Free The Last Shootist by Miles Swarthout Page A

I’m in a damned pickle. Be careful, buddy.
    But of course he couldn’t be for long. Careful. Boys with guns for toys just had to play with ’em, spinning them upward, downside on one crooked finger. Gillom wrapped the long reins of his follow horse around his saddlehorn, so he could take aim with each hand, squinting at fence posts, rabbits bursting from the brush as he passed. When that game paled, and since he didn’t want to call attention to himself by actually firing for marksmanship, he got fancy, pinwheeling a Remington up in the air, catching it by the handle again after a full rotation as the butt dropped naturally into his palm. Reversing the revolution, too, by tipping the five-and-a-half-inch barrel with his forefinger so that it tossed up butt first, and brought his left hand into play, so it was ready for work, false-fanning the hammer when he caught the big pistol again by its handle on its drop. He was quick, very quick. His reflexes, hand-to-eye coordination, distant vision, Gillom Rogers had it all, the lightning-fast instincts of a gifted athlete, or a gunfighter.
    It was only when he pushed his tricks too far, flipping the .44 up from behind his back with a twist of his wrist and lowering his right shoulder, that he missed a catch. The heavy revolver bounced off the horse’s flank and then to the dirt, spooking the animal. Gillom had to grab the saddlehorn and unwrap the reins of the follow horse to get both startled animals calmed down after a few bucks and snorts. The gunslick dismounted and walked the skittish horses in a circle before retrieving his Remington from the dust. Better leave the gunplay for standing up, he realized.
    His fingers were as sore as his legs when he made camp at a grove of cottonwoods early evening. The horses he watered at another small stream and since it was twilight he risked a fire. In the dimness smoke wouldn’t show much and it was still light enough for his tiny blaze to be invisible at a distance. Any Indians around, though, could smell the smoke with their keen noses. Apaches had raided regularly throughout southern New Mexico, but this was a new century, although he’d heard there were still some wild ones left down in the Sierra Madres. Gillom pondered noises in the night now drawing about him while he enjoyed his first full meal of beans and bacon in nearly two days. He licked the skillet clean before nodding off with a slice of moon for dessert.
    He awoke to a chilly wind blowing across his blanket. Dust began to swirl. Gillom blinked. Damn! Another spring dust storm! When the spring temperature was in the seventies, conditions grew ripe for winds around El Paso to blow in from the west. These big dust storms, hundreds of miles across, could reach fifty miles an hour, gusting higher.
    â€œClean sand is healthy for your character,” his dad used to tell his tyke. “It polishes up the town.”
    Gillom wasn’t as sure of the medicinal qualities of flying dirt as he choked down a dry biscuit while saddling. A last drink of water for the horses, a faceful for himself, and then wet handkerchiefs tied round his neck and pulled up over his nose, trying to filter out the grit. These sandstorms every spring stung like a slap across the face, reminding one the Southwest still wasn’t fully tamed.
    They moved northeast to Gillom’s reckoning, riding slowly into blowing sand for what seemed like hours. Finally he raised his head, squinting against the scratchy dust, for they’d reached a rise in the hard-packed ground.
    A railroad track! Coughing, he dismounted to take a piss. Relieved, he gulped water from a canteen and washed his dirty neckerchief to retie over his nose. It was too difficult in this strong wind to switch saddles, so Gillom moved his bedroll and warbag from the back of the Mexican’s saddle he hadn’t traded to Mose Tarrant and tied this gear onto the back of Books’s big saddle atop the