A Wanted Man Read Online Free PDF

man.
    “Drink this,” he ordered, holding out the squat glass.
    “And calm down. Otherwise, you’re likely to bust a blood vessel or something.”
    Payton clutched the glass, and his hand shook a little as he raised it to his lips, closing his eyes almost reverently, like a man taking a sacrament. He swallowed, shuddered, opened his eyes again.
    “You bring the rangers down on me, boy,” Payton said, when he’d recovered enough to speak, “and I’ll die in a jail cell. It’ll be on your head.”
    “I came here to warn you,” Rowdy replied, hooking his thumbs under his gun belt. “That’s more than you would have done for me. From here on out, you’re on your own—Pappy.”
    With that, Rowdy figured his business was concluded. He turned and made for the door. Took his hat from the fancy three-legged table, held it in one hand.
    Payton hoisted himself out of his chair and turned to face Rowdy. “You don’t owe me any favors, boy. I won’t argue that you do. But if you have an honorable bone in your body, you’ll ride out of here and keep on going, without a parting word to Sam O’Ballivan or anybody else.”
    Rowdy put his hat on, laid a hand on the fancy glass doorknob. “You’re right, Pa. I don’t owe you any favors. And I’m not going anyplace until I’ve heard Sam out. If you don’t want him coming after you, don’t rob any more trains.”
    “I gave that up a long time ago.”
    All of a sudden, the backs of Rowdy’s eyes burned, and his throat drew in tight. He didn’t know what he’d expected—it had been five years since he’d ridden with his pa’s gang—but it wasn’t this, whatever this was.
    “For your sake, I hope that’s the gospel truth. At the same time, your word and two cents would buy me a cheap cigar.”
    “I guess we understand each other then.”
    Rowdy nodded glumly. “One more thing,” he said, his voice coming out hoarse. He oughtn’t to linger, he knew that, but he did it just the same. “Is Gideon all right?”
    “He’s fine.”
    “You haven’t brought him into the family business, then?”
    “He’s only sixteen, Rob.”
    “I was fourteen, the first time I rode with you.”
    “I’m a different man than I was then,” Payton said. Now that the whiskey had hit his bloodstream, he was his familiar, cocky self. “Older. Wiser. And one hell of a lot sadder.”
    Rowdy didn’t reply to that. He simply nodded, opened the door and went out. He looked neither to the right nor the left as he strode through the saloon beyond. The swinging doors crashed against the outside walls when he struck them hard with the palms of both hands.

    G IDEON P AYTON CROUCHED beside the small grave outside the picket fence surrounding the churchyard. The monument was white marble, the finest to be had, and there were no dates, no Bible verses or lines of mournful poetry—only two plain words, chiseled into Gideon’s heart as well as the stone.
    “Our Rose.”
    In the ten years since his sister had died, Gideon had visited this spot under the spreading limbs of an oak tree on all but a handful of days. He’d been a child himself when Rose was killed, only six, but the memory was as vivid as the town surrounding him now, the people coming and going in wagons and on horseback out there in the street, the bell tolling in the little steeple of yonder church.
    In spring and summer he brought her flowers, usually stolen from someone’s garden. In the fall the leaves of the great oak blanketed the long-since-sunken mound in glorious shades of crimson and russet and yellow and gold. In winter he offered trinkets—a bright bottle cap, a woman’s ear bob found on a sidewalk, a colorful stone from the banks of Oak Creek. Sometimes he read to her out loud from a story book.
    Rose had loved stories, but he hadn’t known how to read yet when she was living.
    He supposed he ought to have gotten over the loss of her by now, since he was sixteen and almost a man, but some wounds never