Boon

lot of the time, rooming houses and hotels and the like wouldn’t rent a room to Boon, much less let her walk into the building in the first place, on account of her not being fully white. Of course, they never could guess where she actually came from; as far as most of the dim-witted idiots were concerned, she had to be either Indian, Mexican, or Chinese. In the end, it hardly mattered, as none of them would be permitted if any one of them wasn’t.
In the case of the Darling, Texas rooming house, the main floor was sparsely occupied by clean, well-dressed folks having late breakfasts or early lunches, and each and every one of them was as lily-white as fresh-fallen snow. The way more than a couple of them gave me the stink eye, I reckoned Boon was right to send me in alone. She’d come up later, quietly, and we’d hope for the best.
It was due to this sort of malarkey and utter lack of horse sense that I tended to prefer it when we made camp on the trail rather than sleep in clean, warm beds in town. I would never have guessed I could come to such a conclusion—I was not a hard nor rough-and-tumble man—but there was simply less to worry about that way. Just the quiet of the open night, Boon, me, and a couple of horses. Once in a rare while we’d have to make a cold camp if we were trying to keep our heads down or maybe lose an unwanted follower, and this was considerably less comfortable, but those nights that she built a little fire and we just sat together, silent with our own private thoughts, were just about my favorite parts of the time I spent traveling with Boon.
The rooms I rented were two dollars apiece, which I found exorbitant, but I paid without complaint from my fast-dwindling financial reserves and carried my saddlebag up the stairs with me to get settled into one of the rooms. Though we often slept side by side on the trail, the same could never be said of proper bed-sleeping. Likely this was more on account of my discomfort than hers; it just didn’t strike me as proper. It was not as though she was at all unaware of my habits, that I farted in my sleep or almost always woke in the dead of night to make water, but everybody has his own peculiarities and that was one of mine.
The other room I rented was just across the hallway, and it was no surprise to me to find Boon already waiting outside of it when I came into the hall. How she had gotten in was a mystery to me. She was just ghostly that way when she wanted to be.
“I’ll get cleaned up, and you should too,” she said when I gave her the key. “I want you to talk to some of those folks downstairs, and I doubt they’ll have much to say to anybody looks as trail-weary as you do right now.”
“It’s sort of a buttoned-up place,” I said. Probably I said it with a sneer, though this was more from being scolded to bathe at my age than it was in reaction to Darling its own self.
“You can have a drink or two to loosen up tongues,” she continued, “but watch yourself, Edward. Last thing we need is a repeat of the Blind Dog thing.”
The Blind Dog thing, as she called it, was an occurrence, all right. And I sure did hate it when Boon brought it up.
This was down in West Texas, not six weeks after I first began riding with Boon, which meant fewer than six weeks since she saved my spine from a necktie party outside Comanche. The Blind Dog was a mining camp tavern of repute so poor it would have been a step up to call it ill, which is to say it was no place for a lady. Of course, Boon never presented herself as much of a lady, and besides, she’d heard tell of a muleskinner and occasional stagecoach robber name of Ambrose Umberton who was wanted for a robbery that turned into a double murder in Bexar County. Now, Boon was no bounty hunter and neither was I, no matter how much the county seemed willing to put up for Umberton’s scalp, but that was beside the point entirely. Alongside Umberton’s name on the bounty truebill was his shotgun, an Englishman known fittingly around the region as Shotgun Arthur Billings.
The way I saw things at the time, there must have been a thousand Englishmen called Arthur wandering around Texas alone, never mind the rest of the Union. It was a common enough handle. Boon, on the other hand, wasn’t willing to chance it. So, we rode west while she played bounty hunter until we got wind of the Blind Dog from a pair of Texas Rangers, neither older than twenty, both of whom were well into their cups at the time and blathering on about their next move to intercept their quarry.
Boon meant to get there first. Accordingly, we lit out at twilight and left the drunk Rangers to their braggadocio and whiskey-infused bravado.
As soon as we saw lantern light on the flatland, dead ahead of us in the otherwise pitch of night, Boon said, “We’ll leave the mounts in yonder trees.”
She was riding that palomino even then, but in those days, I had a Paso Fino that I called Brownie. I named horses then, thinking I’d have them around a spell, before I got used to my luck with horseflesh. Both of them got hobbled in a thicket of bur oaks a thousand yards from the Blind Dog, and from there we approached on foot. Boon reckoned if nobody knew we were there until we came through the door, there would be no time for anybody to move against us or escape out the back. It was a