Desperadoes
Page 29
I walked to the First National Bank just as I had at twenty and little boys tried to place their shoes on whatever bricks I stepped on. Maybe a thousand people gazed in awe as I stood at the doors of the Condon bank, my hand skating over the riddled wood, and gave my version of the Great Coffeyville Kansas Raid. Then I crossed Walnut Street just as my brother Grat had, recalling aloud the withering gunfire and wagon barricades and the smoke hanging at Isham’s. I walked with a crowd shoved around me, adults and children gaping at the picket fence with pea vines on it where my brother Bob was killed. I scraped my heel in the cinders to indicate the place where I lay dying, and then I saw that the crowd had retreated, and there in the alley in black suits with red ribbons on their pockets were six survivors of those men who’d shot at me there forty-five years before. One sat in a wooden wheelchair; two leaned on canes; they shaded their eyes from the sun and grinned at me, and then they slunk up to shake my hand.
The end
Copyright
First published in the USA by
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979
This edition first published in Great Britain in 1980
by Souvenir Press, 43 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3PD
Paperback edition published in 2008
by Souvenir Press, 43 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3PD
This ebook edition first published in 2012 by Souvenir Press
All rights reserved © Ron Hansen 1979
The right of Ron Hansen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 9780285641235