The High Rocks by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online

however, and so they vanished as soon as they touched the ground.
    I dismounted before the sheriff′s office, nearly folding when my weight came down on my legs, and caught Henry just as he was locking up before going over to the Castle for breakfast. Today he was wearing his hat, charcoal gray with a low crown, a wide, sweeping brim, and set off by a gold band—the style of headgear favored by gamblers who preferred not to store their derringers in plain sight. The brim wasn’t wide enough to conceal his look of surprise when he saw me swaying before him.
    â€œI need a fresh horse and supplies,” I told him. “Get them for me, will you, Henry?” Then I fell into a heap at his feet.
    The room in which I came around smelled strongly of carbolic and something else almost as pungent. Summoning all my strength, I forced open my eyelids, which evidently someone had sewn shut. Ezra Wilson’s gourd-shaped face swam into focus, dissolved, then came back and stayed. I noticed that the pomade had begun to lose its grip on his hair, allowing a band of pink scalp to peep between the loosened locks near his crown. His starched collar, missing now, had left its mark in the form of two horizontal red welts at his throat. His features seemed even more pinched then normal. Beyond his head, a water-stain shaped like a buzzard with a broken wing adorned the yellowing plaster of the ceiling.

    The mattress beneath me was not one of Sir Andrew’s featherbeds. A little thicker than a poorly constructed quilt, it was stuffed with straw and studded with metal buttons that dug into my back like pebbles. I could feel the slats beneath it. There were four of them running sideways, not enough to support my one hundred and eighty pounds. As a result I lay bent in the middle like a sprung bow.
    I had started to raise myself onto my elbows when a mule kicked me in the back of the head and I fell back, blinking at the fireflies swarming around my face. For a moment the pain was blinding, but as I lay motionless it ebbed into a sea of blissful warmth that drew me, as it had hours before, toward the brink of unconsciousness. The pounding returned (if indeed it had ever left), but now it seemed muted and distant, like a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil wrapped in cotton. The effect was mesmeric. This time I didn’t fight it. I slept.
    The barber was still there when I awoke a second time, or maybe he was back. He was dozing in a paint-spattered wooden chair near the foot of the bed with his legs stretched out in front of him and his hands folded upon the swell of his belly. A kerosene lamp stood on the cracked veneer of the bedside table, hissing and sputtering and casting a liquid glow over the bed and onto the ceiling, where the buzzard still crouched with its injured wing thrust out to the side.

    I avoided the temptation to sit up, remembering what had happened the last time. Instead, I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth, rolled it around a little to see if it still worked, and called out Wilson’s name. He shifted in his chair, crossed one ankle over the other, and went on sleeping. I tried again.
    â€œWilson!”
    He came awake with a snort, nearly pitching headlong over onto his face when he drew his legs under him and his ankles became tangled with each other. He blinked about, bewildered, and then his eyes fell to me and comprehension dawned in his expression. He grunted like an old dog that had been kicked out of its master’s favorite armchair.
    â€œYou’re alive,” he noted morosely. “Thought sure you’d be stone cold by now.”
    â€œSorry to disappoint you.”
    He smoothed a careful hand over his thinning hair. The band of pink disappeared, then eased back into view as the locks separated again. He eyed me as if he didn’t know what to do next. “Suppose you want to eat.”
    I hadn’t thought about it, but as he said it I remembered that