Soul Catcher Read Online Free PDF Page B

Left Behind Me" or "Lilly Dale," usually some sad lament of too-early death and the loss of a lover. When he sang, his stammer seemed almost to vanish and his voice turned fluid and smooth, as if greased by whale oil. It slipped out of his homely face like the sun breaking through a gray and overcast day. Cain, reading his copy of Milton by firelight and sipping from his flask filled with laudanum, would be distracted for a moment as Little Strofe conjured up visions of doomed love. Sometimes he'd even ask Little Strofe if he knew a particular tune, like "Bury Me Beneath the Willows." If the man wasn't familiar with the song--after all, he couldn't read a lick--Cain would usually just have to repeat a few verses or hum a little of it, and Little Strofe would pick it up right quick. Even Preacher seemed not immune to the beauty of the man's voice; he'd sit there, whittling a piece of wood or sharpening his knife, and his snake eyes would momentarily soften and take on a slightly confused, wistful look. If Cain didn't know better, he'd have said the words almost wounded him, made him long for something he had lost but couldn't remember what it was.
    .
    Bury me beneath the willows
    Under the weeping willow tree
    When she hears that I am sleeping
    Maybe then she'll think of me.
    .
    At such moments, Cain would remove the spectacles from his nose and look up from his reading, letting himself be carried away by the words and rhythms of the song. Sometimes his mind would drift back to the war and the Indian girl he had loved. He pictured her, the playful gleam of her feral eyes as she came to him in the night, the earthy musk of her, the way his name slipped like honey from her mouth: Cain, she would say, seemingly fascinated by the sound, like a child with a new plaything. He remembered the beguiling warmth of her as she lay next to him on the ground of the shed, high among the desert mountains. Even naked, she was as natural and innocent as some wild untamed creature. He could still see her smooth, brown belly, her hard, sinewy arms, the small breasts rising and falling in the early-morning sunlight that came slanting through the mud-chinked holes in the wall. Her dark eyes searching his, her lips forming words that never materialized. Yet the two didn't need words; they spoke their own language, one of touch and taste and hearts, her skin scorching against his, the tang of her in his mouth salty and sweet at once. At times, he felt she'd been nothing more than a phantasm, a teasing mirage conjured up out of the heat and distance of that long- ago time and place, or perhaps, a mere by-product of his laudanum- clouded mind. But then he'd touch his shattered leg, feel the knotted
    scars along his shin and the permanent ache imbedded there and know that, like the old wound itself, she had been something real, something that had happened. Something he'd had and then lost. At such times he would feel the familiar ache rise up in his chest and seem to squeeze the very life out of him like an iron fist.
    One night they had camped along a ridge overlooking a frozen lake. The night was cold and clear, with a sharp wind howling down from the north and raking the flesh like nettles, and in the dark the lake seemed almost to glow, to give off its own eerie illumination. Cain was reading, and he kept having to switch hands, keeping the free one warm in his pocket.
    "What you reading there, Mr. Cain?" asked Little Strofe, who sat close by, huddled beneath a blanket.
    Cain always brought along something to read wherever he went, packed away in his saddlebags for an evening's diversion. This book, his favorite, a dog-eared, broken-spined edition of Milton he'd received as a present from his schoolmaster, the ancient Mr. Beauregard, who'd studied classics at Harvard and had fought with Old Hickory at the battle of New Orleans. Milton was Beauregard's favorite poet, and he'd fostered in Cain a similar appreciation. Cain had found the character of