Free The Last Shootist by Miles Swarthout

horses down to the stream. While they guzzled noisily, he unbuckled his new twenty-five-dollar Bianchi spurs, yanked his boots and socks off, and splashed into the chilly flow alongside his stolen horseflesh. The spring freshet felt so good, he flung off his new felt hat and cotton shirt to sluice his sweaty chest in a whore’s bath.
    Gillom managed to find in the dark the leather hobbles Mose Tarrant had thrown into his tack sale. One was unusual, a fore and hind leg “cross-hobble,” which he finally attached to the reluctant gelding’s hooves by the rising moonlight. Their reins removed, the two horses were left to browse as he untied his canvas-wrapped bedroll with wool blankets inside, rolled up in them and, still chewing a chunk of hardtack, fell into exhausted sleep with his head against J. B. Books’s own saddle.
    *   *   *
    He awoke to one of the horses nibbling grass near his ear. While stretching the stiffness out of his legs, Gillom gathered sticks for a small fire, filled his coffeepot and canteens in the stream. He stuck head and shoulders underwater and blew bubbles to wake fully up, then walked back to his fire shaking water from his wet hair like a dog. He’d decided to eat mostly on the move, holding off regular meals until Tularosa, where he could rest and figure out what to do next.
    If this Rhodes fella ain’t there, I’ll ride west, over the mountains to Arizona, he decided. Prescott’s the territorial capital, so it should be a hoppin’ town. Or maybe ride down to Old Tucson in the Sonoran desert, before their summer heat hits. Tucson’s a famous old tradin’ post I’d like to see.
    After horse and rider loosened their leg muscles, Gillom booted the bay mare into a hard trot, wanting to put long miles on while the day was still cool. He aimed northeast, trying to hit the El Paso and North Eastern rail line, which had been completed across the Tularosa Basin only three years before in 1898.
    A wide sky sprayed light blue with thin swatches of clouds, across which birds winged. The vast emptiness of the Tularosa Valley was so peaceful Gillom’s worries from the two weeks since John Bernard Books had ridden up to his mother’s front door took wing, too. He crunched one of Bond Rogers’s biscuits.
    He kind of missed school, sorry that his run-in with the marshal and Books’s shocking suicide and his own temper had all conflagrated so quickly to make him a pariah even among his buddies, an undesirable at high school. Ahh, to hell with my senior year! Wish they could see me now. Free as a bird and rich to boot! Bee, Ivory, and Johnny would be jealous of my free-ridin’ life. Green with envy, especially Mr. Kneebone, Jr. The thought pleased him no end.
    Lunch was hardtack washed down with water, while he lazed in the grass giving the horses a half hour blow and a hatful of corn. Then he switched tack again, putting Books’s saddle on the black gelding. The bigger horse didn’t fight the bit so much today, the unfamiliar saddle, so Gillom didn’t have to grip tight with his sore thighs, alert to the sudden buck or occasional sidestep by an anxious horse.
    To relieve the boredom of his slow ride, Gillom practiced. That morning, concerned about highwaymen, he unpacked Books’s guns and strapped them on. He reversed the handles of the black and pearl revolvers so he’d be less likely to knock them out of their holsters if he suddenly had to do any hard riding. Gillom practiced his cross-handed draw with each hand a few times, then both at once. Spinning the nickel-plated beauties on his index fingers like Catherine wheels, forward, backward, halting quickly with a twist of his wrist to slip them reversed back into the leather holsters. Gosh! Did I leave the chamber under the hammer empty like Books warned me to do? He checked each cylinder. If I shoot myself or one of these horses in the leg accidentally,