The Chisholms Read Online Free PDF Page A

deeper red. There was a fireplace of intricately carved marble, and the chairs around the table were the finest Hadley had ever seen. In the corner, on a cherrywood lowboy, he recognized a napkin press. The squire was dining on what looked to be plates of real London pewter, not the newfangled lead stuff, and there was a sparkling white linen napkin tucked under his jowly chin. As they watched, a slender black woman poured wine from a decanter into the squire’s long-stemmed glass goblet.
    The clouds shifted, the moon broke through. Hadley and Will moved swiftly away from the house, heading below and to the south where Gideon was waiting with mules and horses, close by the Squire’s stable. A man named Alexander Buchanan was sitting on a puncheon bench in front of the unlocked stable door, his rifle resting against the wall. He was whistling a tune Will had first heard in Texas, when he was riding with Lamar against the Mexicans. The tune had been sung by a lanky Texan astride a horse without a saddle, said he’d learned to ride that way from the Kiowa. Fellow said the tune was called “Zip Coon,” but Will had heard it again a year or two later, same tune called “Turkey in the Straw” this time around. He sometimes wondered about things like that; like if a fellow made up a tune, could just
anybody go
around singing it and changing the name of it however he liked? Seemed akin to horse-stealing somehow.
    Alexander Buchanan was whistling “Zip Coon” or “Turkey in the Straw,” or whatever a body chose to call it, as Will came around the side of the stable, his father behind him. He had seen Buchanan often enough in town, had once bloodied his nose for him when the man boasted in the tavern
(and
in his cups) about having been abed with Rachel Lowery; Will hated livery-stable talk, specially when it moved from the stable to the tavern. It was no doubt true about Rachel; Will in fact knew that his own brother Gideon had sampled her quim. But talking about her that way was another thing. You enjoyed yourself with a woman, why then you shut up about it; you savored the pleasure, you anticipated it again, you didn’t go spoiling it by sullying it.
    He was glad it was Alexander Buchanan sitting here in front of the squire’s unlocked stable door. No need for a lock on it, Will surmised, since anybody all up and down the Clinch’d have to be clear out of his mind to even attempt stealing a blade of grass from the Bailey plantation, what with Stokes and his armed patrol roaming the night. Alexander Buchanan was the squire’s lock, sitting here on a puncheon bench and whistling a tune to the night. Will smiled, and put his knife to Buchanan’s throat. The whistling stopped abruptly. Buchanan knew what the blade of a knife felt like, though he’d never had one pressed up against his throat before. The blade was laying flat just below his Adam’s apple, but all a person had to do was turn the knife and there’d be a nice sharp cutting edge against his skin. He swallowed his whistling and sat there very still on the bench, backing away from the knife, trying to melt right into the silvered pine siding on the wall of the stable.
    “That’s a good boy,” Will said, and stepped around Buchanan, turning the knife so that now the tip of the blade was against his throat. Buchanan peered at him in the darkness, moving only his eyes, his head still, his hands still, even his heart seemingly stopped.
    “Is that you, Will Chisholm?” he asked.
    “That’s me, friend,” Will said.
    “What you want here?”
    “We come for our wagon.”
    “You ain’t got no wagon here.”
    “Don’t argue with the man,” Hadley said, coming around the side of the stable. “Just slit his throat and toss him over there in the bushes.”
    Buchanan’s heart lurched, causing his Adam’s apple to bob, scaring him half witless when he realized he might easily have been the cause of his own death, allowing it to bob up that way against the