Mildred Pierced Read Online Free PDF

my sides. As I turned, the boy whipped a thin bamboo tube from his pocket and the woman was pulling her knife from its sheath. The man with the shoulder holster and gun just stood there with his arms folded and smiled.
    There was a whoosh of air as the knife shot past me and a thin shaft of wood or metal flew out of the tube the boy was holding up to his mouth.
    The knife thudded into the William Tell painting, and so did the missile from the blowgun.
    “Now are you impressed?” asked Timerjack, looking at me with one eye and at nothing with the other one.
    “She killed William Tell’s kid,” I said. “So did he.”
    Timerjack smiled. It was a loony smile.
    “That’s what they were supposed to do, Mr. Peters.”
    “Now you’ve got holes in your painting,” I said, as the woman went to retrieve her knife. The boy stayed behind me.
    “We have others.” Timerjack sat back and fished in his desk drawer.
    He came up with a pipe and motioned for me to sit in one of the folding chairs. I had the feeling I was going to get lesson number one. The woman had a little trouble digging the knife from the wall, but she managed and gave me a less-than-friendly look as she returned to her spot behind me. I moved to the front row and sat. Timerjack nodded his approval.
    I raised my hand.
    “Yes?” asked Timerjack.
    “May I go to the washroom?”
    “Right through that door.” He pointed toward a door to his right, but looked somewhere behind me. I didn’t move.
    “Forget it,” I said. “It just seemed like the right thing to say to the teacher.”
    “Are you like this all the time?” Timerjack asked.
    “Only when someone feeds me a good setup for a punch line. I do have some questions, a few of them about Sheldon Minck.”
    Timerjack puffed and nodded his head knowingly.
    “Pigeon Minck has been with us five—”
    “Six,” the woman behind me corrected.
    “Yes,” Timerjack agreed with a smile. “Thank you, Martha. Six weeks. I’d say he’s making slow progress in his skills, but we have no intention of giving up on him. He is a difficult project. We like the challenge.”
    “Progress in what?” I asked.
    “Survival in the wild, in dark alleys, making and using weapons, blowguns, knives, clubs, spears, bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, slings. We don’t believe in guns.”
    “They exist,” I said, looking pointedly over my shoulder at the craggy-faced man with the gun and holster.
    “If other people make them.” Timerjack ignored my look. “They need bullets made by other people, parts made by other people. When the time comes, we will be able to slip into the woods here or anywhere and survive. Of course, in these times, we make exceptions.”
    Now it was his turn to look at the man with the gun. “You mean Pathfinder Anthony. Even Natty Bumppo was forced to use a gun,” he added.
    I ignored the inconsistency and raised my hand again.
    “You don’t have to keep raising your hand.” Timerjack was irritated.
    “How many of you are there?” I asked.
    “That is restricted information. We don’t want our enemies to know our numbers.”
    From the size of the compound and the number of folding chairs, I guessed we were talking about twelve or fifteen.
    “Your enemies?”
    “And yours, too.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. “The government, foreign powers. Indians. We live on a ridge along the Slough of Despond in the Valley of Despair.”
    “Indians?”
    “They’ve been secretly conspiring for nearly a century to take back the land,” Timerjack said. “Like Magua and the Hurons, they’ll coordinate their move at night taking out the president, the cabinet, Congress, the governors, and generals. They’re already in place.”
    “I didn’t know there were that many Indians left,” I said.
    Timerjack smiled knowingly.
    “We’ll thwart them,” he said. “When we have enough people, we’ll thwart them; but just in case, we must learn to survive.”
    “The next Indian