Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell Read Online Free PDF

pouch. It would be unsafe to take more—any man who suddenly started spending freely would be suspected of the robbery. He closed the strongbox and shoved it into the den, where it would be safely hidden. He tumbled Arno’s body into the bushes.
    Now, standing on the rocky ledge in front of the wolf den, Jasper felt happy and secure. No one had disturbed his gold, and no one would. Sarah McKensie was surely dead. The odds of a child surviving one night in the wilderness were slim—and it had been four days since he did her parents in. That child would be no trouble to him. She couldn’t tell the miners that Jasper Davis had gone up the mountain with Arno and a box of gold—and he had come back alone. She could not tell them that he had murdered her parents so that they could not betray his secret.
    He was smiling when he turned his back on the wolf den, heading back up the trail to where he had left Max. “Sarah,” he called as he walked. “Come out, little Sarah.” By the time he reached the clearing where Max waited, his face was set in a grim expression.
    Max opened his eyes and saw Jasper coming up the trail. “You found nothing?” Max asked.
    “Nothing. Let’s go back to camp. Maybe someone else has found her.”
    The other men had been equally unlucky. No sign of the child or her body. By the light of the setting sun, the miners used William’s shovel to dig a grave. They buried Rachel and her husband together in the valley and marked the spot with a cross constructed of two oak branches lashed together with rope. Over the grave, Henry murmured a few words from the Bible.
    They had done what they could, Max thought. The child was gone. Johnny Barker thought she had been devoured by wolves; Henry held to his theory of Indian capture. One way or the other, she had vanished.
    As the sun set, Max sat beside a boulder—the very same boulder that Rachel had used as a writing desk—and sketched the valley, the creek running through the meadow, the oak trees and grasses. Henry Johnson had gathered a bouquet of poppies and placed it by the cross. The orange flowers caught the golden light of the setting sun and seemed to glow, as if illuminated from within. The cross at the head of the grave cast a long shadow in the grass. An acorn woodpecker flitted from an oak tree to the upright of the cross, paused for a moment, then flew away in a flash of black-and-white wings.
    Max penned the sketch in careful detail. He would send a letter to Audrey North, the woman to whom Rachel McKensie had been writing. From Audrey North’s letters to Rachel, he had gathered that the women had been sisters. Perhaps, he thought, Rachel McKensie’s sister would take some comfort in knowing that Rachel had been buried in a beautiful place.
    The others made camp on the far side of the valley at a goodly distance from the grave and the McKensies’ camp. When the sun set, Max joined the others by the campfire.
    It was late the next day when they reached Selby Flat.
    Rain had begun falling in the morning, a persistent drizzle that soaked through Max’s wool felt hat in the first hour and his coat in the second. The trails were slick with mud and treacherous, and it was a long, slow journey back to town.
    Mrs. Selby met them at the entrance to the hotel. Drenched from the rain and chilled to the bone, the men trooped into the bar, long-faced and weary. Max was among the first to enter.
    “No sign of the little girl,” Max told Mrs. Selby. He described their search, then shook his head despondently. “All we could do was to give her mother and father a decent burial, then come on back.”
    “You did your best,” Mrs. Selby said. “No one can ask for more than that.” She patted Max’s shoulder.
    “I thought I’d write a letter,” he said. “To her sister back home. Let her know what happened.”
    Max hung his hat and coat by the fire that burned at one end of the hall. The space in front of the fire was crowded with boots, and