Free Hard Ride to Wichita by Ralph Compton, Marcus Galloway Page B

ever come around to thinking I want to stay here and let the rest of my days trickle away.”
    â€œYou could at least give it some time,” Red told him. “You’ve at least got to be here to see your mother put to rest.”
    Shaking his head, Luke replied, “It don’t matter if I’m here or not for that. I said everything I could to her when she was here. From now on, it don’t matter what I say because she won’t hear it. And if she does, she’ll be able to hear me no matter where I’m at. All that business about putting her in a box and watching as she’s . . .” His eyes clenched shut as if to fight away the images that his imagination was conjuring up. When he opened them again, he was even more somber than he’d been before. “What I have to do . . . it’ll take time. I can’t waste any of it.”
    â€œWhat is it you intend to do?”
    â€œI’m going to Wichita and I’ll find whoever that Granger person is.”
    â€œDo you have any notion on how to do that?”
    Luke nodded. “Yeah.”
    â€œWhen do you mean to leave town?”
    â€œFirst light tomorrow morning.”
    â€œAnd there’s nothing that’ll change your mind,” Red asked in a tone that said he already knew the answer.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHow long do you think it’ll take?”
    â€œA few days to ride to Wichita. If I can’t find who this Granger is within a few more days after I get there, I doubt I’ll ever find him. After that . . . I don’t know yet.”
    â€œAll right, then,” Red said decisively. “We head out tomorrow morning for Wichita.”
    â€œWe?”
    â€œThat’s right. A ride that long, you shouldn’t go it alone. Anything happens out there and you could die without a soul knowing about it. Well, your ma would know, but I doubt she’d be too happy about you going off and doing such a foolish thing as that. Also, wherever she is, she’d find a way to haunt me for the rest of my days if I let such a thing happen.”
    Luke started to laugh. “I reckon she would. She always did believe in ghosts.”
    â€œRemember when she wanted to visit that traveling spiritualist? Kyle threw a fit.”
    â€œAnd she went anyway,” Luke recalled. “She said that spiritualist wasn’t nothing but a huckster. But that fellow who came along to hold séances last year, the one who got the spirits to rattle them bells and such on that wall he had, she said he was the genuine article.”
    â€œYour ma was funny.”
    Luke nodded. He then looked over to his friend and said, “She wouldn’t be happy if she knew I was getting you into trouble. She always told me you got into enough of it on your own.”
    â€œShe never knew the half of it.”
    â€œShe knew about you robbing that first spiritualist blind.”
    Red’s eyes grew so wide that they were clearly visible in the faint moonlight. “What did you just say?”
    â€œAll right,” Luke admitted. “I think she knew about both of us robbing that spiritualist.”
    â€œHow could she know about that? We snuck into his tent, stole his lockbox, and was out again before anyone was the wiser.”
    Luke shrugged. “I don’t know how, but she knew. She just couldn’t prove it, so she lectured me for hours about how wrong it was that anyone should steal or otherwise break the law.”
    â€œI never heard about that before!”
    â€œBecause I wasn’t about to give you up.”
    â€œIt was your idea to rob that fella,” Red pointed out.
    â€œExactly. And when I didn’t admit to any of it or cave in while she was raking me over the coals, Ma let it be known that she would never lift a finger to help anyone who got caught stealing.”
    Letting out a breath as if he’d just escaped from a posse, Red said, “I’m