secondhand man who quickly showed up that night to take possession of Books’s few personals hadn’t been able to snatch his famous guns in the bargain. Gillom professed ignorance of their whereabouts, though Mr. Steinmetz hadn’t believed him. But his bill of sale from Books said nothing about the Remingtons.
    â€œToo bad for that old peddler!” he laughed later.
    Gillom would turn eighteen this summer, a grown man. He couldn’t hide something as exciting as these big pistols forever, especially from his pals. As spring weather began to warm the Pass of the North, his restless thoughts turned from readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic, to gamblin’, guns, and gunmen in pretty quick order. Girls, too, figured somewhere in his brain-scrambled equation, but an amateur gunslinger needed time and money for courting, two commodities that had only just fallen his way.
    Gillom knew where his pals might be. They often liked to wander down to the muddy Rio Grande after school, to skip stones across the slow-moving water, or watch an occasional train chug across the Mexican Central Railroad trestle heading south into Juarez. Maybe they’d sip a little cheap whiskey or smoke hand-rolled cigarettes if they could steal any liquor or tobacco, or bribe some cowhand to buy these prohibited goods for them.

 
    Five
    Â 
    Gillom found Bee Dunn, Ivory Bean, and Johnny Kneebone, Jr. in the thicket of cottonwoods and tall brush at the river’s edge, smoking and joshing as Bee splashed about in the turgid water, hoping to stir up a frog. All three youths attended the old Central School where four upper classes met weekdays in rooms on the second floor. All three were pleased to see their compadre when he hailed them.
    â€œGillom, lad! Bring an offering to the party?” yelled the blacksmith’s big son.
    â€œI did, Mister Kneebone! A nip of the cacti to go with a relaxing smoke after a hard day in the classroom.” Gillom broke through the brush to his pals, pulling a bottle out of his bag, which he’d purchased out the back door of one of the cantinas clustered along the road to the border crossing. He’d bought that Mexican’s tobacco pouch, too.
    He held up a small pint bottle of golden liquor with a blue agave on the label. Gillom pulled the cork with his teeth as he strode up to them. “Mezcal!”
    Young Ivory smiled. Named