In the Still of the Night Read Online Free PDF

his meager funds and read every word of it, finger following down the pages phrase by phrase, lips moving slowly with the words. It was the first book he had ever read voluntarily.
    He screwed up his courage and knocked at the door of the big stone house the day he finished reading it rather than leaving the paper on the stoop.
    The Great Man had come to the door himself. “What is it, boy?“ he snapped impatiently. “Do I owe you money? My cousin John takes care of that sort of thing. But he’s in the hospital with pneumonia. Come back next week.”
    Before the door could slam, Bud put his foot over the threshold. “No, sir, you don’t owe me nothing.
    But I want to work for you.”
    “Why?”
    Bud hadn’t expected the question. He stammered for a moment, then got out the words, “ ‘Cause I liked your book. First whole book I ever read. And I’m a good hard worker. I can garden and cook a bit and fix near anything. You got a broken window or a electric light that won’t work or a cistern to be emptied, I’m your boy.”
    With a rare smile, Julian West said, “Well, neither my cousin nor I is very good at any of that. Let’s give it a try.”
    Bud had been with the West cousins ever since, boy and man. He kept the household running smoothly and was unobtrusive. He accepted Julian’s cranky nature as the right of a Great Man who had a lot of important stuff on his mind and books to write that told you lots of things you’d never of known otherwise.
    Cousin John had returned shortly, cured of his ailment, but a bit on the morose side. But Bud accepted that, too. Mr. John West helped the Great Man. Typed up his books, took care of paying the bills and venerated Julian as much as, or even more than, Bud himself did.
    Years later, when the Great War came and both West men signed up for the army, Bud signed up along with them.
    “You can’t do that,“ Julian had said. “You have to stay and take care of the house.“
    “Nossir,“ Bud Carpenter said, drawing himself up to his full height. “I’m going with you. We’ll close up the house, or maybe hire some woman from the village to come in and look after it, but I’m going with you. You need me. The both of you do and you know it.”
    The cousins had reluctantly agreed.
    He’d been with them the whole time, being the only one of the trio who came out unscathed either physically or mentally by the horrors of shelling, gassing, gangrene, trench foot; the stink of rotting flesh of young men coughing up their lungs; and the sheer, terrifying boredom of waiting for the next horror.
    When the war was over, he’d come back with Captain West and taken up where they’d left off, in spite of the cousin having died in a fire in the trenches. Bud went with West to the nursing home in England, convinced that mere doctors and nurses couldn’t take care of the Great Man half as well as he could. And when, six months after the armistice, they came home, he got the house, garden and kitchen back in order.
    He ripped out the poppies, which were a bad reminder of what they’d been through, and put in delphiniums. He’d rewired the upstairs rooms, hired a gardener’s helper and a cook, whom he supervised, and got on with life while West recovered from his injuries and got back to his writing. He’d engaged a typist and a bookkeeper for the Great Man (Bud knew his own limitations, regarding figures and the typewriters with suspicion, and he still couldn’t read without moving his lips). He went right on running the house and, to an extent, the Great Man’s life, with undiminished and fearless bossiness.
    “I really think you ought to sit facing forward, sir. You know you get sick when you ride backwards and read at the same time,“ he said now as the train started moving.
    “Oh, very well. If it’s the only way to shut you up,“ Captain West said, slamming down the manuscript pages he’d been trying to study and causing them to slither to the floor in