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

The robe slipped from her sweaty hands, and Butch fell part way out, onto his back, feet and legs in the
grave.

Cold dead eyes looked up at Calamity.

I shut them eyes, didn't I?
That did it.

"I can't hardly marry me no corpse, now can I, huh?” She'd said that.

She'd tried a Jimsonweed poultice and “There, there.” Neither answered, but she had more tricks in her
possibles sack.
****
Twenty years before, Calamity was named Sarah Jane Foster. Indians killed her folks the same summer
she met Bob Beaumont, a handsome young fellow, son of a nearby farmer. An adventurer, Bob was.
When Sarah Jane lost her folks, Bob was about to head out West, to see some land, and trap beaver in
the Shining Mountains. Bereft of family, in love with Bob, Sarah joined him.

Bob fell off his horse en route and broke his fool neck. Sarah, with nowhere else to go and nothing else
to do, buried him and moved on. She joined up with old Jim Bridger's outfit. When she told him her
story, she got dubbed “Calamity” on the spot.

Bridger told her. “Nobody treks these here mountains without knowing how to do for their
owndamnselves.” With that, he'd taught her to fish, shoot, skin, fight, smoke, patch clothes and wounds,
cook, and fix a fair rosehip tea.

After he taught her all he knew, he loaned her to his friend Shot in the Hip, a Shoshone medicine man.
“Ol’ Shotsie'll give you the lowdown on medicine manning, stuff even I don't know. Y'ever need to set
your own leg, or take out a bullet or an arrow, you'll remember your lessons."

Calamity learned how to use and abuse more than three hundred herbs, roots, flowers, leaves, barks,
pollens, sap, seeds, stems, stalks, and grasses. She learned how to use bear fat and wild onion to make a
salve for burns, how to use badger gall and flax seed to brew a tea to cure headaches, how to use dried
moss and coyote shit to staunch a wound. She learned how to cure every ailment, harm, malady, and
complaint known to man, Indian, and horse.

"What else is there?” Calamity had asked Shot in the Hip when her training was near done. It had taken
up the latter half of the winter and early spring her first year west of the Missouri. She was smart, a quick
learner.

The old Indian, as tiny as Calamity, frowned, adding wrinkles to his leathery face. “You know everything
Indians know, and everything the French and Americans know. You're a good doctor. What else is there
to know?"

"How to raise the dead?"

At the time, Calamity had thought she was joking.
****
The batwing doors of the Lucky Nickel Saloon, on Laramie's muddy Second Avenue, swung open, and