The Beyonders Read Online Free PDF

some clear blockade from a fruit jar. A drop hung to his chin like a tear.
    "I'm done for, Gander Eye," he said lifelessly. "Done for and out in the cold."
    Gander Eye took the jar and sipped in turn. "Hark at me, Duffy, have you seen some sort of strange thing using 'round in the woods here? Maybe as big as a big calf, with a softly shine to it and leaves no tracks?"
    "Don't go asking me no crazy riddles. I'm telling you a fact, my heart's broke. I ain't got nothing left to live for, no way." He shut one eye to gaze more directly at the table top. Even his gaudy shirt seemed subdued. "You don't know aught about this here kind of thing, Gander Eye. You want a girl, you always get her."
    "Not always." Gander Eye sipped again and set down the jar. Duffy clutched at it as at an anchor in a reeling world. He drank noisily.
    "You never been like me thisaway," he said as he came up from the drink. "Loving a girl and she won't no more than look at you like as if you was a lost soul. You know how I been about Slowly, year in, year out."
    "I know," said Gander Eye, wondering how often Duffy had told him.
    "Lately I thought I might could have a chance. But then this Jim Crispin comes, and he's got her."
    "I never reckoned nobody'd got her," Gander Eye said.
    Yet again Duffy took a deep drink. "They went home together, didn't they? I don't fault Jim, I like him. But he's got Slowly, and that's the end of things for me. The pure down dead end of things. What I got to live for?"
    If he had meant the question rhetorically, Gander Eye did not choose to take it so. "There's always another drink to live for," he said.
    "And that's about all." Duffy drank and set down the jar. "Now I've done took it, and that's all she wrote."
    "All who wrote?" inquired Gander Eye, from deep inside where he was enjoying himself to the full.
    "That's all there is," said Duffy, a laborious word at a time. "My heart's broke, and I'm a-going to kill myself."
    Fumblingly he opened a drawer in the table and groped inside. His broad hand brought out a revolver, a blue .38 police special. "Going to shoot myself, and you tell Slowly it was for her."
    Slowly, unsurely, he lifted the pistol toward his temple.
    "Now hold on," said Gander Eye, speaking sharply at last.
    "Ain't no way you can stop me," Duffy assured him thickly. "Ain't nobody can stop me."
    "You're doing stupid," Gander Eye snapped. "That's the worst thing you can do."
    Duffy lowered the pistol a trifle. His other hand lifted the jar and he drank from it and set it down again, almost overturning it.
    "It's the best thing I can do," he mumbled doggedly. "Take myself out of her way. Put that on my grave, I took myself out of Slowly's way."
    "You don't understand," said Gander Eye.
    "I understand right well." The pistol wavered upward again.
    "That's the unpardonable sin, Duffy, a-killing yourself."
    The pistol came all the way down. Duffy crumpled his brow in thought. "I always heard tell the unpardonable sin's playing with yourself. "
    "If that's so, this here world's full up of unpardonable sinners." Stoically, Gander Eye held back a laugh. "No, Duffy, suicide's the unpardonable sin. Look at it thisaway, whatever other sin you do, you can pray it out. Be saved."
    "Saved," Duffy half crooned, as though it were the first word of a song.
    "You kill yourself, you ain't got time for prayer," Gander Eye elaborated. "You've done it, you're dead and gone to hell. Can't pray it out, can't ask to be forgiven."
    Duffy had laid the pistol on the table, but kept his hand on it.
    "What happens, then?" he appealed. "How do we know about sin and hell and all like that? The Kimbers give up on the church long ago. Maybe they know what the score is."
    "Maybe nobody knows, maybe we got it all to find out," said Gander Eye. "But 1 wouldn't die with no unpardonable sin on me." He held out his hand. "Let me have that there gun."
    "No, you don't." Duffy quickly pointed it. "You make an awkward move, I'll give you the part of it you