The Book of Murdock Read Online Free PDF

homes for dinner the same as purchasing an indulgence.” He touched his flat belly. “Mind you, don’t be taken in by the conventional belief that all country wives are superb cooks. You’d be wise to carry a sack of peppermints in your pocket to settle your stomach.”
    â€œI didn’t realize the work was so dangerous.”
    Nothing like a smile crossed his features. “Many men—out here in particular—make the mistake of confusing a cassock with a skirt. They have no concept of the level of courage required to walk the path of the lamb in a den of lions. Any fool can muster the strength to face a mortal enemy. Only one man in a thousand can find it within him to turn his back on one. Are you that man?”
    I hesitated for the first time in the discourse. “I don’t know.”
    â€œAn honest answer at last. Have you a Bible?”
    â€œI own one. I didn’t bring it. It seemed like carrying firewood to the forest.”
    â€œBring it with you next time. It will save passing the text back and forth.” He turned in his chair and lifted a volume
the size of a traveling desk off the pile of books on his writing table—one-handed; his hands were slim and white, but as strong as a harvester’s—opened it in his lap, and hooked on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from a waistcoat pocket.
    And so began the catechism.

FOUR
    I returned to my furnished room past midnight, limp as a bar rag. A hundred voices were shouting Bible passages in my head. Sunday school with Eldred Griffin was like digging postholes all day in the desert, and I’d done that too.
    By gray dawn I was back in his study. He looked as fresh as I felt stale, wearing a clean collarless shirt with his waistcoat and trousers brushed and creased in the right places (he had no one to impress with his poverty) and a shine on his elastic-sided boots, round-heeled though they were.
    That day began as did the next four, with the same question :
    â€œAre you baptized yet?”
    My answers varied:
    â€œNot in the last six hours.”
    â€œI haven’t had the chance.”
    â€œReverend Clay went shooting.”
    â€œI’m catching a cold.”
    â€œI forgot.”

    On each occasion he made no comment, snapping open his leviathan Bible and directing me to turn to the passage before him in mine. He’d marked his place with a piece of razor strop scraped thin as flannel. My copy was bound in supple leather for traveling, with all the gold leaf worn off the outside lettering and its dog-eared pages rubbed nearly transparent at the edges, like a marked deck of cards. It had been left to me by Dad Miller, a deputy marshal who’d taught me two-thirds of what I knew about the hunting of men, including a posthumous lesson: Place the same faith in your friends as you do in your enemies. He’d had his throat cut while on watch by a member of his own posse.
    Each day we interrupted our labors for breakfast, noon dinner, and supper. Esther Griffin was a good simple cook who skimped a bit on salt and pepper, but kept vinegar in a cruet on the table for my use; neither she nor her husband touched it. We ate meat on two evenings and crackles every morning, so I concluded that she had made peace with the butcher. We spread lard on slabs of coarse bread and washed everything down with chicory coffee and water, which she drew from a well uphill of the cemetery. She baked bread twice that first week and on Saturday a peach pie made from preserves sent to her by a sister in Michigan whom she hadn’t seen in seven years. I gathered that although she belonged to a large family, this sister was the only member who stayed in touch. I assumed the break had something to do with Griffin’s having quit the priesthood, but later I learned I was wrong. Anyway the pie was good, if the crust was a little doughy; she blamed the woodstove, which listed toward the
corner where a stack of bricks