The Eye of the Hunter Read Online Free PDF

no one what he was doing here.
    He found the bathroom, spruced up, and walked down a hall to a kitchen. A small, aproned woman was standing at a worktable with her back to him. He tapped on the doorjamb, and she turned, her hands white with flour.
    â€œWell, Mr. Logan!” she said. “Did you have a nice rest?” She was dark-haired and pretty, and he spotted at once the huge gold bracelet on her left wrist, massive enough for a mule skinner.
    â€œI slept like a dead man,” Henry said. “I need to ask about board, Mrs. Gary.”
    She told him he could call her Allie, that room and board was fifteen dollars a month or five dollars a week, and that sheets were changed weekly. Henry paid a month’s board, using one of his gold pieces. She gave him some silver coins for change.
    â€œWe use Mexican pesos here,” she said. “They go for fifty cents.”
    Henry liked the big cold coins’ honest heft on his palm, their slick feel and the fierce eagle on a cactus, a rattlesnake in its beak; he clinked them on his hand a couple of times before dropping them in his pocket.
    â€œI have a question, Allie. Whereabouts would I find a cemetery?”
    She tried to suppress her amusement but giggled. “Oh, now you don’t look that bad,” she said.
    â€œI had malaria,” Henry said. “A friend thought I might feel better here, so—”
    â€œYou will, Henry, you surely will! I like to died in San Francisco—the damp. I had bronchitis. Here, I’m healthy as a horse. Will you be looking for work?”
    â€œDepends on how I feel. First off, though, I’m looking for—”
    â€œA cemetery. Well, if you walk south, you’ll soon be on Cemetery Hill. There’s also a lot of little houses where retired soldiers from Fort Huachuca have settled. And a bigger one where General Stockard and his wife, Emily, live. She’s going senile, poor thing. Tomorrow you’ll have time to visit the other cemeteries, if you’re a mind. Dinner’s at six and I ring the triangle on the porch. That’s funny,” she said. “Most people want to see where the Yaquis burned the buildings, or where the Maid of Caborca was captured. You must have a relative or friend ...?”
    Henry recited what John Manion had told him. “I’m trying to help a lawyer friend in Kansas City. A client of his passed away a while back, and there was a small fund for perpetual care. I promised I’d make sure—”
    Allie giggled. “Surely they didn’t send you to Arizona to count weeds on a grave?”
    â€œAlice”—Henry chuckled—“there is no fooling you. The truth is, I’m with the Kansas City zoo, and I’m collecting roadrunners. They told me they’re thick in cemeteries.”
    He heard her laughing as he went down the hall.
    The houses on the west side of the street stood several feet higher than those on Allie’s side, all of them built of adobe, with peaked roofs and galleries running all around them like steamboats. On the walk to the cemetery, Henry saw some flowers growing by the road, and he picked a few lupines and Indian paintbrush for Humboldt Parrish’s grave. Finally he came to the cemetery, a small, tilted, bedraggled half acre inside a rusty barbed-wire fence. Here and there Spanish bayonet and scrub oak grew from the caliche soil. A black buggy stood near a wrought-iron gate, and a gray horse, stone-anchored, browsed on the yellow weeds. The rig had a funereal look, as though plumes should stand in the whip sockets. But what was fixed on the nigh side, he saw, was a rifle in a scabbard. He leaned down to study it, and pursed his lips.
    Nice! Excellent piece of the gun maker’s art. The gun stock was of carved rosewood; the barrel, walls, and magazine of nickel steel. Looked like a Hotchkiss, what he could see of it, a gun Winchester had tried to sell the Army, so that a few officers