A Wicked Way to Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

watch the stranger as he produced a dull coin from another pocket, and put it by his empty tankard. After that he gave a nod to the landlord, snugged the brown bundle up under his arm again, and made his way carefully toward the open door.
    Gabriel Fortier was in the doorway ahead of him.The young Frenchman stopped to look back with a frown, then drew his foot over the frame and disappeared into the evening.
    The old stranger seemed to hesitate, but soon followed, and the tavern let out its breath.
    Candles again flickered quietly, and conversation, when it resumed, was subdued. Several times, one man or another looked deeply into the dark recess that now held only a table and two empty chairs.
    Who was the old man in the scarlet cloak, they asked themselves and each other, and how had he come by all of that money? Everybody knew that gold and silver coins were scarce throughout the colonies. Spanish silver dollars—“pieces of eight”—were sometimes seen, as well as British sterling. But most silver received was sent straight back to England, to help pay for the flood of goods the colonies required—or else it was melted for plate, or other items. So it was with gold. And the odds of seeing Dutch coins? They were very, very slim.
    Where had the stranger come by it? And more to the point, where was the frail old man going with his gold, out on the dark road at night, and all alone?
    The two quails by the fire (whose names were Tyndall and Flint) relit their pipes, and issued the first of several dire predictions involving footpads, demons, and wolves. Meanwhile, Phineas Wise shook his head as he went to stand on the doorstep and jingle pockets full of copper. He peered out and saw that the chilly night was less complete than it had appeared from inside the lighted tavern. A bit of bloodred twilight still clung to the western horizon, while the sky overhead was a deep blue dotted with small, pale clouds, and several points of twinkling stars.
    A breath of cold flowed down the hillside that the stranger had just begun to climb. Eventually, the road the old man followed disappeared near the crest in denseforest, with a wide stretch of old burned-over meadow coming before. As he continued to watch, the landlord heard the lonely voice of a whippoorwill calling out from nearby woods. It cried, it was said, for lost souls who wandered in the night. The practical man listened, and half believed. Someone would die soon. The cry of a nearby owl joined that of the other bird, echoing Phineas Wise’s own unasked question in an eerie staccato.
    Whoo-who-whooo?
    Where was the old man going, Wise wondered, watching him climb slowly past dark fingers of a bending hemlock that overhung the road. There was no other tavern to stop in for a good five miles. Ahead, there were only a few isolated farms nestled in a hilly stretch of forest, and unprosperous ones at that. Was there something wrong with him? Didn’t he know how to tell direction? Beyond that, did the old man feel no fear? It was a puzzle, but in the end Wise turned back to his own hearth and business, and shut the tavern door firmly behind him.
    Inside, it was as if his customers could still hear the happy ring of the falling gold coins, while they called for more of the same. Now the miller, too, seemed concerned for the old man’s safety.
    “I only say,” maintained Peter Lynch, “that he’d be far better off investing it, than carrying it around.”
    “Investing it with you?” Dick Craft asked with a wink. The miller did not return his amusement.
    “Better than to lose it somewhere in the night,” Lynch intoned ominously.
    “Myself,” Dick continued, “I’ve lost more money in broad daylight than in the dark. But that’s rarely called stealing, is it? Not when there’s signed notes, and all, to make it right—”
    The miller’s glowering face soon made Dick bite histongue, and remember that he spoke to a man quite used to doing business.
    The third of their