Black Hat Jack by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online

being a white person, living the way they wanted you to live. I understood a bit of her concern, having been among whites as a young slave. On the frontier, I was better treated, and by some folks a lot better. Buffalo hunters and mountain men was down right democratic compared to others, even Yankees. Therefore I can see her being more than a smidgen nervous amongst the whites.
    She run off a few times, but they wouldn’t let her go, caught her and brought her back. Her baby died, and then she died too. Starved herself to death. After she was taken, Quanah never saw her again. She died four years before this time I’m telling you about, and I apologize. I can’t seem to stick to anything straight away, and get distracted as easily as a cow by a blue bottle fly.
    So there we was, surrounded by hundreds of Indians, and we was now less than thirty, some having died in the wagons outside. A couple of the men that had been wounded wasn’t doing so well either, and there was a couple that was talking about putting on the sneak if we could hold until dark. There was also a man or two thinking about breaking out in broad daylight for the horses and making a run for it. This was something that got our best wishes, but not our support, especially that whole daylight runaway plan. Besides, the horses had at this point either been taken by the Indians, scattered, or shot in the barrage of gunfire that had gone on earlier. They wouldn’t be waiting politely for us in the corral.
    It wasn’t that I didn’t consider escape plans, but outside of tunneling straight down to China, nothing seemed better than those rickety walls, the hunters and those buffalo rifles, me and my pistols and that sweet Winchester.
    Well, there I was contemplating, thinking that the bullet I ought to save for myself ought to be that 4/10 load. I figured I put the barrel in my mouth and let it rip, there wouldn’t be any wounding and surviving, left to be worked over by the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa. I would be missing a head. One thing I decided I would do, if time allowed, was shave my head. A good load from the 4/10 might make my part a bit too wide for scalping, but I didn’t want to leave my hair to hang on their scalps. I was a Negro with what we called good hair. I wore it long because it made me look like a real frontiersman, which I was, and the girls liked it. Also, it covered my ears, which was a little like two ends of a hallway with the doors thrown open.
    I pulled my knife and was going to get some water from one of the water barrels, and then I realized we needed all the water there was to drink, not wasted on me shaving my head. I put the knife away. I hadn’t no sooner done that then a barrel was dragged around with a dipper in it, and we all took turns. The man dragging it was the barkeep, and he said, “This here is it, boys. Unless one of you would like to go out to the well.”
    That got a short laugh.
    “They done cut up a horse or some such and dropped down it,” Jack said, “you can bet on that. Maybe they all peed in it. That’s how they work. How much whisky is there?”
    “Plenty,” the barkeep said.
    “That’s what we need,” Billy said, “a bunch of us drunk and trying to make a clear shot.”
    “I been thirsty enough I would have drank piss and thought it a treat,” Jack said.
    “I’m shooting myself first,” Bat said.
    “You say that now,” Jack said.
    “Ask me about it later,” Bat said. “See if the view changes.”
    I eased up by Jack, said, “So, you think this is where we toss in our hats?”
    “Could be. Never say never until never is done. Or almost done. You save a load for yourself, Nat.”
    “Planned on it.”
    “You know, that fellow ate all the peaches, it was me told him to go to the shitter.”
    “Everyone has to shit,” I said.
    “That’s true, but I told him right then. Maybe it was his pancreas.”
    “He’d have gone to the outhouse soon enough,” I said. “It’s just how