The Outlaw Josey Wales by Forrest Carter Read Free Book Online

high-step trot.
    There was a distance of a half mile… now three-quarters… now a mile separating the cantering mare from him. Behind, he could hear the first faint beating of running horses. Still he jogged. The drumming of hooves became louder; now he could hear the faint shouts of the men. Slipping the knife from his boot, he carefully cut a plug of tobacco from the twist. As he cheeked the wad the hoofbeats grew louder.
    “Well, Red,” he drawled, “ye been snortin’ to go…” he slid a Colt from a holster and fired into the air, “…now RUN!” The roan leaped. Ahead of him, Josey saw the mare gather haunches and settle lower as she flew over the ground. She was fast, but the roan was already gaining.
    There was never any doubt. The big horse bounded like a cat over shallow washes, never breaking stride. Josey leaned low in the saddle, feeling the great power of the roan as he flew over the ground, closing the gap on the mare. He was less than a hundred yards behind her when she made the heavy timber of the ridge. As Josey pulled back on the roan, he turned and saw the cavalrymen… they were walking their horses, fully two miles behind him. Their mounts had been “bottomed out.”
    Jamie had pulled up in the timber, and as Josey reached him the heavy clouds opened up. A blinding, whipping rain obscured the prairie behind them. Lightning touched a timbered ridge, cracked with a blue-white light, and the deep rumbling that followed caught up the echoes and merged with more lightning stabs that made the roar continuous. Josey pulled slickers from behind their cantles.
    “A real frog-strangler,” and he wrapped a slicker around Jamie. The boy was conscious, but his face was twisted and white, and his body rigid in an effort to cling to the saddle.
    Josey gripped his arm, “Fifteen, maybe twenty miles, Jamie, and we’ll bed down in a warm lodge on the Neosho.” He gently shook the boy. “Well be in the Nations, another twenty miles… we’ll have help.”
    Jamie nodded… but he did not speak. Josey pulled the reins of the mare from the clenched hands that held the saddle horn, and leading, moved the horses at a walk upward into the ridges.
    The lightning flashes had stopped, but the rain still came, whipped into sheets by the wind. Darkness set in quickly, but Josey guided the roan with a sureness of familiarity with the mountains. The trails were dim now, that sought out the cuts between the ridges; that headed straight into a mountain only to turn and twist and find a hidden draw. They were still there… the trails he had followed with Anderson, going into and coming out of the Nations. The trails would carry him through the corner of Newton County and onto the river flats of the Neosho, out of Missouri.
    The temperature fell. The rain lightened, and the breath of the horses made puffs of steam as they walked. It was after midnight before Josey called a halt to the steady pace. He saw the campfires below him… the half circle that hung like a necklace… enclosing the foothills of these mountains between him… and Jamie… and Neosho Basin a few miles away.
    There was still some movement around the fires. As he squatted in the timber he could see an occasional figure outlined against the flame… and so he waited. Behind him the roan stamped an impatient foot, but the mare stood head down and tired. He dared not take Jamie from the saddle… there were only a few miles across the flats to the Nations… and a few more miles to the Neosho bottoms. There was a bitter-cold bite now in the wind, and the rain had almost stopped.
    Patiently he watched, jaws slowly working at the tobacco. An hour passed, then another. Activity had died down around the campfires. There would be the pickets. Josey straightened and walked back to the horses. Jamie was slumped in the saddle, his chin resting on his chest. Josey clasped the boy’s arm, “Jamie,” but the moment his hand touched him, he knew. Jamie Burns was