The Jewels of Cyttorak Read Online Free PDF Page B

then vanished.
    Remy stood staring at the position the guy had been in a moment before, then glanced quickly around.
    The streets of the French Quarter had returned to normal on this hot summer night. In the distance, a jazz band still blared out a tune. Cabs lined the curb two blocks up near Bourbon Street. The too-loud laughter of a drunk drifted over the buildings.
    No one stood with Remy on that dark side street.
    The guy had vanished.
    More likely, he had never been on the street in the first place. Maybe it had been only a projection of some sort. It certainly hadn’t been a ghost.
    “Cute trick,” Remy said aloud. “But de last laugh will be mine.”
    An hour later Remy could still not find the slightest trace of any projector or any other way the image of the man could have appeared on the streets of the French Quarter.
    And every so often he thought he heard the sound of
    a man laughing like a small barking dog. The sound gave him the chills, as if he were hearing a ghost laugh.
    And it also made him mad. And Gambit was not a good person to make angry, even by a ghost.
    hi

    Slowly the sun broke over the edge of the deep valley, the light oozing down the rock and pine-covered hillside like someone had poured a bucket of thick, orange and yellow paint on the top of the ridge. It filled the cracks in the rocks and drove the morning mist higher into the air, where it swirled and then vanished.
    Albert Jonathan had always loved sitting on the front porch of his small log cabin, watching the morning creep down into the deep Idaho valley he called home. For one hundred and sixty-three summers he had loved watching that sunrise. But this morning, for the first time, he dreaded the coming day.
    Albert appeared, to the few who met him, to be the very picture of an Idaho mountain man. He had a long white beard and white hair. His face was rough and red from the sharp wind and bright sun. In the early years, he’d only worn animal skins, but since the turn of the century, and the first real gold mining rush into this area, he’d worn regular clothes, bought at the store a week’s walk away in the little town of Yellow Pine. He only went into town once a year. He never talked to anyone and no one had paid him any attention. Fifty years back, he had reported to the authorities that Albert Jonathan had died and left his land to his son, Albert Jonathan Jr. He had no son, but the little ploy had covered the fact that he was living so long.
    During the mining rush in the 1890s, he’d filed the first official homestead claim for his land and the eighty
    turn
    acres around it. During those early years he had been forced to defend it from all trespassers. There were three bodies buried down the hill a ways on a ridge overlooking the river. Back before the West got civilized, all three thought they could take his cabin and supplies.
    The thought had gotten them all killed.
    But mostly during the last eighty years the outside world had left him alone and for that he was glad. Since that very first trip into this wilderness area as a trapper in 1840, he had loved the steep mountains, the wild rivers, the unforgiving beauty of the Idaho back country, and he just wanted to live alone with that beauty for as many more years as he was going to live.
    Five years after first trapping along the river that ran through this steep-walled valley, he had returned and built his first log cabin. He had been thirty-six and had fully expected to live out his last days trapping and doing a little mining, living alone in the mountains he loved.
    He had not expected to live this long, not even after finding and picking up the large emerald that had cured his aching back, given him new teeth, and cleared up his fuzzy vision. But something about that large emerald had been very special, and for a long, long time he hadn’t questioned it, only just lived and enjoyed, keeping the emerald tucked away in a very special hiding place.
    But last night that