Free Between Hell and Texas by Ralph Cotton Page A

had recently wound its way out the open back door. Leaning his rifle against a wall and dropping his saddlebags onto the table, he walked to a dust-covered broom standing in a rear corner and picked it up.
    An hour later, he had swept the floor, dusted the few battered pieces of furniture, and gathered a pile of mesquite brush and oak kindling for a fire in the small hearth. He went outside and rolled a heavy rock off of the wooden well cover and pulled the cover off. He shook dust off of a small metal pail tied to the end of a coiled rope and let fifteen feet of the rope slide through his hands into the blackness, until he heard the pail splash quietly in the water. With the pail filled, he covered the well and walked back into the shack. He took a small bag of coffee beans from the poke sack Shaney had given him before he’d left the Double D Spread. He crushed enough beans with his pistol butt to boil a pot of coffee.
    While the coffee heated, he took out a small bag of dried beans, considered cooking a pot, but then changed his mind and set the bag aside. He had no appetite. It wasn’t food he needed, he told himself. He couldn’t name what it
was
he needed, but he wascertain it wasn’t food. Waiting on the coffee, he walked out and led Stony out of the sun to a lean-to inside a small rail corral filled with clumps of wild grass that had grown all summer long.
    “Graze it down,” he told the bay. Lifting the saddle and bridle from the horse, he dropped them over a fence rail out of the sun. He picked up an oaken bucket, carried it to the well, and returned with it full of cool water. He set the bucket at the horse’s hoofs, then walked back to the house.
    When the coffee had boiled and he’d taken it off the fire and let it settle, he poured a cup and took it out on the front porch. He righted an overturned rocking chair with a busted cane bottom and sat on it sipping his coffee for a moment. Then, restless, he set the cup down, walked inside, and took out an old drawstring cloth pouch of smoking tobacco that had been in his saddlebags too long to remember. He carried the tobacco and some wrinkled rolling papers onto the porch and sat rolling and smoking cigarettes as the sun moved over into the western sky. He didn’t realize he’d spent the afternoon thinking about Rosa Shaw until all of a sudden it was gone and there was nothing he could do about it. Looking down at the empty coffee pot and the stained cup sitting near his feet, he cursed silently and stood up.
    “I can’t stand this, Rosa,” he said, not knowing if he’d said it aloud or only in his mind. Kicking his boot through a pile of crushed cigarette butts and the empty tobacco pouch, he stepped down off the porch, walked around the house, and came back moments later leading the bay by its reins, saddled and ready for the trail.
    He rode into Somos Santos as evening stretchedlong across the land and the sun set low and simmering in a sea of red fire. Stony cantered quarterwise the last few yards, as if knowing that cool shade awaited in the black slices of shadow reaching out from the rooftops of buildings to the wide street below.
    “What have we here, Karl?” Sheriff Martin Lematte said to the man standing beside him on the boardwalk out front of the saloon.
    “I don’t know,” said Karl Nolly. He spread a slight grin. “But if he’s carrying any money, I think we better get a hold of it, before he wastes it on something foolish.”
    “There you go reading my mind again,” said Lematte, smiling himself, working a thin cigar back and forth between his lips as the pair stood watching the big bay slow to a walk toward the hitch rail.
    “Good evening to you, stranger,” Lematte said, smiling affably, ripping his black flat-crowned hat. “Welcome to Somos Santos.”
    Cray Dawson remembered Bouchard’s warning. But he returned Lematte’s smile, and touched his fingertips to his hat brim. “Evening, Sheriff,” he said, stepping down from