The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online

behind it when it all come down like a hailstorm. I think them robbers thought they had it made easy. They didn’t. There was lots of shooting. But the ones got away took the money with them. They split up there at the end of the street, to meet up somewhere else, I figure.”
    “The river and the ferry,” I said.
    “Oh, you mean that rig that pulls across the Sabine. That son of a bitch owns it burnt the bridge to have that ferry.”
    “It didn’t do him any good,” I said. “The ferry got hit by a water twister right after Grandpa got shot. I was near drowned, and them others were the ones got away with robbing the bank. They took my sister with them.”
    “That ain’t good for her,” said the colored man. “Not with one of them being Cut Throat Bill. And I think there was Nigger Pete with them. They been in the papers, mostly robbing banks up north. They got prices on their heads, considerable ones. Papers say Bill rode with Frank and Jesse James when he was just a kid. He liked the work and has been out doing it for near thirty years or so, off and on, between that and other mischief. I don’t know nothing about the fat one. There was some dime novels about Cut Throat Bill, though they made him out a hero and such. There ain’t no heroes.”
    “Fatty is all the name I know,” I said. “That’s what they called him. Deputy, or former deputy, seemed to know who he was. Not that it mattered. He’s quit and gone on to hunt out another career, possibly barbering.”
    “Well, that barbering is a pretty steady job, cause there’s plenty like a neat haircut and a shave they don’t have to do themselves,” said the colored man.
    I tried to get up, but my legs weren’t ready, and I had to sit back down. It was then that a bunch of dirt fell off me and I knew I had been hit with a mess of dirt clods while I was out, not to mention that I ached all over from having been kicked and whopped on. I figured that kid had been at me with that stick a little.
    “Only good thing come of this is that ferry is gone,” said the colored man. “I don’t like to pay for crossing a river when there was a perfectly good bridge there. Though you got to give him credit for coming up with that ferry idea. I might have done it had I thought of it.”
    “I got to go find my sister,” I said. “I got to get some law some kind of way.”
    “Good luck to you, kid,” said the colored man. “Ain’t no law wants any part of that bunch. Not after what happened here. Sheriff was brave, and what it got him was a final ride in the back of a wagon with a tarp slung over him. The deputy, soon as the shooting started and a bullet whizzed in his direction, he run off like a rabbit. If he’d have run any faster, he’d have run out of his clothes.”
    “He was telling me he had a kind of revelation that the law wasn’t his kind of work,” I said.
    “I bet he did tell you that,” said the colored man.
    I tried to get up again, and this time the colored man grabbed me under the arm and helped me to my feet.
    “You might get a Texas Ranger involved,” he said. “They are some bad men. But by the time you find one of them, your sister could be on the dark side of things, and there ain’t no certainty about them Rangers.”
    “What else is there?”
    “You could hire a bounty hunter or a tracker.”
    “Do you know one?”
    “Well, I’ve done the work. I’m part white, part nigger, and part Comanche injun, and I’m the part of that last part that knows how to track. I was taught by my mother and some of her people. They could find a fart under a stone at the bottom of a lake. I’m not that good, actually, but I’ll do. I mean, I’m pretty damn good. So I could find him, but I wouldn’t do it without Shorty going with me, and I don’t know he would. Neither of us would go without being paid. And we can take the hog, too. He helps track. Well, not really, but I’m used to his company. But I got to have enough to make it