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

as far as I knew I hadn’t eaten since breakfast at Arthur’s Castle the morning I’d left with my prisoner, and God knew how long ago that had been. I nodded. The movement made me aware of the pounding in my head and I placed a hand
against it. It was encircled just below the hairline by a bandage like an Indian headband.
    Outside, I heard a wagon rattling past, followed by the grinding sigh of hinges as a large door was swung open or shut nearby. I decided that I was in the back of the barbershop, which was next to the livery stable. No wonder Wilson was so surly, I thought; I was lying in his bed. Carefully I eased myself into a sitting position with my back supported by the brass bedstead. My head weighed fifty pounds.
    The barber had left his chair and been swallowed up by the blackness beyond the globe of light thrown by the lamp on the table. Dishes rattled, something wet splattered into something dry, and then he came back bearing a soup plate full of steaming something which he balanced in one hand while he drew his chair up to the bed and sat down. He lifted out a spoonful of liquid, blew on it, and slid it underneath my nose.
    â€œWhat is it?” I studied the contents suspiciously. It smelled like boiled rags.
    â€œVenison broth,” said the other. “Been cooking all day. Shot it last year and all I got left is jerky. Eat it. Worst it can do is make you heave.”
    I opened my mouth and he inserted the spoon. It tasted pretty good, but then the judgment of a man half-starved is not to be trusted. I held out my hands for the bowl. He handed it to me and I finished the broth in silence.

    â€œHow long was I out?” I handed back the empty vessel and wiped my lips with the graying linen napkin he had given me.
    He shrugged and set the bowl and spoon on the table next to the lamp. “Nineteen, twenty hours. When the sheriff brought you in I told him you wouldn’t last till sundown. Yours is only the second fractured skull I ever saw. Man who had the first one died two hours after it happened. His didn’t look near as bad as yours. What was it, a rock?”
    I started to nod, then thought better of it and said, “Yeah.”
    â€œHow’s it feel?”
    â€œHurts like hell.”
    â€œI got something that’ll fix that.” He got up and walked back into the gloom, this time in a different direction, probably toward the front where the barbershop was. He had no shirt on over his long-handled underwear and his suspenders flapped loose around his knees. A moment later he returned, this time carrying a tall square bottle in one hand and a shot glass in the other. He sat down and poured a thin stream of pale brownish liquid into the glass. The sickly sweet scent it gave off was overpowering, like that of too many flowers in a room where a corpse lay in state. When the glass was nearly full he thrust it toward me with the same nonchalance with which he had offered me the venison broth. I was suspicious of the human race today. I asked him what it was.

    â€œLaudanum. Take some; it’ll ease that ache.” He pushed the glass closer. The fumes filled my nostrils and made me drowsy.
    I turned my head away. “Pour it back.”
    â€œDon’t be stubborn.” He slid the medicine around toward my lips. “It’s the best cure there is.”
    â€œI once knew a cowhand who felt that way,” I said, looking at him. “He got stomped by a bronc and the doctors fed him that stuff for a solid week to ease the pain, then released him and told him he was good as new. Know what he was doing the last time I saw him? Screaming his lungs out in an insane asylum. The attendants had refused to give him any more of that good medicine. No, thanks. I’d rather have the pain.”
    â€œSuit yourself,” he said, and drank the stuff himself. I stared at him, but I don’t think he was aware of it. His pupils clouded and his pale lips were