Dead of Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

his own wife would be cleaning his guts off his windows before he could bring himself to help us out." Cora's boots thudded her indignation into the worn hide rug as she walked across the room. She set her pistol on the wooden table that stood between the room's two windows and rolled her head around on her shoulders. "Seems to me that a man with any kind of sense would be begging us to chase that thing off after seeing the clearing."
      "Didn't seem that bad to me."
      "Sure, when we was there," she said, sitting down and pulling off her boots. "Critters had picked it pretty clean by then. Not much left to go on."
      "Then what did you shoot at?" Ben finally looked up from his book.
      "A gray something hiding itself up in the trees."
      The book's spine crackled as Ben closed it. "So you did see something."
      Cora told him of the strange shadow she'd seen in the trees and of the chill she'd felt. When she finished, he leaned his head back against the headboard and smoothed down his mustache.
      "Ring any bells?" she asked.
      Ben shook his head. "Can't say it does. I've never heard of something that can cause a chill like that."
      "Sure wasn't no hellhound." Cora propped her feet up on the other chair. Ben nodded his agreement, his eyes tracing the thick pine logs that framed the room.
      Cora's gaze settled on her toes, and she gave each set a stretch. Like the rest of her feet, they were thick and hard from long years trapped in boots. The second toe on each foot stuck out beyond the others, the nails worn small. When she was a little girl, her father had told her that having long middle toes meant she was born to ride. Their tiny farm on the Shenandoah hadn't housed more than the two horses needed to plow the furrows. They were big and thick with shaggy brown hair, four-legged giants in her young eyes, but they weren't for riding. Her father had promised that he'd make enough one day to buy her a real riding horse. Then he'd show her how to sit and ride like a real lady, he said.
      Of course, that was before the blue coats had come through the valley and burned them out, leaving nothing but blackened earth behind them. She had been a young woman then, gangly and freckled, not the pretty Southern belle she had pictured herself growing into when her father had made his promise.
      "Don't seem like a hell beast to me," Ben said, pulling her out of her thoughts.
      "What do you mean? Anything that can whip two wolfers that quick sure ain't no angel."
      "Course not, but most of the things old Hades spits out have the feel of that place about them, you know? All fire and flames and pain, like the good book says. That unnatural chill you felt out there don't sound like Hell to me."
      "Well, maybe Hell has a patch of cold for those that enjoy the warm," Cora said. "Folks living out in Carson City or Santa Fe wouldn't be all that uncomfortable in the regular parts of Hell, and that ain't no kind of punishment. Maybe Lucifer made some part of his kingdom like Montana in the winter-time to put them off their feed."
      "Could be," Ben said. "Still, you'd think the good Lord would've mentioned something like that if it was so."
      "If the good Lord wanted us to be prepared for everything in life, He'd have put us in the womb with one of these." Cora picked up her Colt from the table, admiring the nickel shine in the lamplight. She wore her holster cross-style, the butt of the gun pointing toward her right arm from the front of her left hip. Every now and again, some pudding-headed cowboy would call her out for it, saying she carried like a Mexican whore instead of a proper white woman. Most of the time, she was too involved with a card game or a glass of whiskey to pay them much notice, but they'd sometimes catch her in a foul temper and end up in the street with a fresh bruise. If they were still sore about it, she'd challenge them to a shooting contest. Used to be that she could win a month's