Vengeance Trail Read Online Free

air, the man started to reach for something inside his coat, and Johnny shot him. She
     saw the man slump from the saddle and drop to the ground, heard him groan once and try to get up.
    “Damn fool!” Johnny shouted as he grabbed the reins of the Arabian in one hand before it could run off. He had aimed his pistol
     at the man’s head by the time she came running out of the weeds.
    “Don’t you shoot that man again, damn you!” she shouted at him. Her horror over what she had witnessed left her angry beyond
     belief.
    She saw how he looked up at her, his face a maskof confusion, of uncertainty at the hellcat that was running out of the bushes toward him, screaming and waving her arms.
    “You shoot him again,” she shouted, “I’ll leave you and go back to Ft. Smith and tell them what you have done!”
    He didn’t quarrel with her. Instead, he lowered his pistol and told her he was sorry any of this had happened. She wasn’t
     sure whether to believe him or not.
    “If you was watching,” he said, “you know I didn’t shoot him on purpose. He was reaching for his gun to shoot me!” He said
     it like a little boy scolded and trying to defend himself. She looked from the dark smoldering eyes of Johnny to the ashen
     face of the man lying on the ground.
    “We have to do something,” she said.
    “Ain’t nothing we can do except get out of here fast,” he ordered.
    “We can’t just leave him, he’ll die out here—look how he’s bleeding.”
    “Someone will come along and help him. It can’t be us. They’d put us both in jail, sweetie. That’s something you don’t want
     to have to experience.” The whole time, he searched the man’s pockets, producing a wallet and a small nickel-plated pistol.
    “See, I told you he was going for his gun!”
    The revolver was a .36 caliber Navy Colt pocket gun with fancy scroll work and the words
Presented To The Hon. W.F. Gray
engraved on the butt strap.
    There had been nearly one hundred dollars in the wallet.
    “I guess we lucked out,” said Johnny. “This fellow must’ve been important.”
    Later, Johnny sold the horse for five hundred dollars, and after that, they took a river boat up the Sabine River. Johnny
     gambled and spent freely, so that by the time they landed in Magnolia Springs, they were nearly broke again.
    He spent what little they had left on a pair of poor saddle horses. Texas was what Johnny had wanted, and she hoped that now
     that they had arrived, things would be different. He had talked it up so much.
    But as they travelled west, it seemed as though Texas was a lot more of the same, only hotter and more desolate.
    One night they stole crabapples from back of somebody’s homestead and got cramps from eating them. A day later, Johnny robbed
     a man waking his mule along the dusty road they were on. The only valuable the man possessed was a nickel-plated Elgin pocket
     watch and two dimes.
    Three days later, in Boleweevel, Texas, Johnny walked into a Chinese Laundry and stuck the fancy pistol in the sallow face
     of the Celestial that worked there. Again, the pickings were poor: a jar-full of Indian head pennies and some boiled shirts.
    She thought Texas was the worst place she had ever been.
    As the days wore on, and the nights turned black and cold as they lay on bedrolls on the ground, she began to feel sorry she
     had ever taken up with Johnny Montana. But it all seemed too late to change, and in spite of her remorse, there was still
     something about him that drew her to him.
    But most of the time, it was hard for her to just keep drifting, and one evening as they sat around afire of cow pies he had gathered, she felt forced to say something to him.
    “I’d like it if you were to find a regular job, Johnny. You know, so we could settle down. I’m plain weary of always wandering.
     Even if you was to get some sort of cowboy work, I wouldn’t mind so much.”
    “Cowboys!” he yelped. He had been trying to pull off his boots when