The Night I Walked Off Of Boot Hill

By Briana Vedsted

A man wakes with no memory, and he’s in the middle of the desert...in a cemetery! He wonders, How on earth did I get here?
And then some of his memory returns to him and he’s able to recall his name and where he was last: cooling his heels in a jail in the Arizona Territory.
He also remembers that he had been sentenced to the gallows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Briana Vedsted
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301800407

Briana Vedsted

Briana Vedsted lives in the country, on a ranch operated by my parents. For the past six years she has been employed by her father, Rob, working cows and irrigating his three hundred acre farm. Having grown up in a farming community, Briana has a deep appreciation for the nearby Indian ruins and all the Old West history. She's a big fan of Louis Lamoure books and John Wayne movies. The smell of pine and aspen trees, trips to the mountains on horseback, and her highly imaginative daydreams inspired her to write western books. Briana's love of magic and mystery, such as the movies Eragon and Brave, and books like Twilight and The Kane Chronicles, as well as a family history that includes the first King of Wessex, England and many princesses, knights, kings, lords, and even a saint, has really has influenced her yet-to-be-published fantasy books.Two years ago Briana began focusing her attention on trying to get one of her books published. Briana mainly write books for middle grade, teens, and young adults.

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The Night I walked off of Boot Hill

By Briana Vedsted

The Night I Walked Off Of Boot Hill

By Briana Vedsted

Published by Briana Vedsted at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Briana Vedsted

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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To my brother, Zane

Chapter One

My eyes opened. This didn’t look like heaven. As a matter of fact, it looked a lot like the Arizona Territory in 1889.

I sat up.

This was the Arizona Territory!

I stiffly got to my feet and dusted off my threadbare overcoat.

There was a chill in the air, and the bright stars and waning moon above shown down, bathing the world in an eerie light. I sucked in the sweet smell of pine and ashes into my lungs and a shiver ran down my spine. This place was different. Alien. It was as if I’d been asleep for too long.

Suddenly, I realized something: I didn’t know what my name was.

Come to think of it, I’m not even sure how I got to be where I was at. Wait, where exactly am I?

Desperately, I tried to remember anything about my past. I must have looked something like a statue, standing on that hill in the darkness, scratching my chin and glaring into thin air.

I might have stood like that for hours, or it may have been mere seconds. I don’t know because time didn’t mean anything to me.

Then it hit me like a sack full of coal. My name is Barbados Tom, and I was an outlaw living in the Arizona Territory in the late eighteen hundreds. But I still didn’t know where in the territory I was, and how I got here. Last thing I remember

I was a sitting in a jailhouse waiting for something.

I suddenly felt sick. My stomach churned and I tasted bile creeping up the back of my throat. I couldn’t get sick, though, because my stomach was apparently empty.

Pain engulfed me, but it was a strange pain, a far-off pain, it was like remembering something I had done years ago, something that had hurt like the dickens. I knew what I had been waiting for: I had been sentenced to hang.

I had robbed one stage too many, killed one too many men, and stirred up a little too much trouble.

The lawman had finally caught up with me, and in the shootout that had ensued, my gang had been knocked off, one by one, all except for me.

I had lived.

But I had been cornered like a mouse with half a dozen hungry tom cats cutting off any hope of my escape.

I had two choices. Surrender or… No, I only had one choice. I threw down my gun belt and stepped out into the open, hands raised skyward, while sweat poured down my body. I was then pistol whipped, then drug unconscious, to the nearest town behind a galloping horse, and then I was thrown into a concrete and steel cell, being told the next time I set foot outside that jail house would be when I was on my way to the gallows.

And here we are.

I now know where I am.

I’m standing on Boot Hill.

I’m dead. I was hung.

But, if that is true, then, how am I standing here, remembering my past life? Am I a ghost? Is it possible? I remember hearing about ghosts, the spirits of those who had died and came back to haunt the living.

But I wasn’t interested in that. Yes,