Free The Big Gundown by Bill Brooks

off with a sharp warning look.
    â€œHe don’t have to know nothing. All he has to do is tell what he does know, about that nigger and the girl and me and you all.”
    Taylor stood there, his fists jammed down in the pockets of his mackinaw. His breath rushed out in smoky streams through his nostrils. Lon and Harvey stood without saying anything, mostly looking down, their noses red from the cold; Lon kept wiping at his with his coat sleeve.
    â€œWhat you want to do about it?” Taylor said. “If he is saying something?”
    â€œI don’t guess we’d have much choice if he is, do you? I guess we’ll have to put him under.”
    Taylor looked at Lon and Harvey, who didn’t look up.Their Stetsons were all sweat-stained and grimy from several seasons of dirt and dust, rain and fire smoke.
    â€œSame goes for anybody else who wants to mix in with our business,” Dallas added.
    â€œThat law dog, too?” Taylor said. “Is that what you’re meaning?”
    â€œThat law dog, too, if we have to. Less of course you want to end up hanging down in Bismarck.”
    Taylor said, “We best go on and fix them fences for now.” And with that he turned and Lon and Harvey fell in behind him as they headed for the corral to cut out saddle horses.
    â€œYou want I should go with them?” Perk said.
    â€œNo, you and me are going to ride into town and see what that kid is up to.”
    Perk sneezed and wiped his nose on his big red bandanna hanging around his neck and said, “Whatever suits you, Dallas.”
    Â 
    â€œWhat girl?” Jake asked the kid.
    â€œShe lives just east of here. Her and a kid brother and their old mother. Some say she’s a witch, the old woman is.”
    Jake said, “What’s the girl got to do with any of this?”
    â€œShe was Dallas’s gal before…”
    â€œBefore what?”
    Tig rubbed his hands together and blew on them. He is frightfully young , Jake thought.
    â€œBefore Nat took up with her.”
    â€œShe liked Nat better than Dallas? Is that it? Is that what happened, they got into it over a girl, Dallas and Nat?”
    Tig nodded his head.
    â€œThat’d be my guess.”
    â€œBut you don’t know this for sure?”
    â€œNo sir. But I don’t know no other reason they’d done what you say they did to old Nat. That’s a pretty mean thing to do…”
    â€œYes, it is.”
    The youth’s eyes brimmed with tears.
    â€œI been trying to think on it, what it must have been like for him to be done that way. He was a good fellow, always happy. Pulled me out of a tight spot more than once. Nat was loyal to his friends.”
    â€œWere you his only friend, son?”
    â€œI reckon on this outfit maybe I was.”
    â€œTell me how I find this girl,” Jake said.
    The boy told him.

8
    J OHNNY S T. J OHN WAS A BOUNTY MAN and he’d been up in Bottineau County, hunting a man named Elmore Flogg wanted for train robbing, murder, and arson. Johnny caught him in an outhouse and Flogg shot Johnny’s little finger off and it made him so damn mad that after Johnny killed him with three shots through the chest, he dragged him out of the privy and chopped his head off.
    He built a little fire right there and cauterized the end joint of the shot-off finger by sticking his knife blade in the flames till it grew white hot and then seared it against the flesh.
    He hopped around on one foot till the pain eased up, then kicked Flogg’s head as far as he could kick it and watched it roll, then went and gathered it up and put it in a burlap sack, saying, “I’m gone take you back down to Bismarck and stick your fucken head in the window of the newspaper office so everyone can see you don’t outwit or outrun Johnny St. John, you son of a whore bitch!”
    Blood and some other things seeped through the bottom of the sack and the cold wind dried it to a hard rusty