Shotgun Charlie by Ralph Compton Read Free Book Online

was halfway down the long plank bar. He set the food on the counter before Grady and the others, then looked to his right, probably sensing someone else had entered. A smile cracked the fat, sweaty face. “Pap Morton! As I live and breathe, been a long time, old friend!” He shuffled toward Pap and Charlie’s end of the bar as Pap responded in kind.
    â€œYou’ve looked better, you old cur—”
    Grady’s voice barked, cutting through the sudden hopefulness.
    â€œThis is what you got for us? You call this food?” Haskell jammed the end of the serving board with his hand and sent it caroming off the bar top behind Tawley.
    Though Charlie admitted that the food hadn’t looked all that appetizing, this stranger’s rudeness was something he’d not ever seen in a man before.
    â€œHere, now,” said Pap, slamming a bony fist on the bar top hard enough to jiggle a cracked saucer with the nub of a tallow candle setting in it. “I’ve had about all I’m going to take from you, mister. My boys here are obviously smitten with you, but I’ll be jiggered if I am. You’re rude, you’re a loudmouth, and you’re acting like everybody in this here room owes you something.”
    The stranger, instead of bellowing like a scalded cat as Charlie had expected he would, grinned high and wide, barked a laugh, and slapped the bar himself. Then he said, “Finally, glad to see someone here with a set of man’s best friends. I thought for sure I’d found the wrong group!”
    The sudden change in the stranger’s attitude stunned everyone into silence for a moment. Then Pap broke the silence. “What are you on about, mister? You looking to pick a fight, I’ll oblige you and glad of it. Been a while since I mixed it up with a jackass.”
    Pap pushed back from the bar and with trembling hands and an outthrust bottom jaw supporting a dancing bottom lip, he fidgeted with the buttons on his shirt’s cuffs.
    â€œRelax, old man. Name’s Grady Haskell, and I was funning you, as I said. Long and short of it is, I am looking for a handful of men for a job. I wasn’t none too convinced of it when I come upon these four slow-witted gents trying to nab goods from a mule skinner’s freight wagon. Man didn’t see them, but I did.”
    â€œYou the law, Grady Haskell?” said Pap, not slowing down his unbuttoning one bit.
    â€œMe? The Law? Nah, but that’s about as funny a thing as I’ve heard in a long while.”
    â€œYou best start making sense, mister, ’cause I’m about to button up those eyes of your’n, fatten your homely lips, and make you wish you wasn’t born.”
    With that, Pap shoved by Charlie and launched his old chicken-bone body straight at the unsuspecting Haskell. Charlie made a grab for the old rooster, but too late, and ended up feeling the back of Pap’s leather vest slip through his fingertips.
    All Charlie would recall of the next few minutes were a blur of scarred, bloody knuckles on grimy hands, bellowed oaths shouted by grunts as those begrimed fists slammed into flesh. All around him the melee built to a rage. Dutchy and Mex, Ace and Simp all dove in, throwing elbows, raising knees, and driving their scarred fists at one another, at Charlie, at Pap, at the stranger—didn’t seem to matter to them if they were friends or foes.
    Finally Charlie figured there was enough reason to help Pap and his boys as there was to fight against that foulmouthed rascal who made less sense to Charlie every time he opened his mouth.
    His sides still hurt him mightily. He guessed that must be those broken ribs Pap was all bothered about. But it felt good to stretch out. Unfortunately his first punch met not with the leering face of the stranger, but with the same spot on Dutchy’s head, who had managed somehow to pop up between the two of them, like a rabbit out of a hole, as Charlie