The Eye of the Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

he bad to tip his head back to see Henry, which caused his mouth, innocent of upper teeth, to gape. He had long, hairy arms and a face like a hound.
    Henry made arrangements for the horse.
    He asked the stableman how to find Alice Gary’s place, and the big simple man took a hoof pick and squatted down in the hard-packed dirt. With deep, rasping scratches, he drew a map.
    â€œThis here’s Morley. Yonder’s Sonoyta. Walk straight up the hill and turn right. Top of the hill. You can’t miss it. Try to buy that bracelet from Allie. I ain’t never seen it off her wrist, and I swear to God it’s too big for me!”
    â€œHow big is she?”
    â€œSize of a sparrow!” The laugh from Budge’s deep, hairy chest sounded like hee, hee, hee! About right for Allie.
    The climb was steep. When Henry arrived. breathing deeply. a Mexican girl with a long shining braid but no English led him to a bedroom in the rear where his bags rested on the floor beside a cot with a white counterpane. She tried to explain something to him but finally giggled and went away.
    The room was much more comfortable than he had expected, the walls covered with flocked cream-colored Wallpaper, the high ceiling of stamped tin painted gray. There was a flowered porcelain fixture on one wall like nothing he had ever seen—a little china tank with a faucet, and a matching bowl below it. The brass bed was narrow, and near the window stood a small desk and a fragile chair. A bowl and pitcher reminded him to take his quinine, and he measured the dose into a water glass, filled it from a pitcher, and bolted it. The bitter taste almost curled his hair. Gasping, he made terrible faces at the mirror until he could get the cork out of a pint bottle of whiskey and down a slug. As always, he gasped. “Great snakes!”
    Recovering, he brushed aside a glass-bead curtain and gazed down into the almost treeless bowl that held the town. The near hillside fell by terraces that held rows of small homes. At the bottom, one- and two-story business houses lined the north- and south-running streets. Water towers on stilts rose above the railroad station.
    The far hillside appeared to be covered with cave dwellings, pole sheds, hovels, and privies. Lines of wash flapped in the breeze. He saw Spanish bayonet and a few mesquite, but nothing a respectable horticulturist would honestly call a tree.
    Downtown, the streets ran capriciously, meeting to form wedgelike comers two fat people could hardly stand on. It would be a surveyor’s nightmare, the only level land seeming to be where the railroad tracks lay like a basking snake between the hills. Yet, built though the town was of tin roofs and dirt, and completely undecorated, he liked it—the foreign smells, the lusty honking of a burro somewhere, and the cool, clean, cell-like room he stood in. It was completely free of clutter—exactly the kind of room a man needed who had some serious thinking to do. In fact, he realized, the room put him in mind of his little bedroom at Fort Bowie.
    He studied himself in the mirror on the dresser. Was his skin a little more yellow? Definitely. Well, at least he had gotten this far without a spell of ague.
    He stretched out on the white iron cot for his first real sleep in days, and sank into oblivion....
    When he opened his eyes, the light in the room had faded. He lay still, enjoying the sounds of children’s voices calling in Spanish. He sniffed something that smelled like apple pie. An idea had come to him as he slept: that since Rip’s Uncle Hum was buried here, Rip’s widow probably would have had him buried in the same cemetery, if he were dead. Tomorrow he would talk to the county recorder, but this afternoon he could check the cemetery, if it was not too far away.
    He hadn’t had time to think about Manion’s telegram. What did “advise caution” mean, exactly? At least it would be the part of wisdom to tell