Novel 1955 - Heller With A Gun (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF

actress. She was a beautiful girl who should be married to some man of wealth and position. She had spoken to him vaguely of past theatrical successes, but he knew they were the sort of lie the theatre breeds. What actor or actress was ever strictly honest about past successes or failures? Certainly not Tom Healy. And certainly not that charming old windbag, Doc Guilford.
    Janice was not even the type. She was competent, he admitted that, and on the frontier all they demanded was a woman. If she was pretty, so much the better.
    Janice had that scarcely definable something that indicates breeding. Tom Healy was Irish, and an Irishman knows a thoroughbred. But like them all, Janice was running from something. Probably only fear of poverty among her own kind.
    Doc Guilford was an old fraud. But an amusing fraud with a variety of talents, and he could be funny.
    Of them all, Maggie had been the best. Maggie had gone up, partly on talent, partly on beauty. Her mistake was to love the theatre too much, and she stayed with it. Her beauty faded, but she still kept on…and she would always keep on.
    How old was Maggie? Fifty? Or nearer sixty? Or only a rough-weather forty-five?
    She had rheumatism and she complained about the rough riding of the wagons, but on stage her old tear-jerkers could still reach any crowd she played to. And in her dramatic roles she was always good.
    Of them all, Dodie Saxon was the only one who might be on the way up. She was seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen. Nobody knew, and Dodie was not talking. She was tall and she was well built and she was sexy. She could dance and she could sing, and, moreover, she was a solid citizen. She was a clear-thinking youngster with both feet on the ground, and of them all, she was the only one with a future.
    And these were the people he was taking off into the middle of a Wyoming winter over a trail he had never seen, into a country where he would be completely out of place.
    The only shooting he had ever done was in a shooting gallery, and he had never killed so much as a rabbit or slept out of doors even one night.
    Until he was eleven he had lived in a thatched hut in Ireland, then on a back street in Dublin, and after that he had never been far from a theatre or rooming house. When he had money he ordered meals; when he had no money he starved. But he had never cooked a meal in his life.
    So it was Alder Gulch or break up the company and turn them loose to sink or swim with little money in a country where none of them belonged.
    Barker had been a godsend. On his first day at Hat Creek he had met Barker, a strapping big man in a buffalo coat that made him seem even bigger. He had an easygoing, friendly way about him that made a man overlook the sharpness of his eyes. Barker heard Healy inquiring the route to Alder Gulch and Virginia City, in Montana.
    â€œBeen over that trail,” he’d said. “Nothing easy about it.”
    â€œCould we make it? With the vans?”
    Barker had glanced through the window at the vans. “Take money. You’d have to take off the wheels and put ’em on sled runners. And you’d have to have drivers who know this country in the winter.”
    Healy ordered drinks. “We’ve got to make the trip,” he said, “and we can pay.”
    Barker glanced at the sign on the vans and his voice changed subtly. “Oh? You’re Tom Healy? Of the Healy Shows?”
    Healy had paid for the drinks with a gold piece.
    â€œIf you’re serious,” Barker told him, “I can furnish the drivers.”
    Nobody else offered any comment. One rough-hewn old man got abruptly to his feet and, after a quick, hard stare at Barker, walked out.
    Barker knew the country and Barker could get the men. Out of insecurity and doubt came resolution, and the plans went forward. Barker would handle everything. “Just leave it to me,” he told them.
    Two drivers appeared. “Reliable,” Barker said.