Valley of the Gun (9781101607480) by Ralph W. Cotton Read Free Book Online

yes, come to think of it,” she said as his meaning became clear to her. “I am quite a good shot with this.” She gave a nurturing lift of the rifle in the crook of her arm.
    Sam sipped the steaming coffee. He wanted to know more about this woman. Were there things she could tell him about the man he was tracking? Of course there were. But it was more than that, he told himself. There was something about the woman herself. . . .
    â€œJust being married to Dad Orwick was enough to make you want to kill him?” he asked. He eyed her inconspicuously. Behind her duster, she wore battered, snug buckskins. A tall skinning knife stood in a fringed sheath crosswise across her flat belly. Atop an open collar button a brown linsey-woolsey shirt revealed the upper edge of faded red long johns beneath it.
    She reached a scuffed boot toe out and dragged a weathered wooden chair closer to the bed. She pulled Sam’s bullet-torn shirt from the chairback and pitched it over onto the bed beside him. Sam nodded his thanks and looked back at her.
    â€œKilling him’s the least of what I first wanted to do,” she said, sitting down. “When I managed to break away from his family, I lay awake nights imagining some of the most awful, torturous things I could conjure up—” She stopped short and turned an ear toward the hillside.
    Sam froze in the process of lifting the cup of coffee to his lips, and the two stared at each other.
    â€œDid you hear that?” Mattie Rourke asked in a hushed voice, half rising catlike from the chair.
    Sam only nodded, reaching down, setting the coffee cup on the plank floor. He picked up his boots standing at the edge of the bed.
    â€œRiders,” he said, “coming from down trail—ten minutes, maybe sooner.”
    She stood and held on to her rifle with both hands.
    Sam stiffly pulled on his boots and looked all around for his gun belt, shaking the last of the cobwebs from inside his head, noting the drumbeat had slowed considerably.
    â€œThe posse from Goble?” she asked him, still whispering.
    â€œLet’s hope so,” Sam said. He pushed himself up from the edge of the bed and pulled his shirt on over his bandaged shoulder. He gave Mattie a questioning look.
    â€œYour gun belt and duster are on your horse,” she said, nodding to where the horses stood staring back at them.
    Sam stumbled a little as he started to take a step. But Mattie caught him, steadied him, looped his arm across her shoulders and walked on.
    â€œI’m all right,” Sam said, even though he didn’t resist her help. He shook his head as if to clear it entirely.
    â€œI know you are, but just in case,” she said, walking him toward the horses.
    â€œWe’ll get atop the trail over them,” Sam said, feeling weak now that he was up and moving. He realized he wasn’t back to himself yet.
    The woman looked at him as she stopped beside his copper-colored dun. She considered what he’d said, with the look of one who was not used to following another’s direction. She resented his assumed authority, but she calmed herself, took a patient breath and let it go.
    â€œYes, you’re right, Ranger,” she said quietly. “That’s what we should do.” She helped guide his boot into the stirrup as he raised it. Then she kept close, her hands up, spread, ready to help, even as he swung himself up into the saddle on his own and settled onto it.
    â€”
    The eight-man posse from Goble wound its way up the switchback hill trail. Ten yards ahead of the other riders, a buckskin-clad man named Dee Ragland scouted the trail for the hoofprints left behind by Dad Orwick’s gunmen. Riding slowly, Ragland bent low down the side of his horse, examining the dirt. Now and then he held up a gloved hand to bring the others to a halt.
    â€œGood God Almighty, must we constantly be stopping like this!” said Kerwin Stone, the bank