Savage Love Read Online Free PDF

the saddleback pass over the Beaverheads toward Bloody Dick Creek and the Wisdom River, mostly avoiding the common trails and mining settlements because he felt at a disadvantage in the midst of a crowd and did not think he was riding faster than his legend. He killed now and then but tried to be prudent and reasonable in his depredations. “Why are you a-killing me?” one asked. “Because I am the Hand of God,” he said. “Bullshit.” Blam. One man he let go when the Sharps hung fire three times in a row. “Speak well of me,” he said. “I will. Thank ’ee.” One man said, “God help you. Kill me, but save my wife and childers.” “I can’t do that,” he said. “May we say a family prayer first?” asked the man. “A short one, I hain’t got all day.” Blam. Always following the spring freshets swelling the creeks in the dry valleys in the shadow of noble mountains. And everywhere they found derelict sluices, dams, ditches, flumes, tailing pools, abandoned cabins, all evidence of the gold rush where the placers had petered out. “Are ye a preacher?” he asked. “No.” Blam. “What do you want a preacher for?” “To get hitched.” “Haha. That’s a good ’un. To the crip?” Blam.
    He rode toward the smoke-heaving blast furnaces of Bannack with a short string of stolen horses packed with loot, gold dust in his pockets, leaving Good Luck in camp in a spring-flower coulee stippled with pines where they had chanced upon a hot-water pool, the boulders and moss beds round about littered with eagle feathers, stone arrow points, beads and bits of bone left by the Indians. Dandling her legs in the pool to ease her stumps, she seemed like a whole girl, half smiling and twitching as the bubbles erupting from crevices below tickled her scars. And he thought were she to speak, it would complete the illusion. But then he thought, She does not speak because she sees her life as a dream, a nightmare, which, if she speaks, will only turn real. In town he listened to stories about himself in saloons where brave men spoke loudly of Vigilance Committees and hangings, in the company of other brave men, voices sounding of brass. But they made him anxious, every hand turned against him, even if they didn’t know it was him, and there were too many to shoot. He bought three steers of a Christian stockman starting a spread on the Grasshopper Creek to drive ahead as a disguise and made for the coulee with coffee, a ribbon for the girl and whiskey bottles clinking in his saddlebags. Then, hidden from the eyes of men, he threw himself naked into the springs, scorching his skin pink, breaking the surface with a shout. He uncorked the store whiskey from his packs and stretched on a moss bed with Good Luck as the sun went down. He helped her shed her boots and clothing and coaxed her into the water. She gasped and flung her footless legs around him, her ribs sliding inside her skin each time she breathed, her small breasts like upturned cups, jewel led with water drops, slippery against his chest. She burrowed against his neck and licked and sucked his skin. “I ain’t a tit,” he said, attempting to kiss her, but she would not. Then, with the heat of the spring water and the excitement of their parts rubbing together, he shot his load into the seething effervescence, cried out a cry of pathos and dismay, and seemed to fall into a black pit. Coming to himself, he heard the mother voice, the words. Oh, you shall be my nevermind / and I will be your doxy / and we shall dance the night away / ere the ill winds blow .
    Then it was summer, rainless and arid, except high in the mountain ranges where snow yet clung in the sawtooth creases. They pushed their steers up the dusty stage road that ran from Fort Hall to the placer fields at Alder Gulch and Helena, lazily working their way north but watchful, driving the