Blood Duel by David Robbins, Ralph Compton Read Free Book Online

circumstances had a reasonable right to expect.
    Some would say that alone made his talent worthwhile, and Jeeter would agree, to a point. Yes, he was still breathing. But there was dead and then there was a living death, a life of hand to mouth, of always looking over one’s shoulders, of never being able to trust, to care, to love. A life as empty as the emptiness of the grave, only, yes, he was still breathing. But that was the only thing he had to show for his talent. The only really good thing about it.
    Until now.
    At length the sun rested on the rim of the world, its radiance painting the sky vivid hues of red, orange, and yellow. Jeeter came to a hollow bisected by a dry wash and rimmed with brush. He drew rein and dismounted. Stripping the gruella and gathering wood and kindling a fire and putting a pot of coffee on to brew took the better part of half an hour.
    At last Jeeter could settle back against his saddle and relax. He opened his saddlebags and slid out the item he had brought with him from Coffin Varnish. In the flickering glow of the crackling flames, he admired the stalwart hero with his arm around the slender waist of a beautiful young woman as painted warriors closed in from all sides. “Jeeter Frost, the Missouri Man-Killer,” he remembered the newspaperman saying. “His thrilling escapades. His narrow escapes.” He ran his finger across the cover and said quietly, “I’ll be damned.”
    A slow smile spread across Jeeter’s countenance. He laughed, a genuinely heartfelt laugh such as he had not felt in a coon’s age. He flipped the pages,wishing he could read the words. So many words, and all of them about him. Or some version of him that others took to be the real him. It was silly, he mused. But it was also—and here he struggled for the right way to describe it.
    The moment Jeeter had set eyes on that cover, something inside him had changed. He could not say what or how or why, but he felt it. This penny dreadful, this ridiculous fluff written by someone who had never met him and knew nothing about him but had written all about him, meant there was more to his life than he ever imagined. He was not the nobody he always believed he was. He was somebody. Not somebody important. Not somebody that mattered. But somebody people would remember.
    “The Missouri Man-Killer,” Jeeter said again, and laughed. Hell, he hadn’t been to Missouri but three or four times in his whole life.
    Jeeter was born in Illinois. He lived there until he was seventeen. He got too big for his britches and took to drinking and staying out to all hours. One night he was in a knife fight. Thinking he had killed the other drunk, he fled, only to learn months later that the man recovered. By then Jeeter was in Texas, where a cowboy by the name of Weeds Graff took him under his wing. Weeds taught him to rope and to shoot and Jeeter learned the shooting so well that when they signed on with the Bar T outfit, it was his six-gun and his newfound talent for killing that held the other side at bay. For a while, anyway, until they ambushed his employer and friend.
    Everyone in Texas heard about what Jeeter did next. They heard about the five men he hunted downand killed. From that day on, Jeeter became marked. He could not go a week without seeing what Jeeter liked to call
the look
. Sometimes the look was one of disgust. Sometimes it was fear. Sometimes it was a glint that warned him he must never turn his back on the person with the glint. Not that he ever turned his back to anyone if he could help it.
    For years that had been the pattern of his life. Riding from town to town and settlement to settlement, seeking a place to fit in but not fitting anywhere. He was a square peg and life was a round hole.
    And now along came this penny dreadful.
    Jeeter sat and stared at the cover until the coffee was hot; then he poured a cup and took jerky from his saddlebags. He sat and sipped and munched and stared at that cover. He could