Andromeda Gun Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned to the girl.
    “I do want to thank you for the loan of your book. As Sir Francis Bacon says, ‘Some books are to be chewed and digested.’ His own is one of them books, and so’s your chicken. Now, you got my meal ticket, Ma’am, and you can punch it any way you see fit, but I want to leave this silver dollar with you in appreciation for the most delightful breast, legs, and thighs I ever met with on life’s journey.”
    The silver dollar he laid on the counter was the largest gratuity he had ever left a waitress, but it was a small price to pay for a fast horse. Gabriella plucked it from the counter with delight and excitement, saying, “Why I do appreciate both of them, Mr. McCloud, the speech and the dollar.”
    Tipping his hat to her deferentially, he walked toward the door, giving Peyton a wide and respectful berth, but politeness availed him little.
    “Boy, that was your last will and testament.”
    As Ian eased out of the door, with a shy, scurrying movement, he heard Gabriella exclaim, “Now you leave him be, Billy. Mr. McCloud is a good Methodist.”
    “A good Methodist! Well, that does it.”
    Ian walked rapidly down the boardwalk toward the hotel. Behind him he heard the door open and close, and he stepped up his pace. Behind him, the clomp of boots on the boardwalk sounded faster.
    “Hey, boy!”
    Ian did not like the term “boy.” Peyton was using it because he was a few inches taller than Ian and not because he was older. But Ian stopped and turned, forcing a smile that wobbled on his face as Billy Peyton halted twenty paces behind him.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “That girl back there. She’s my girl.”
    There was a temporizing, lecturing note in the Mormon’s voice. Apparently he was not intending to gun down the respected stranger, only to give a bullying lecture.
    “I don’t doubt that, Mr. Peyton, but, as I told you, I’m a peace lover…”
    “Watch it, boy.”
    “What I mean, Mr. Peyton, is that I’m no gunfighter like you, partly because I’m peaceful but mostly because I’m so slow. I’m kindly disposed toward everybody, Mr. Peyton. Even Mormons. Maybe mostly Mormons. It’s hard enough for a man to make his way in this world when he don’t know who his pa is. It’s a lot harder for a son like you, whose pa’s got fifteen or sixteen wives, because a poor old Mormon boy, like you, don’t even know who his ma is.”
    “You wouldn’t be calling me a son of a bitch?”
    “No, sir, Mr. Peyton. I couldn’t rightly call you one. Only your pa could do that, since he’s the only man who knows which bitch is which.”
    “Draw, Gentile,” Billy Peyton snarled.
    The men had forced the moment to a crisis. G-7 caught with its tendrils out, diffused along the neutral channels of McCloud, and it knew with the knowledge of its host what devastation might be wrought by a lead slug ripping through brain tissues. Vulnerable, now, it was faced with the instant dissolution of its photons. With it would go all hope for this species, and it was either it or the Mormon.
    Reluctantly but instantaneously, G-7 fissioned an ion and slowed the currents of time around Billy Peyton.
    With lightning speed the Mormon’s hand swooped toward the gun, but the hand had a long way to go to the low-slung pistol, and Ian knew, already, the gunfighter he faced was a rank amateur. Not only had Peyton telegraphed his move by tensing his knees, the fool had yelled at Ian to draw.
    This boy, Ian remembered, was the son of Bryce Peyton, the Mormon stake superintendent. Through Billy Peyton, Gabriella was trying to bring the Mormon children to the light. Ian hungered to send a bullet into the groins of Peyton, killing him slowly and letting him know that death was on the way, but his hand slowed at the thought of Gabriella’s students.
    In its haste, G-7 erred in attempting to superimpose its own unselfish aims onto the purposes of the gunfighter.
    With Peyton grabbing iron, this was one hell of a time to be