The Six-Gun Tarot Read Online Free

gesture revealed a mouthful of yellowed, snagged teeth and two very sharp, very straight incisors. The image triggered a memory in Jim that darted in his groggy brain, like fish in a pond, and then was gone.
    “We’re keeping the horses over there so they can stay upwind of me,” the Indian said. “Horses don’t like me.”
    “I thought horses liked Indians,” Jim muttered.
    “Well, they don’t care much for me,” he said.
    “Thank you,” Jim said, “for saving us. I’m obliged.”
    The Indian shrugged and stood. He was short and thin, but there was a languid strength in him. Jim noticed the six-gun strapped to his left thigh and the huge hunting knife tied to his right.
    “Mutt,” the Indian said, handing the boy a plate of cold beans and hunk of gray bread.
    “Jim,” the boy managed to get out before his face dived into the plate. Mutt chuckled; it was a dry sound like sandstone underfoot.
    “Figured you’d be hungry,” Mutt said. “How long you out there alone, Jim?”
    “I kind of lost count. Days, I reckon. Promise, she got hurt on the … second day? That slowed us down a bit. We were trying to make it to Virginia City. I was looking for work.”
    “On the railroad?”
    “M’hm,” Jim murmured around a mouthful of beans and bread.
    “Slow up there,” Mutt said, handing him a metal cup full of water. “Your belly’s ’bout the size of a hooter right now—you eat all that too quick, you’ll end up sicker’n a dog.”
    Jim wiped his mouth on his sleeve and took a deep swallow of the water.
    “How old are you, boy?’
    “Turned fifteen, last October.”
    “Where you from?”
    Jim froze up a little. He tried to be as blasé as he normally was when it came to lying about his past, but it wasn’t easy when you were tired and sunburnt and groggy, and it seemed awful disrespectful to lie to the man who saved your life.
    “Kansas,” he said after a beat.
    Mutt looked at him for about the same amount of time, then nodded. “Kansas it is then. Well, you didn’t make it to Virginia City, but I’m sure you can scare up some work in Golgotha.”
    “That where you from?”
    The Indian nodded. “Presently.”
    “I thought there was another fella with you,” Jim said. “I woke up and he was leaning over me, I think he gave me water.”
    “Yup. That’s Clay. It’s his wagon.”
    Mutt jerked his thumb in the direction of the buckboard.
    “He’s asleep up in it. Afraid of waking up with the snakes.”
    “Well, we sure were lucky you-all were passing through.”
    Mutt frowned and refilled Jim’s cup from a canteen. “We weren’t exactly passing through, Jim. You’ve got some medicine about you.”
    Jim laughed. It hurt, so he stopped as soon as he could. “Shoot, I ain’t no doctor. I’d feel sorry for anyone who I tried to fix up.”
    “No, I’m talking about the old medicine, the first powers. The things that move like crazy smoke and fever dream through the worlds. White men call it magic—a little word to hide all the world’s truth behind. White men like to try to laugh at the things that scare the hell out of them. So, do you know any magic, Jim?”
    Jim paused. He remembered what happened in the graveyard outside Albright—the unmarked grave and the eye. If he told anyone, even this crazy-sounding Indian, they would surely think he was insane. He shook his head and looked into the fire.
    “No sir. I ain’t no wisdom, if that’s what you mean. I’m a God-fearing servant of Christ, and I don’t truck with no haints or boogeymen, or none of that, no sir. Devil’s business, it is.”
    “Uh-huh,” Mutt said, but the yellowed grin was back. “Right. So why do you smell of power, power that I could track across the desert?”
    “I … I don’t understand. You were out here looking for us?”
    “I came across you out here the other night. I didn’t want to frighten you, so I went back to town and talked Clay into bringing his wagon out here to fetch you and