The Chisholms Read Online Free PDF

tip of the knife blade. Were they really here to take a wagon they somehow thought was theirs? Were they really going to slit his throat and toss him in the bushes?
    “Your pa’s kiddin, now ain’t he?” Buchanan said.
    “That’s right. I ain’t going to slit your throat,” Will said. He paused and then said. “What I’m going to do is cut off your balls.”
    “Now come on, Will,” Buchanan said, and swallowed, and again his Adam’s apple bobbed up against the tip of the knife blade.
    “Toss your
balls
over in the bushes,” Will said. “Squire’s hogs’ll find them in the morning. Big balls like these have got to be Buchanan balls, the hogs’ll say. Must be this Buchanan’s a real lover-man. Must be he boasts around town bout lifting a girl’s skirts.”
    “Now come on, Will,” Buchanan said.
    Hadley had opened the stable doors and was hauling out the squire’s blue wagon. He glanced at Buchanan and said, “Ain’t you slit his throat yet?” and Will said, “I was thinkin of cuttin off his balls, Pa,” and Hadley said, “He ain’t
got
none, Will.”
    He hung something on the door hasp then, little leather pouch with leather drawstrings, and came back to where Buchanan was sitting motionless, the knife still at his throat.
    “I thought I told you t’slit the man’s throat,” he said to Will.
    Buchanan was sure they were joking now.
    He guessed.
    But he was enormously relieved when they tied him hand and foot and stuck a piece of tow cloth in his mouth and wrapped a rag around that, and left him propped against the stable wall then hauled the wagon downhill.
     
    Sean Cassada had crept through the cornfield and lay hidden now in the staghorn bushes east of the Chisholm cabin, watching the family pack the wagon. They had unhitched the mules the moment they rode into the front yard; mules were cantankerous and unpredictable, as likely to bolt as bray, and Sean surmised they wished no mishap while they were loading. They moved in and out of the cabin like a line of ants, male and female alike carrying what appeared to be all their worldly possessions and putting them into the wagon willy-nilly; or at least if there was rhyme or reason to how they loaded it, Sean could fathom none. Tinware platters, plates and mugs, candle molds and chamber pots, rifles and hunting knives all went into the wagon, each Chisholm carrying something out of the cabin, and going back into it empty-handed to return a moment later with yet another load. Wool sack coats and cotton dresses, pantaloons and buckskin pants, butcher knife and — Ah, Bonnie Sue, carrying tight against her sweet bosom a mantel clock; how often had he unfastened her bodice and reached inside to touch those tender breasts?
    Will Chisholm, who had threatened to strangle him one morning outside church, was loading into the jockey box at the front of the wagon all the family’s smaller tools — axes and mallets, jack plane and adze, gimlet and augur, level and square. Gideon was lashing the family plow to one side of the wagon, Bobbo carrying shovel and spade to the opposite side. There now came Bonnie Sue from the cabin again, this time carrying three, nay,
four
grubbing hoes, which she handed to her brother Bobbo. She looked directly into the bushes then, and Sean was certain she’d seen him, and yet the night was so dark; had she heard the pounding of his heart? Were the Chisholms truly leaving? Sean could not believe this, and yet the evidence was there before his eyes to see: tonight he was losing his Bonnie Sue, whose breasts he had kissed, and once tickled the nipples of with a blade of grass, her skirt and petticoats up around her knees, naked beneath she was but would not let him higher than where her drawers might have reached had she been wearing any.
    She did not come out of the cabin again for the longest time. Sean lay there crouched in the bushes, wondering what she could be doing inside there, and then realizing when he saw her in