Damnation Road by Max McCoy Read Free Book Online Page A

indicated. He kept his coat on, even though it was warm by the fire, to hide the Manhattan in its holster on his left hip.
    Burns shrugged out of the elk robe, threw it on the ground, and settled into an identical chair beside Gamble. The girl picked up the robe, smoothed it, and hung it from a deer antler tied to one of the lodgepoles.
    â€œWarmer than any damned tent I’ve ever slept in,” Burns said. “I feel sorry for those other fellows out there, freezing their butts off in the middle of a Kansas winter. Now, how about some whiskey?”
    â€œOr dope?”
    â€œI provide it as a public service,” Burns said. “Since they outlawed it in Caldwell, I had to set up here on the prairie so these fiends could get their heads dosed. They’d go to pieces without it. And friend, I didn’t offer you dope because you don’t look the type.”
    â€œYou’re right,” Gamble said, removing his hat and placing it upside-down on the deer hide between them. “I’d prefer some coffee now. Whiskey later. And I can pay for the whiskey up front, if you like.” Gamble took a silver dollar from his pocket and tossed it into his hat.
    â€œNo offense, friend, but whiskey would warm you quicker than Arbuckles,” Burns said. “But you can get whatever you want here, that’s what I always say.”
    He spoke a few words to the Indian girl, and she threw some grounds and water in a gallon-sized tin can. As she leaned over to place the can on a hot stone just inside the fire circle, Gamble watched the flames reflected in her eyes.
    â€œWhat are the games of chance at the Porch?”
    â€œOld Buell runs a crooked poker game in the shack across the way,” Burns said. “Faro, sometimes, but it’s the old-timers who mostly want to buck that tiger. The young ones want poker, and are freer with their money. Me, I prefer craps. Do you play the bones, friend?”
    â€œSometimes,” Gamble said, still watching the girl, who had the affect of someone much older and infinitely sad. “You were going to tell me the story about Laughing Bear.”
    At the sound of the name, the girl looked up. She held Gamble’s gaze for a moment, then turned back to the fire.
    â€œIndeed,” Burns said. “He was so old he claimed to remember a time before the Spanish came, but that’s absurd. He would have had to be more than four hundred years old. But that’s how Indians are—they tell themselves the damndest stories and believe them.”
    â€œPerhaps he meant Jedediah Smith. Some of the old ones make no distinction among Spanish, Texans, and other whites.”
    â€œCould be. Jed Smith was killed out here someplace on the Kansas plains, but they never found his body. Hell, it was the Kiowa that might have killed him. That would put Laughing Bear in his eighties, which would be about right.”
    â€œSo why did Laughing Bear come back here?”
    â€œDamned if I know,” Burns said. “The last time a buffalo was seen in Sumner County was 1884. They can’t even have the Sun Dance anymore because they can’t get the buffalo head to hang up on the altar. He did the Ghost Dance back in 1890 to drive the whites away and bring the buffalo back, and he took the peyote, and he believed everything old Wovoka said about if you just danced hard enough, the earth would swallow up the whites. But then the soldiers from Fort Sill busted the movement all up and ending up shooting the old bastard in the chest.”
    â€œSo Laughing Bear is dead?”
    â€œAs old as death and twice as ugly,” Burn said. “But no, not dead. Survived the bullet. Claimed his ghost shirt saved him, just like Wovoka promised. He’s asleep over there, out of his mind on opium and alcohol. Now that he can’t get his fix of peyote from the Rio Grande valley anymore, he had to find some substitute to enter the dreamworld where he can talk to