And Kill Them All by J. Lee Butts Read Free Book Online Page B

badly enough that traveling didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. Figured as how we’d just lay up in the shade and set to mending. You know, rest and recuperate for a spell before we headed on back to Fort Worth. Even made arrangements to send Cap’n Culpepper a telegraph message to let him know our plans. ’Course, he wasn’t at all happy with the situation but did seem to understand.
    Looking back on the whole dance, our plan seemed solid enough. But, as it turned out, that’s when my bad dreams started. And, not long after, that’s when me’n Boz got tangled up in one of the bloodiest, most awful messes of my entire ranger career.
    Thermometer I got from the Baker Brothers Funeral Home in Domino says it’s 105 in the shade right now. Thank God for lemons, ice, and sugar. Sitting here in the shade with a sweat-covered glass in my hand, just thinking on that whole grisly dance of uncommon horror and how we came to meet up with a beautiful little gal named Clementine Webb. Blood-soaked tale still has the power to send shivers charging up and down my ancient spine like a herd of longhorns stampeded by pitchfork lightning. Jesus, amazing how some memories have the capacity to make my aged blood run as cold as Rocky Mountain river water.

5
    â€œDAMN IRBY TEAL FOR A GOOD SHOT.”
    NOW, ME AND Boz had hoped to get far enough away from civilization to forget about doing any ranger work for a spell. But, to my dismay, we hadn’t been living on the Devils River ranch much more than a few weeks when the realization thundered down on me that no hope existed of ever escaping the everyday events of my blood-soaked past.
    See, when the oft avoided blackness of sleep descended, the power of dreams could, once again, bring my bygone experiences, with blood and thunder, to vivid, brutal, frightening life. Always the dreams. Nightmares to be more precise.
    Looking back on it, I’m convinced that having Irby Teal plug me, in that Rio Seco dustup, was what precipitated the whole life-and-death dance that followed. Have always felt there’s nothing like getting shot to put a man in touch with his own mortality. In truth, I’ve come to realize that I had never suffered from such a crisis of conscience before that period. Or afterward, come to think on it.
    For reasons that are still unclear to me, the most compelling of the nocturnal reveries concerning my short but turbulent ranger career invariably involved the lingering, stomach-churning stench given off by slaughtered men. The acrid fragrance released by roiling clouds of spent, death-dealing gunpowder lingered in my sleep-leadened nose. The bilious odor of spilled blood hovered over my bed, along with the reek of puke, urine, and human waste. The bitter, coppery taste that swelled on the back of a man’s throat and always accompanied the putrid aroma of sudden death came along for the ride as well.
    Then there was the accompanying noise. The blistering roar from pistols, rifles, and shotguns when they sent the certainty of eternal damnation echoing through my quiescent brain. The entire ball of wax often seemed masked in a cacophonous, chilling cloak draped across the narrow shoulders of that insatiable, bony-fingered, skull-faced Thief of Souls.
    But even worse than those skin-pimpling horrors were the agonized, screeching cries and whimpers of wounded and dying men. The nerve-grating screams of injured, wild-eyed, panicked horses. My nighttime apparitions rolled themselves into a calamitous tumult brought on by a litany of misty and confused visions of gore, thunder, and violent death, that I came to feel sure had not yet occurred but would present themselves soon.
    There was no denying it, those blood-spattered nightmares seemed genuine beyond human understanding. So authentically sharp, clear, and saturated in the colors of departing mortality. Even the piercing, gut-wrenching burn of being shot felt real. The hornet-like