Far North Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes on me. There were five or six men on horseback bossing the prisoners. I counted at least three rifles and I was beginning to regret my boldness. Then a tall lean fellow rode out of the line, coming in close beside me, and tipped his hat. He had a sharp leathery face, blue eyes, and the fingers that held his bunched reins were long and thin.
    He licked his cracked narrow lips and spat into the dirt. ‘Looks like the rain is going to hold off.’
    ‘Depends how long you’re on the road,’ I said.
    ‘About four more weeks.’
    The gun he was wearing on his hip had a long silver barrel as thin and dainty as one of his fingers. I sensed he was afraid there was more of me, dug in somewhere around. He seemed cool and relaxed, of course, as a Pharaoh should be, but what gave him away was the eyes of his men, fidgety, flicking around to see who was lying in wait.
    ‘What are you trading?’ I asked him.
    Those blue eyes of his narrowed into steel splinters. He said nothing.
    I looked at the sullen faces in the line, all those filthy clothes, taking the chance of a stop to rest on their haunches, peasant girls, some Chinese, some with chapped red cheeks, some darker, asiatic-looking, natives.
    ‘First time I’ve seen you come by here,’ I said. I knew if he was silent again it spelled trouble.
    He gazed down at his hands, which were folded on the saddle pommel, and looked up slowly, as though to let me know he was in no hurry to answer my question.
    ‘We came through here in January.’
    ‘How about that,’ I said, to fill his pause. I was calculating how quick I could draw on him and then spur on the mare to get away from there. My heart was hammering, time seemed to be slowing down, and my eyes had that keenness that comes as your body dumps those fight chemicals into your blood. I could pick out individual grinning faces on horseback behind him.
    ‘As a matter of fact,’ he went on, ‘I lost a girl somewhere around here. You didn’t happen to come across a stray?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Too bad. I’d taken a shine to her.’ Leather creaked as he shifted in his saddle. ‘Nice visiting with you.’ He tipped his hat and spurred his horse back the way he’d come, and his men roused the sitting prisoners into moving again.
    I stayed for a long time without turning my back on them, partly out of curiosity, wondering about all those people, masters and slaves, and where they’d come from, and what lives they’d been leading, but also in case any of them were minded to take a pot-shot when my eye was off them.
    There were times when I wondered if I had done the right thing staying behind when everyone else had left or died. That day, watching the column of people vanish into the dust raised by their own feet, I was struck by a fear about what had happened to the world in my absence.

    5
    I SHOWED P ING a map of the town and pointed out my house on it, and where we’d met, and asked her to show me where she’d been living before that.
    She turned the map around and around to get a fix on it, and then put a cross just behind the old fire station on Malahide Avenue. There was something in her face when she looked back up at me, trepidation I’d call it, as though the place held bad memories for her, even when it was just lines on paper, so I smiled and stroked her cheek to reassure her that she wasn’t going back there.
    The fire station stood at the north end of town, right off the highway that ran west to the old gas and gold fields and east into the empty tundra country where it dwindled to nothing a thousand miles short of the sea.
    Sometimes travellers would bed down there for a night. The sheds where the water trucks had stood were empty, but the building was a sturdy one, and the old walls were as good a windbreak as any. There were scorch marks against the bricks, and discarded cans where people had passed through. I gave it a wide berth in general. You never wanted to get mixed up with the kind of