No Country for Old Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

boots. He put the knife back in the holster and fastened it
     and picked up the pistol and stood and listened. A redwing blackbird. Nothing.
    As he turned to go he heard the truck very faintly on the far side of the river. He looked
     for it but he couldnt see it. He thought that by now probably the two men had crossed the
     river and were somewhere behind him.
    He went on through the trees. The trunks silted up from the high water and the roots
     tangled among the rocks. He took off his boots again to try to cross the gravel without
     leaving any tracks and he climbed a long and rocky rincon toward the south rim of the
     river canyon carrying the boots and the wrappings and the pistol and keeping an eye on the
     terrain below. The sun was in the canyon and the rocks he'd crossed would dry in minutes.
     At a bench near the rim he stopped and lay on his belly with his boots in the grass beside
     him. It was only another ten minutes to the top but he didnt think he had ten minutes. On
     the far side of the river a hawk set forth from the cliffs whistling thinly. He waited.
     After a while a man came out of the cane upriver and paused and stood. He was carrying a
     machinegun. A second man emerged below him. They glanced at one another and then came on.
    They passed below him and he watched them out of sight down the river. He wasnt really
     even thinking about them. He was thinking about his truck. When the courthouse opened at
     nine oclock Monday morning someone was going to be calling in the vehicle number and
     getting his name and address. This was some twenty-four hours away. By then they would
     know who he was and they would never stop looking for him. Never, as in never.
    He had a brother in California he was supposed to tell what? Arthur there's some old boys
     on their way down there to see you who propose to lower your balls between the jaws of a
     six-inch machinist's vise and commence crankin on the handle a quarter turn at a time
     whether you know where I'm at or not. You might want to think about movin to China.
    He sat up and wrapped his feet and pulled the boots on and stood and started up the last
     stretch of canyon to the rim. Where he crested out the country lay dead flat, stretching
     away to the south and to the east. Red dirt and creosote. Mountains in the far and middle
     distance. Nothing out there. Heatshimmer. He stuck the pistol in his belt and looked down
     at the river one more time and then set out east. Langtry Texas was thirty miles as the
     crow flies. Maybe less. Ten hours. Twelve. His feet were already hurting. His leg hurt.
     His chest. His arm. The river dropped away behind him. He hadnt even taken a drink.
    No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
    No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country For Old Men
    II
    I dont know if law enforcement work is more dangerous now than what it used to be or not.
     I know when I first took office you'd have a fistfight somewheres and you'd go to break it
     up and they'd offer to fight you. And sometimes you had to accommodate em. They wouldnt
     have it no other way. And you'd better not lose, neither. You dont see that so much no
     more, but maybe you see worse. I had a man pull a gun on me one time and it happened that
     I grabbed it just as he went to fire and the plunger on the hammer went right through the
     fleshy part of my thumb. You can see the mark of it there. But that man had ever intention
     of killin me. A few years ago and it wasnt that many neither I was goin out one of these
     little two lane blacktop roads of a night and I come up on a pickup truck that they was
     two old boys settin in the bed of it. They kindly blinked in the lights and I backed off
     some but the truck had Coahuila plates on it and I thought, well, I need to stop these old
     boys and take a look. So I hit the lights and whenever I done that I seen the slider
     window in the back of the cab open and here come somebody