Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read Online Free PDF

both their plates and was working on them over at the scrub pail in the dry sink, Lewis said, “What’d the letter say? Read it to me.”
    Yakima stood and retrieved the letter from the saddlebags.
    â€œBring the gold over here, too.”
    Yakima looked at him and shrugged. Lewis wasn’t going anywhere with the bounty tonight. The half-breed pulled the hefty sack out of the saddlebag pouch and set it on the table.
    Trudy was looking over her shoulder at the sack, one brow arched, as she added hot water from the reservoir on the range to her bucket of dishwater. She held her head and lips so that Yakima could see the missing eyetooth, courtesy of a contentious, ewe-necked broodmare, on the left side of her mouth. Still, she was a pretty brown-eyed girl growing up too soon out here, on the backside of nowhere. Old Judith looked at the table over the half-glasses resting low on her age-spotted nose as she rocked and knitted.
    â€œWhat you got there, Lewis?” She hadn’t addressed Yakima directly since he’d thrown in with Lewis. She did her best to pretend the redskin heathen wasn’t here, that it was still just her and Lewis and Trudy, though Lewis was getting too old and becoming too much of a drunk to do much horse trapping or hunting on his own anymore. Yakima knew the old Irish horse hunter had a good grubstake for himself and the women, however, for whenever he and Yakima had ridden to town for supplies, Lewis had paid from a large wad of cash he carried in a money belt.
    â€œThat there, Ma, is gold dust,” Lewis said, throwing back another belt from his coffee mug. “Maybe ten pounds’ worth.”
    The old woman stopped rocking. Trudy turned slowly from her bucket, holding her soapy hands straight down in front of her soiled apron and shabby gingham dress. The top of her dress drew taut against her swelling breasts. Her brown eyes were riveted on the gold.
    â€œGo ahead and read the letter, since you can read so well, red man,” Lewis said. The man’s hard tone tied a half-hitch knot in the half-breed’s gut.
    The way the women were eyeing the gold made the knot even tauter.

Chapter 4
    A gun blasted in the street outside the Snowy Range Hotel. A man screamed. Glendolene Mendenhour, dozing in her deep copper tub, awoke with a gasp. She pushed herself up out of the water, grabbed a towel, walked barefoot to the room’s single window, and slid the rose red curtain aside with the back of her hand.
    She squinted into the street below. The lit candles and oil lamp she’d lined up on the dresser were reflected in the dark glass, but then she saw beyond the reflections a man stumble out of the Longhorn Saloon on the street’s far side, nearer the hotel than the Silk Slipper. This smaller, rougher saloon than the Slipper sat perpendicular to the hotel, its side facing the Snowy Range, so Glendolene could see only the man’s profile as he staggered across the saloon’s porch, clutching both hands to his belly.
    There was a flash inside the saloon. A quarter second later, the gun’s blast rattled the hotel window in front of Glendolene, and she gave another gasp as she took one step back but continued staring down at the street lit by oil pots and torches bracketed to porch posts. The wounded man jerked and then flopped forward down the porch steps to lie sprawled in the street. The five or six horses tied to the saloon’s hitch rack whinnied and nickered and pulled against their reins.
    Glendolene clutched the blanket tight around her dripping, wet body. “Good
Lord
!”
    Two men in fur coats, one holding what appeared to be a gun in his right hand, walked out of the saloon to stare down at the man in the street, whom Glendolene could hear groaning and rolling from side to side in agony.
    One of the two men on the porch holstered his pistol, said something to the man standing beside him. They laughed, then turned and walked back into