Pale Rider Read Online Free PDF Page A

care for someone else’s furniture. He was six foot four and broad in proportion, and the petite chairs often favored by store owners for their female customers sometimes displayed the disconcerting habit of collapsing beneath him, to the chagrin of both the proprietor and his visitor. But these stools had been fashioned by men who also built railroad trestles and sluice boxes and mine carts. The one he’d chosen did not creak beneath him when he placed his full weight upon it.
    He was much harder to overlook than the boy who’d just fled the store. The woman who had been working at the cutting board behind the counter turned to greet him. As she spoke she toweled fresh bread dough from her hands. Fiftyish, matronly in appearance and pleasant of voice and countenance, she gave the stranger the impression that she could deal on an equal basis with tough miners or the wives of the wealthy.
    “Mornin’, stranger. I’m Carlotta Blankenship, but everybody hereabouts calls me Ma. You might as well too, and I don’t think your own ma would mind. Welcome to Lahood, California.” She gestured expansively. “Only place on Earth they cut the seasons down to three: winter, July, and August. What’ll you have?”
    “Just coffee, thanks.”
    Her eyes narrowed slightly and she regarded her customer with fresh curiosity. Odd sort of voice. Came from the back of the throat and not the lips or mouth. Sort of whispered out at you. It reminded her of something, and it took her a second to remember.
    A steam radiator. She’d once stayed in a room in San Francisco that had been heated by such a device. That was just what this tall visitor sounded like when he spoke.
    “Pardon me for sayin’ so, but you look like you could use something a mite solider.” She nodded back toward the cutting board where she’d been working. “Have some fresh bread ready in a while. Supposed to save the first loaves for the Cutter boys, but they’ll likely be late as usual. So if you’d like some . . .” She let the offer trail off meaningfully. “Got some fresh blackberry jam, too.”
    His initial reply came in the form of a winning, almost boyish smile. “Sounds good. Coffee first, then maybe I’ll work up to the other. If I have enough time.”
    Lahood, California, was a far cry from Sacramento or San Francisco. The town was composed of no more than half a dozen permanent buildings flanking a muddy main street. Tents and lean-tos clustered around the town’s outskirts. Their owners aspired to wood and plaster but found better uses for their gold.
    The foothills of the Sierra Nevada encroached on the east side of the community, smooth, rolling, and deceptively modest in size. Shrouded in mist, beyond rose the first of the granite ramparts that formed the Range of Light. These were covered in snow and ice the year ’round.
    Not everyone living in California was engaged in the mad hunt for gold that year. Someone had to provide the miners with tools and victuals. Someone had to bury the unlucky, someone had to cut hair, and someone had to assist with births as more and more women followed gold hungry men into the new state. They filled up the burgeoning cities and trickled out into new towns like Placerville and Bad Flats and Lahood.
    Some strolled along the duckboard planks that enabled ladies to keep their feet out of the mud while others worked to load a freighting dray outside the big feed store. A few horsemen trotted down the main street, eyeing the sky and wondering if this winter would be as hard as the last.
    From the northern end of town a buckboard could be seen as it approached, its single horse plodding townward slowly and patiently.
    The barber-cum-dentist was busily engaged in extracting a broken tooth from the mouth of a customer with all the skill and delicacy of touch that his patient would use to blast quartz matrix from the surrounding granite. Both dentist and patient strained mightily. A powerful yank on the iron pliers and