The High Divide Read Online Free PDF Page A

which he’d tucked last night beneath the covers. Quietly he rolled up the quilt his grandmother had made for him and which he’d slept beneath for as long as he could remember. He tied it up with a shoelace. He crept to the wall and from the space behind the loose board removed the letter, the Smoot’s, and four dollars—one left over from his trade with Two Blood and three from his wages at the store.
    Downstairs in the kitchen he held his pocket watch up to the window. Three-fifteen, plenty of time. The Northern Pacific eastbound, with both freight and passenger cars, stopped for water at four-thirty.
    As he crossed through the kitchen to the back door, avoiding the planks that moaned, his mother called out from her bedroom: “What is it, Eli?”
    Damn it. He set down his bedroll.
    She was lying on her side, up on one elbow, her face pale in the starlight filtering through her curtained window. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
    â€œI didn’t want to wake you. Fargo, remember? A shipment of rugs came in from New York,” he said. “Mr. Goldman wants to pick them over before, you know, everybody else gets there. We’re leaving at four.”
    â€œWho has the rugs?”
    â€œMichaelson.”
    â€œYou didn’t tell me.”
    â€œYes, I did.”
    â€œYou said that he wanted you early, not in the middle of the night.”
    Eli shrugged.
    â€œWhen are you getting home?”
    â€œI don’t know. Six or seven, I guess. No earlier, with that team he’s got. The one mule’s blind, you know.”
    She was quiet for a few moments. “You’re not going to eat anything?” she asked.
    â€œHe said he’d have rolls for me—those hard, flaky ones his wife makes. With the chocolate inside.”
    â€œWell go on then. But give me a kiss first.”
    When he bent down, she took hold of his head, a palm on each ear, and pulled his cheek hard against her lips. “You be careful now,” she told him.
    You, too, he thought, and turned away, the muscles twitching in his back and legs.
    The night was clear and still, the stars a chalky whitewash across the sky, no weather this time to make him give up and turn back home. The town was quiet, every window black, and at first he walked along the dirt street, right down the middle of it. Then, out front of the tailor shop, a kitten darted in front of him, making him cut over into the alley where there was less chance he might be seen. A block later, at the back of Fogarty’s rooming house, he heard a faint cough and dived behind a brittle lilac bush. For a minute or so he kept still, watching. There was nothing astir in front of him and nothing behind, not that he could see, but then it came again, the same cough, and he was able to track the sound to its source: the third floor of Fogarty’s, an open window there, and the orange glow at the end of a cigar. It was Harry McLaughlin, former baseballer with the Cincinnati Red Stockings, former town alderman, former proprietor of a water-hauling business he lost to gambling. The man was blind now, and rumor had it he was dying.
    In a rush, an idea came to Eli—a bold picture that rose up and danced in his mind’s eye. He couldn’t turn away from it. Two months ago he’d delivered a new porcelain chamber pot to McLaughlin. It was eighty-thirty or nine in the morning when Eli arrived, and he found Fogarty in the lobby, wiping down the maple woodwork with a vinegar rag. When Eli announced his purpose, Fogarty reached beneath the counter and came up with the ring of keys he liked to flaunt, a couple dozen or so large brass skeleton keys on a steel ring and chain. Fogarty led Eli up two flights of steep stairs to the third floor and down the dark hallway to McLaughlin’s small room, all the while playing with the keys, tossing them forward and snapping them back into his hand, forward and back, up and