Sudden Country Read Online Free PDF

from Flynn's hand and landed with a clank in darkness. He cursed and almost dropped the lamp. He shook his stinging hand.
    The man on the blaze-face said something in a low voice. Pike spat, gathered in his whip, and said petulantly, "I was just practicin'."
    "You wouldn't be back here you didn't know something, Flynn," said Beacher, the man on the roan. "You remember what the Cap'n said about greed busting up all the best outfits."
    "I'm writing a book is what I'm doing here." Flynn worked his fingers.
    Pike laughed nastily. "You couldn't write your own name in the snow."
    Joe Snake said, "I say we take out an eye."
    "The right one," said Pike, turning toward the man on the blaze-face. "Then him and you could side each other."
    Flynn drew his big knife. "Which one of you sons of whores is man enough to try old Flynn?"
    Pike raised his whip. Flynn lunged, slashing through the man's reins. The bay backed up and tried to rear. Dropping the whip, Pike grabbed for the harness. Joe Snake meanwhile drew a carbine from his saddle scabbard and worked the lever. Flynn dashed the lamp at the buckskin's feet. It shattered, spraying flame. The horse screamed and bucked and plunged. Joe Snake fired wild, tried to hold on with one hand, lost his grip and his seat, and fell to the ground, releasing the carbine. His left foot was twisted in its stirrup. The buckskin bolted, dragging the Indian shrieking through the blaze. More shooting broke out. Flynn fell.
    The house came alive. I heard the door to Mr. Knox's room crash against the wall as it was torn open, heard the Judge demanding in stentorian tones what in thunder was coming to pass. Feet pounded the staircase going down. I held my post at the window. In the light of the flames I saw the man on the blaze-face dismount and approach Flynn on the ground with a pistol in his hand. His horse shied from the burning grass but appeared otherwise unaffected by it or by the other horses' panic. Beacher had one hand on his roan's traces and the other on the harness of Pike's shaggy bay, helping him bring the animal under control. Joe Snake's buckskin was gone, leaving behind a motionless flaming something lying on the ground several yards away from the original fire. The man who had stepped down from the blaze-face turned over Flynn's body with a foot, then put the pistol away in his clothes and bent over the body. The back door banged open. He straightened, glanced that way, and retreated toward his horse. In a flash he had gained the saddle, wheeled the animal, and galloped off, shouting something unintelligible over his shoulder. Beacher left off Pike's bay and whipped the roan after the blaze-face. Pike followed, hunched over the bay's neck as he hung on to the harness. Someone discharged a firearm in the yard and I thought I saw. Pike jerk as if hit, but then darkness swallowed up horse and rider.
    These details remain as vivid in my memory forty years later as they appeared that night, and even though I am no more certain of the exact chronology than I was immediately afterward, I have only to close my eyes to see one in particular. When the man to whom the blaze-face horse belonged glanced toward the house, light from the fire in the yard glinted off something bright in the shadow of his face. Without doubt it was a glass eye.
    "His neck is broken."
    By the time I reached the back door, Mr. Knox had put out the fire smoldering in Joe Snake's clothes with one of my mother's blankets, which remained draped across the body he was examining. I could go no farther because of Mother's hands on my shoulders. I stood barefoot in my nightshirt on the threshold, smelling smoke and spent powder.
    Judge Blod upended the well bucket over the last of the burning grass and joined Mr. Knox. He had pulled on a pair of his striped trousers under his own nightshirt and thrust his feet into purple velvet slippers with worn tassels. "It must have happened when his head struck the base of the bench." With his