How the Stars did Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

from his father’s farm. It did not take Faraday long to decide what to do. He would follow Tennyson and when the opportunity was right he would fall on the doctor and take the gold and the machine. Faraday was not a thief, he thought to himself, but he would do what had to be done to save himself and his family.
    Faraday took his horse from where it had been stabled and walked with it to the grocer. There he bought some dried meat and a couple of cans of beans and a used canteen, which he filled with fresh water. Then he rode out after Tennyson, as fast as he could with his injury still stinging, until he caught sight of the man’s slow-moving horse about a mile ahead on the road. Faraday managed that distance, keeping as far away as he could while not losing the man. At times, when there were no forks in the road, he would even fall back and lose sight of Tennyson for five or ten minutes. He kept this rhythm up for four or five hours, until Tennyson left the road. It was only the start of the evening, the sun still shining above, so Faraday considered Tennyson’s move suspicious—as if he were testing to see if the man riding behind him would stop as well or keep riding. Faraday thought about riding right ahead, pretending he was not following Tennyson, but what if the doctor recognized him, and rode up to inquire about his business? Then he would lose all element of surprise. So instead Faraday stopped and hid behind an agglomeration of stones, peeking now and again in Tennyson’s direction. He saw the doctor ride on behind a hill. Faraday waited some more, then rode towards that hill until he could see what lay hidden by it. When he saw Tennyson dismounting near a stream, Faraday turned back.
    Night came. Tennyson lit a fire and Faraday would now and again creep forward to catch sight of the flames, making sure the doctor was still there. After a while, he thought Tennyson had fallen asleep so he kept watching the man, waiting for a movement or a sound that indicated otherwise, but none came. Convinced of the evidence, Faraday walked to the opposite side of the hill, pulling the horse by the reins, and bivouacked there. He allowed himself to sleep, but only managed a few short bursts of rest, for he feared Tennyson might ambush him or some coyote or other animal might approach in the night, with no fire to keep them away. Sometime before dawn he awoke, startled, and did not sleep again.
    His watch was long and it was directed not at Tennyson but at the sky above. Faraday pondered many things as the stars hung above him. The luminous city of God. His thoughts traveled to his father’s farm, where his family waited for him, hoping, and they traveled to his brother, wherever he might be. What doctrine sets brother against brother, son against father? Daniel is lost. As he studied the visible cosmos, Faraday felt as though the machine, the gold accumulator, was not so strange—that the machine of the universe, made up as it was of spinning bodies and vacuums, was stranger still. But he concluded that whether the machine was real or a fake mattered little to Tennyson’s objectives or to his own. The only question remaining was how he would take it. He could drop a boulder on the man’s head. But he was not a murderer. So before the sun came up, Faraday had resolved to continue following Tennyson and figure some other way. He believed the fates would conspire in his favor.
    Just as the sky began to gray, a light rain fell over the land and grew into a heavy rain, waking Faraday’s horse. He mounted up and waited. It took only a couple of minutes for Tennyson to appear from behind the hill, urging his horse towards the road. Faraday waited awhile longer and then followed. The rain turned the road to mud, and that slowed the horses down but it also allowed Faraday to sit back, out of sight of Tennyson, and follow Tennyson’s tracks without arousing suspicion. The tracks took him directly to another town.
    Its name was