Bone's Country 2 (Patreon)

So here was a beautiful woman, all his, sworn to obey him. Such a thing called for debauchery of the kind not seen since Sodom and Gomorrah were smote by God’s wrath. But he didn’t truly have her, for if he fired that temper of hers hot enough—well, the last one to get her that het up had ended up collecting Bone’s lead. It would be nothing for Sophia to refuse his touch till Kingdom Come.

Except that before they’d made their relationship all official… when she was simply a soiled dove and he the latest in a long line of whoremongers… she’d truly enjoyed the use he’d put her to. Longing to carouse with him again as much as he’d hungered for her.

So where’d that leave them, with the loving so sweet but all that surrounded it so bitter? Was he nothing more than a killer; her no more than a slave? They’d both treated each other as such. How they seemed to jump back and forth: he tried to act like she was a lady, only for her to insist she was no more than his property. And when she gave herself to him, sometimes Sophia seemed to welcome how rough it was, want it that way and more so, til he was paining her as much as pleasing her.

It didn’t make a lick of sense to him, how a man could know a horse so that it didn’t surprise him in a hundred years, but give him a woman and in a nothing of a spell she’d do something he never figured on.

It was midway between summer and fall, an Indian summer, holding onto the Great State of Texas like a bear-trap. The hot made the prairie grass brown and brittle, the dirt dry and easily moved by heat-spurred gusts.

Without the relief of autumn rains, the town was besieged by dust devils. Red dirt piled up against doorways and covered the streets like snow, challenging a man’s boots to sink in them and come back out. Women and children kept to the boardwalks, though the sandy grit soaked through the spaces between planks and tried to claim more when it wasn’t swept up. And in the heat of the day, few wanted to go to the effort. The custom of the Mexican siesta had found a temporary sanctuary north of the border.

But the Protestant work ethic held on, even after a dust devil had caught Old Man Curry outside of town and held him down, tossing and turning, until his heart gave out. In an effort to raise spirits after his funeral—the grave half-filled with roaming sod before his casket could even be lowered into it—the mayor had set up a horse race.

It’d been meant to be held in August, been cancelled when the heatwave made its presence felt, and now was back on. The town treasury was dipped into and awnings set up in the town square, shielding watchers from the sun so the racers had an audience. All up and down Main Street, people watched from inside their buildings, out on the boardwalk, or at the starting point in town square. The horsemen would ride out to the city limits, circle a post a quarter-mile out, then ride back. The winner got a Winchester One In One Thousand Model 1873.

Bone wondered to himself, when they reached that post, whether they might not see the markers of the surveyors in the distant east, telling where the coolies and Irish and assorted malingers of the Union Pacific would lay down rail by the same time next day. He and Sophia had ridden by the railhead on their way in, like a pestilence on the land.

A forest fire that waited and slowed instead of getting itself over with. The game in the area all shot up, latrines and graves dug in the earth to scar the land, men like Vikings going to each town the railway connected for fresh women, fresh whiskey, fresh anger when they got into fights. So rejuvenating to have a new grudge instead of picking at an old one.

Bone was lucky in that regard. Old feuds he couldn’t remember. And in his line as a bounty hunter, new ones tended to resolve themselves in a hurry.

The scowl that he habitually wore hardened from its rest into a sneer. Progress. He couldn’t cleanly hate it—once, this whole town would’ve been wilderness. It was progress that it had as much law and people as it did.

But folk never did know when to say enough was enough. Soon there’d be so many trains that a man would have no need of horseflesh. He’d go from one state to another thanks to rails strung up like a spider’s web. Never knowing how it felt to have a mount go where you willed because the horse wanted to, not because it had to keep to the work of the muleskinners and the iron men.

“What does your mind think of?” Sophia asked in her voluptuous accent, slipping an arm about his midsection so tight that Bone wondered for a flicker whether she was going for his gun.

He put an answering arm across her shoulders. “Horses. The railway. The day it’ll get to be so a man can get anywhere he wants without saddle or spur.”

“Caramba, how nice. My cula would feel worlds better without bouncing on a horse all day.”

“But think how sad the horse would be to see you go,” Bone teased her, sliding his hand down until he sampled the swell of her hip.

Sophia slapped his fingers away and they ended up in a more dignified pose, her arm around his. “Idiota. You are used to a bruised rump from how many times your mother smacked your naughty behind, sin duda!”

Bone clicked his tongue, shushing her. There at the starting line was his pigeon: Carl Frenly.

Bone would say this for Frenly. The man clearly knew his way around horses. Bone was as much a horseman as any cowboy, having ridden the range to make ends meet more than once. But his was a practical knowledge. He knew whether a horse was used roughly or decently, some of whether it had spirit or was all but embalmed. Few had been the time when a horse had proven him wrong, for good or ill.

Frenly, he seemed the type whose knowledge of horses extended into genealogy, breeding, stock and coloring and the study of bones—the ingredients of the horse rather than just the taste. He sat his horse as loosely as Bone had ever seen a man do, rolling with its ambling gait like a feature of the animal and not an addition.

He held the reins in one hand, but that hand was steady as a rock, never twitching. The horse he seemed to direct to the starting line, and bring to a halt, by the tension of the muscles in his thighs. The stirring of his legs and such. It was a thing of artistry and Bone felt a bit of a brute, having to rely on spurs every so often to motivate his own cayuse.

Frenly and his fellow horsemen arranged themselves on the line. The whitebeard mayor took out the starting pistol, a Colt Navy 1851. Beautiful gun, Bone thought, though any cap and ball piece was outmoded these days. Nevertheless, he braced himself, his hand a claw at the butt of his own gun. He knew not to pull; the starting pistol wasn’t the start of any evil. Being ready still set him at ease. And, were it him needing to hide a shot, he’d use the blast that started the race.

The 1851 went off. Bone stiffened a little more than he already was, eyes darting about, but he saw no splash of blood, no sudden fall to the ground. Everyone was motionless, spellbound on the race.

It started out beautiful. Horses in motion, doing what God intended them for. Muscles in perfect harmony under gleaming pelts. Well-cared for, well-loved, well-fed. Even the sound of it was beautiful. Hooves in a symphony; the music of thunderstorms.

Then their hooves raised a fine red mist from the ground and the hooves were shouted down by the snorts from big but too-small lungs. The horses jockeyed for position, already starting to sweat, to lather. The weaker ones would be in a froth soon. It was just too damn hot for a horse to be a horse or a man to be a man.

Still, Bone didn’t look away. It made him remember the last time he’d been on the trail, his stead between his legs, and he’d brought the cayuse up to a gallop just because he could. The horse had loved it as much as he had; there’d been no need for the reins or the spurs. When the horse tired, they slowed, and Bone had congratulated himself on gauging right that the sprint would end almost at a watering hole. He’d rested the horse, they’d both drunk, and the horse had nuzzled against him, cheating some oats and some pets out of him before they took off again.

It was something he’d felt that was going out of the world; soon, people would feel the whispering sway of the railroad instead. He wondered if they’d think that the railman loved them—that that was why the train went so fast.

Bone realized he was tensing up, aligning himself to the chaos of a horse in motion when he felt Sophia’s hand on a taut leg muscle. “You’re all clenched,” she said to him. “Tight as when you give me your mecos. It’s… something.”

Bone kissed her cheek—halfway through he felt the blazing flush of her embarrassment.

“Bone, not where all can see…”

Bone lowered his voice to a growl, keeping only one eye on the racers as they sped out of town, becoming a sandstorm in the distance. “You sound like you're trying to get me up to a gallop. Can't wait until the next time I take an interest?

Sophia batted her eyes coquettishly. She pressed her cheek to his and let him feel the heat of her feverish skin. It wasn’t all embarrassment. No woman that’d made a living on her back could be that ashamed. “You can touch me if you do that thing I like.“

The sandstorm reached the post, stilled, and out came the tiny dolls of the riders in the distance, horse legs flying spastically across the ground. The floating sand changing course and following with their hoofbeats. Raising like a shadow behind them as they came back, growing into winner and losers. Frenly was in the lead. Bone took both eyes off of Sophia, but his hand reassured her she was still there.

“I’ll think about it,” he told her offhandedly.