Let's Kill Uncle Read Online Free PDF Page B

breakfast.’
    ‘Cornflakes and tea?’
    ‘No.’ She gave in and pointed to Barnaby’s empty plate. ‘I guess I’ll have to eat what he had.’
    Without a word the goat-lady arose and cooked another breakfast. Christie ate until her shrunken stomach was tight and she felt almost ill, then she sighed.
    ‘I can’t finish it.’
    ‘Give it to Shep. Maybe you can do better tomorrow.’
    Again she put cookies in a bag and handed them to Barnaby.
    ‘Now divide those evenly. And no quarrelling today. Go and play and have a good time. I’ve got a lot of work to do, so don’t bother me for the next couple of hours.’
    At the door Barnaby turned.
    ‘Thanks,’ he said. He and the goat-lady smiled at each other.
    When Christie reached the bottom of the stairs, she paused and stared back at the goat-lady.
    ‘You can curl my hair tonight,’ she announced.
    The two children followed the path they had taken the day before. They climbed the cedar fence and waved to the tall woman plowing, and again they stared fascinated at the bull, who surveyed his domain with murderous eyes.
    He was grand champion and he knew it. For all the loving attention lavished on him, he remained, at the bottom of his mean heart, a sullen brute. A brute who ruminated by the hour, wondering how he could, with his polished black horns, impale his patron, Mr Duncan.
    Once a year, at the end of August, sleek, shining and burnished like a pagan bull-god, he was shipped to the Exhibition. During his absence, the Islanders hung anxiously over their battery radios until reassured that he had won again. He was their one claim to fame.
    Agnes Duncan stopped, tied the reins to the handle of the plow and walked over to the children. Red-haired, six feet tall and as strong as a man, she was held in eternal bondage by her father who had no intention of paying wages to a labourer as long as Agnes could put in an honest day’s work.
    ‘Hello,’ she said shyly to the children. ‘I heard you were here. How do you like the Island?’
    ‘Fine, thank you,’ said Christie. Both children smiled at her.
    ‘I hope you won’t be lonely.’
    ‘I won’t,’ said Barnaby. He pointed to the bull. ‘What’s his name?’
    ‘The Duke of Wellington, but everyone calls him the Iron Duke.’
    ‘He’s big, isn’t he?’
    Agnes Duncan nodded and smiled, then turned to look at the bull. The smile faded from her face. With the possible exception of her father, she hated the bull more than anything in the world.
    ‘Would he hurt somebody if he got off that chain?’ asked Christie.
    Agnes looked over her shoulder, to her father, who was still painting the barn. She turned and leaned toward the children.
    ‘Mark my words,’ she whispered, ‘mark my words, that bull will turn on him someday. He’s vicious!’
    ‘Agnes!’ roared her father from the barn, ‘get back to your plowing.’
    ‘Yes, Father,’ she called meekly. She nodded to the children and returned to the Clydesdales and the plow. Following the furrow, she looked longingly over her shoulder at the two children.
    If
he
had not driven her only suitor, Per Nielsen, away, she might have two flaxen-haired children like that.
    The big easygoing farm horses suddenly snorted and tossed their heads. Agnes spoke to them and they plodded on obediently, but their eyes rolled and their nostrils quivered.
    Unlike Agnes, they were aware that a pair of eyes, the colour of grass under ice, were watching from a clump of bushes only ten feet away.
    One-ear, the outlaw, was crouching in the undergrowth. He slavered and licked his chops as he looked past Agnes to the bull. He had killed a cow once and he very much preferred beef to venison, but he knew that unless he killed in his first spring, the bull would put up a savage fight. And furthermore, the crosseted Iron Duke was watched over as if he were a visiting diplomat.
    One-ear sighed. There was already a price on his head;
they
had an unwritten law that cougars, hungry or