"Ken Rand - Calamity Djinn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ken)

Calamity Djinn
Ken Rand
"Marry me, or I'll shoot."

Calamity Djinn stood firm as a cottonwood, back to the just-risen sun, knee-high buckskin moccasins
spread in a shooter's stance in the tall meadow grass. She aimed her Sharps, as long as she was tall, at
Butch Parker, who stood across the campfire from her. Seconds before, he'd been asleep. He was
awake now, his eyes riveted on the weapon aimed at him. At and upтАФButch stood a good two feet
taller than Calamity.

Pungent gunpowder overwhelmed the meadow's sage perfume. A covey of quail flushed in the tall grass
close by, but the woman didn't flinch.

Butch could have reached out, if he'd wanted to, and stuck his finger in the muzzle, but he didn't. Nobody
messed with a loaded Sharps. Or with the trapper woman some folks called Calamity Djinn. Some folks
called her тАЬCalamityтАЭ because wherever she went, calamity followed. Some folks said she was a witch,
or something like it; that's where the тАЬDjinnтАЭ came from.

Nobody messed with her, not even Butch Parker, who was big enough to be called тАЬPorkerтАЭ behind his
back by his fellow trappers, and big enough that seldom happened.

Butch flicked his eyes away from the Sharps and looked around the grassy meadow where they stood.
He looked at the big dead cottonwood behind them, at the aspen and pine-covered rolling hills beyond
the meadow, and the jagged spikes of the Wind River Mountains on the eastern horizon over the
woman's shoulder. It looked to Calamity as if he was scouting for a griz or a Shoshone war party or
something else to change the subject. But she didn't flinch.

She'd planned the ambush well. No bear for miles and the nearest Indians she'd tracked was a hunting
party moving away and north, upvalley.

"Now, Calamity,тАЭ Butch said, voice molasses smooth, тАЬthat Sharps packs a kick, you know."

"Reckon I do."

"And you don't want to hurt yourself."

"Reckon I don't."

"So, if you'll just sort ofтАФ"

Butch lowered one big paw to gesture, but being nervous facing the Sharps, he did it too fast and the
motion spooked Calamity, who gasped, a tad nervous tooтАФthe thought of marriage and all, at lastтАФand
took half a step back. She caught her heel on a loose rock and stumbled. The Sharps discharged with a
roar, knocking her to the ground in a gunpowder-smoke cloud.

The bullet tore Butch's coonskin hat off. The slug, the size of a cigar stub, careened off a snag hanging
from the cottonwood behind Butch.

The limb, as big around as Butch's thigh, fell straight down on him from twenty feet up, butt first, hit him
on the head like a well-swung war club. Knocked him out cold.