Free Novel 1966 - Kid Rodelo (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Page A

Joe?” Badger spoke quietly. “I’d like a cup myself.”
    Nora held out a cup to Dan. “Take this. There’s no sense in bickering over a cup of coffee.”
    Instantly, Joe Harbin slapped the cup from her hand and grabbed for his gun. He drew and fired so quickly that his shot missed, smashing into the just filled waterbags behind Rodelo.
    Rodelo, close to him, went in on a long dive, his powerful right shoulder catching Harbin on the hip and knocking him spinning to the ground. Before he could get a good grip on his gun again, Rodelo kicked it from his hand.
    With a grunted oath, Harbin came off the sand in a lunge, but he pulled his punch too wide and Dan Rodelo’s caught him on the cheekbone with a wicked right as he came in. Harbin, stopped in his tracks, was perfectly set up for the sweeping left, and he went down hard.
    Instantly, Badger leaped in and grabbed Rodelo. “Easy now! Let’s not be fightin’!”
    Stunned, Harbin lay still for a moment. When he got up he was quiet. “All right, Rodelo,” he said. “I’ll kill you for that.”
    His voice was cold and even. The man who spoke was not the man Rodelo had knocked down, scarcely the man he had known for all those months in prison. For the first time Dan Rodelo felt something like fear. Yet he stood quietly and looked at Harbin.
    “You’ll be a fool if you try, Harbin,” he said. “You’re out of prison. You’re in Mexico. In a matter of a day or two you’ll be aboard Isacher’s boat and headed for Mazatlan. But believe me, you’ll need me from here until you get to the Gulf. You’ll need me until you get your feet on that boat.”
    There was a growing welt on Harbin’s cheekbone, a thin cut on his jaw. Harbin’s fingers touched them gingerly. “You marked me,” he said almost wonderingly. “Nobody ever put a mark on me before.”
    He took up his coffee and, making no effort to retrieve his gun, walked off and sat down on a rock. Nora filled cups for Badger, Gopher, and Rodelo, and finally for herself. Nobody talked. They drank their coffee, the wind down the arroyo grew chill. Dan added wood to the fire, going out into the darkness for branches or roots of dried mesquite and creosote.
    The fire blazed up, the smoke smelled good, the stars became brighter and the wind colder.
    “Is there water down by the Gulf?” Badger asked.
    “Some…and some of it is bad.”
    “But you know the good springs?”
    “Sure he does,” Harbin spoke up. “You can bet he knows. He knows just about everything.”
    Badger strolled over to the waterbags. The sand was damp under them. He knew what he would see when he lifted the sacks, for he had seen the bullet strike. The bags had been piled together; now they were flat and empty. Each of them had been holed by the bullet, cutting a corner from one sack, going through another and into the third.
    Harbin watched Badger examine the bags and drop them back on the ground. “We still got two canteens,” he said. “That should last us.”
    “And the horses?”
    “We’ll water them before we leave. They’ll make it.”
    The horses were in bad shape and they all knew it; they were in no condition for a grueling ride through the last of the lava, and then the tough travel over the deep sand of the dunes.
    Harbin came over, picked up his gun, rubbed the sand from it, and slid it into his holster.
    “Where are they?” Nora asked. “The Indians, I mean.”
    “Out there. They’re where they can see our fire, maybe even within the sound of our voices. They’ve seen all this before, you know. We’ll have to keep a good lookout tonight.”
    He got up and walked over to the horses. Leading them to water, he allowed them to drink their fill. He noticed that the campfire showed scarcely at all when a man was well away from it. He let the horses take their time, then led them to some mesquite brush and picketed them nearer the fire.
    Now for the first time he realized how tired he was, but he did not dare to