Kill McAllister by Matt Chisholm Read Free Book Online Page B

conscious that there was a man in front of him. He swung a fist,felt knuckles on bone and then the floor rushed up to meet him again. He tried to push himself up on his hands; his face struck the floor.
    He heard a voice say: “You should of killed him, captain.”
    Another said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did.”
    Then a merciful unconsciousness took over.

Chapter 7
    There were stars above him.
    The moon rode cold and serene.
    He knew that he lay in the open, but he did not know where. All he was conscious of was the mass of agony that composed his body. He knew that he was as near to death as he would ever be without dying. He lay there trying to remember until the face of the man called ‘captain’ floated uncertainly into his vision. Slowly the scene in the shack returned. And with it came fear that the men had taken him out onto the prairie and left him there to die. He tried to sit up, but the stark agony that knifed through his rib-cage prevented him. He heard himself groan.
    He must have drifted off again.
    The next thing he was conscious of was a sound which at first he could not identify, but slowly it seeped through into his benumbed brain that he was listening to a woman singing.
    Something inside him laughed. Maybe it was an angel.
    He rolled over onto his face and forced himself to his hands and knees. Lifting his head, he saw lights. A house. To left and right, more lights. Then it came to him that he was on the backlots of the town. Hope rose in him. He gritted his teeth together and fought his way to his feet through a curtain of weakness and pain. When he tried to walk, his legs folded under him and he hit the ground. Twice he gained his feet and twice his legs failed him, but he kept at it, his will driving him. Finally, having fallen a fourth time, he tried crawling on hands and knees, pushing as slow as a snail toward the lights.
    He crawled till something stopped him. A picket fence. Gripping it with both hands, he hauled himself to his feet again. He saw that he was immediately behind a house and that a door was open allowing light to stream out into the night. Between him and the light was a figure.
    He tried to call out and all he could get out was some kind of a croak. He lost his balance and pitched forward over the fence.
    * * *
    Voices.
    There was a bright light shining in his eyes and it hurt them, sending hot darts of pain through his head. He winced and closed them for a moment. When he opened them he saw a girl’s face; the loveliest face he had ever seen it seemed.
    A man’s voice said: “Who could do a thing like this?”
    He heard himself whisper: “That’s a very good question.”
    He felt bad, lying there like that with a woman looking at him. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move at all now. Voices and faces became blurred, he tried to hang on desperately, feeling that if he surrendered he would be dead. But he drifted back into darkness just the same.
    * * *
    Again light hurt his eyes.
    This time it was sunlight and it shone into his eyes like hope itself. He was in a room and its quietness was accentuated by the distant sounds of the town that came to his ears. He lay there a long time, listening and thinking:
I’m alive
. It was good, just lying there and knowing he was alive.
    Slowly details of the room came through to him – pretty curtains that could only have been chosen by a woman, flowered paper on the walls, a bureau with a mirror on it. By God, he thought, he was in a woman’s room.
    Time meant nothing as he lay there, letting his mind drift, not moving, because he knew that movement meant pain. He remembered some of the details of the fight that had put him here, he recalled how he had found himself in the backlots; the faces of the man and woman leaning over him returned. Thinking about them, he drifted smoothly off into sleep again with a last thought for the man he had come here to find, but who