Andromeda Gun Read Free

sick from the rotgut he had drunk last night in Idaho Falls.
    Idaho Falls! The very words rang as a knell , and he closed his eyes again to shut out his memories. He had bet a hundred dollars on a two-card draw to an inside straight and had lost the pot to a pair of jacks. He had bet and lost his horse and saddle and had tried to bet his pistol, but the other gamblers would not let him bet the weapon. It had a hair trigger, and its handle was so full of notches that drawing it was like grabbing a saw.
    If he couldn’t learn to play poker, he might as well quit robbing banks, he thought. All he had left from the Boise holdup was thirty-seven cents and a ticket to Shoshone Flats, Wyoming Territory. Remembering the stage ticket, he could account for the position of his boots. The stagecoach had overturned, which meant he had paid good money for fare to nowhere, and if he didn’t make Shoshone Flats by six the bank would be closed. He reopened his eyes, suddenly alert.
    Today was Saturday and if he didn’t get to the bank before closing time, he’d have no funds for Sunday. It was against his principles to rob banks after hours or after dark. He was a bank robber, not a night-crawling burglar, so it was imperative that he get to town in time to find and steal a fast horse for his getaway and rob the bank before nightfall. Still marveling at his clear head and unroiled stomach, he climbed through the window and looked over the wreckage.
    One glance at the angle of the driver’s head told him the man’s neck was broken. One of the horses was dead, and the other, still in harness, had a broken foreleg. Loco slid down from the side of the stagecoach, walked over, pulled his pistol, and killed the lame horse in an act of mercy so conventional it was unaccompanied by compassion for the beast. Reloading and reholstering his pistol, he knelt beside the body of the driver and pulled the man’s wallet from his pocket. He riffled through the contents.
    There was a paper dollar and a two-dollar meal ticket with eighty cents unpunched drawn on a Miss Stewart’s Restaurant in Shoshone Flats. The ticket was made out to Will Trotter by the Territorial Stage Lines. Loco kept the dollar and returned the meal ticket to the wallet when he noticed the width of the dead man’s belt. He unbuckled the belt and slid it out of the belt straps.
    Apparently Will Trotter had not been a trusting person. Loco found nine silver dollars concealed in the belt. That sum, with an additional twenty-three cents he found in the driver’s jeans was the extent of his salvage. Loco was not disappointed. He had robbed banks for less money.
    Standing, he looked up at the road and saw the two lead horses farther down munching on the roadside grass. He climbed the hill and walked down the road to take the reins of the first horse, a Percheron. It was no horse for a man of his calling, but it was as good as the Clydesdale farther down the road, good enough to carry him within stealing distance of a faster horse. He started to swing aboard the Percheron when, for the first time in his life, Johnny Loco reconsidered.
    Here was an opportunity to become respectable. If he took Will Trotter’s body into Shoshone Hats, he would be regarded as a citizen doing his duty. He was twenty-eight, time for him to start thinking about making his old age a possibility. He couldn’t go on forever as an itinerant bank robber.
    He held the idea at arm’s length, eyeing it distastefully. Respectability was for women and men with green eyeshades and bankers who put mortgages on the homes of widows and orphans. Admittedly he wasn’t called Johnny Loco without a reason, but he had not yet gone plumb loco.
    Yet the idea had its good points. Neither of these heavy draft horses could get him close enough to town and leave him much time to spare for finding a faster horse, stealing it, and robbing the bank. If he rode in on an errand of mercy, bringing Will Trotter’s corpse, his behavior