Tie My Bones to Her Back by Robert F. Jones Read Free Book Online

strong stomach, I do. And a itchproof hide. I wouldn’t stick a butcher knife into one a them stinkers again for love nor money.” He reached both hands across his chest and clawed at his shoulders. “Why, just the mere idea of it gives me the rampagin’ ek -zeemer.”
    “Miss Dousmann has skinned pigs and sheep and steers on the farm back home,” Otto said. “And plenty of deer, too; even a bear once, when we were hunting up north.”
    “A pig comes close to a buffalo for tight,” Peacock said. He leaned his elbows on the wet, dark wood, smiling at Jenny with a teasing look and moving his mouth around playfully. “And a bear for smelly. But there’s nothing like a shaggy for bed rabbits.”
    He was flirting with her, Jenny suddenly realized. “Bed rabbits?”
    “Yes, missy. Linebacks, some fellows call ‘em. Graybacks? Lice.”
    Jenny took a sip of her beer. Felt the fizz tickle her nose.
    “And buffalo gnats? And fleas? And the maggots come later.” Peacock shuddered. He reached under the bar and brought up a water glass half full of whiskey. “Nope,” he said, “I done it one whole winter, that’s enough.” He drank off a big swallow of the whiskey. “Here, missy, have a plover egg.”
    He forked a small egg out of a jar filled with brine and peeled it. Jenny ate it. She was hungry. Then she forked herself another from the jar, peeled it, and popped it in her mouth. The eggs lay like pale pink, bloodshot eyeballs on the grainy rock salt at the bottom of the jar. She chewed down the second egg and forked out a third.
    “Well, Otto, she sure eats for a buffalo runner,” Peacock said. He laughed loud and approvingly, then reached under the bar again and brought up a bottle of whiskey. He winked at Otto. “Would you care for a sip of Old Baldface, ma’am, to settle your stomach? Or p’raps a proper cocktail—I do a nice Citronella Jam? It’s on the house.”
    “Thank you, no, Mr. Peacock. This beer suits me nicely.”
    When they left the saloon Otto led them back to Zimmerman’s. The shop was still open.
    “I need a new rifle, and that .44 Sharps looks just fine,” he told Jenny.
    “What about me? Something to fight off the bed rabbits?”
    “Oh,” he said, smiling, “you can use my old buffalo gun on those fellows.” A thought occurred to him. “No, it’s .50 caliber. Probably kick too hard for you, and it’s only a single-shot rifle. You might need something faster than that.”
    “For what?”
    “Well, camp meat for one. Unwelcome visitors for another.”
    “Are there likely to be bandits?”
    “Always a possibility, though a slim one, but it was Hostiles I had in mind. You never know when redskins are likely to go on the warpath.”
    Jenny laughed, but Otto remembered the Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota back in ‘62. During the course of it, the Indians had attacked a small German community called New Ulm, where the Dousmanns had friends. The militia finally fought the Santees off, but not before they’d killed or wounded nearly a hundred townsmen and burned all but a few of the houses. A childhood friend of his had written to Otto about it, just after Antietam, reporting in shocked words that more than seven hundred whites, many of them women and children, had been slaughtered before the uprising was suppressed. The atrocities were too horrible to relate in detail, the friend wrote. Otto had been scornful at the time—at Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the war, some 23,000 men had died or been wounded on both sides. But now, visualizing Jenny as the victim of an Indian attack, New Ulm seemed horrible enough.
    “How’s about that little repeater there?” she asked, pointing to a rifle in the window. It was a lever-action carbine, an improved model of the Henry with a loading gate on the side of the receiver.
    “ Ja ,” Otto said. “Just the thing. Holds seventeen bullets, .44 rimfire—the same round I use in my pistol. We can share bullets for economy’s sake.