Arkansas Smith by Jack Martin Read Free Book Online

who you are. I’ll be back and I’ll have the law with me.’
    ‘Sure,’ Arkansas said, feeling he’d like nothing better than to put a bullet between John Lance’s eyes here and now. The temptation to do so and damn the consequences was great. Only these days he didn’t do things that way. ‘Watch out for rustlers as you go,’ he said with a grim smile.
    John Lance looked at Arkansas for a moment andthen made the sign of the cross and again spat onto the ground.
    He turned his horse and spurred it forward. His men followed close behind.
    Arkansas stood watching them until they were out of sight and then went back inside and retrieved the knife from the crate. He held it up in view of his friend.
    ‘Is this yours?’ he asked. Will shook his head, confused. ‘What was all that about out there?’
    Arkansas turned the knife over and over in his hand. He looked at his friend and then smiled. ‘This,’ he said, enigmatically, ‘proves that the men who shot you were working for John Lance.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Will asked, his face a blueprint for confusion.
    ‘We need to talk.’ Arkansas sat on the edge of the bed, tossed the knife down on the bedspread and told his friend of the events of moments ago.
    ‘The two-bit, fork-tongued skunk,’ Will said, after listening to Arkansas’s story. ‘I never sold him anything. I’d burn this place before I’d sell to that no good varmint.’
    ‘Which is what I thought,’ Arkansas said. ‘He say’s he’s got the legal papers.’
    Will frowned. ‘Papers?’
    ‘Forgeries no doubt.’ Arkansas placed the knife into his waistband and stood up from the bed. He crossed the room and then lingered in the doorway for a moment before turning back to his friend. ‘John Lance is going to wish he had never been born.’

YESTERYEAR
    Arkansas Smith, ten years old, finding himself the man of the house, stood at the graveside long after the other mourners had departed. He stared into the open ground, aware of two men waiting impatiently to fill it in, to pack the soil on top of the cheap coffin for all eternity. But he ignored them and was unable to move.
    As soon as he walked away and the grave was filled in it would be final. Walter Smith would be no more.
    He didn’t want to take that step; as if staying here, refusing to move, would somehow delay the moment when the old man’s death became a part of history. He wasn’t really his father, no blood relation, but the man he thought of as his father anyway. The man who had found him as a newborn, still attached to his dead mother, and promptly named him Arkansas because that’s where they were. Only they weren’t, he would later discover and tell the boy years later, but the name had stuck.
    Blood kin or not, the young boy couldn’t have wanted for better parents than Walter and Edith Smith and he was proud to carry their name. 
    ‘Arkansas.’
    The shout came through the mist like a phantom and Arkansas spun on his feet and saw the woman he called his mother standing at the bottom of the hill that served as the cemetery in these parts.
    She was waving to him, telling him to come down from there now. His father was dead and only the body rested in the grave. He was with the Lord now and life had to go on.
    Arkansas waved back and then once more said a silent goodbye to the man. He turned and caught the stare of the two gravediggers and offered a weak smile, but they bowed their heads to the ground, understanding his grief.
    He walked down the hill and met the elderly woman and together they made their way back to the small, two-roomed house at the far end of town. As small as it was, it was going to feel mighty big now with Walter Smith gone.
     
    Winter drew in quickly that year. The summer seemed to bypass the fall and head directly to the sub zero temperatures of the Illinois winter. It was early October and for the past three days freezing rain had fallen and was now giving way to snow. As the temperature