The Story Keeper Read Online Free PDF

off the tiny fingers that moved waste along the animal’s insides when it was livin’. She knew how to wash gut, was good at it even, and she knew she’d best not stop when Brown Drigger hollered for his woman to come in the cabin.
    Pegleg Molly left behind a threat before she headed off. “You git ’em done while I’s seein’ to the mens.” She backhanded Sarra on the way by, catching an ear so that Sarra’s head rang before she blinked the pain off.
    She didn’t answer, and Molly left to do for the men, who’d likely worked up an appetite while gamblin’ and dealin’ in thin mash and goods.
    It was the change in the sounds of the cabin that’d finally pulled Sarra from the crock of petal-white membranes. The careless laughter and loud talk had took to quietin’ in a worrisome way, and so shecrawled under the cabin to hear. Could be they’d brought news of her daddy. Bad news.
    Settling her fingertips on the tree litter and mud, she peeked up through a gap in the floor near the stone hearth where she’d found broken hours of sleep for nearly a month now, folded in the wool blanket Aginisi’d wove with her own gentle hands   —one of the few things Sarra’d carried from the little log house before leavin’ on a mule behind her daddy.
    The men in Brown Drigger’s store sat gathered round the table. Six, maybe seven in all were there now. Either Brown Drigger’s men had got back while she worked in the smokehouse or others’d rode in lookin’ for a drink, a place to sleep, or trade for goods.
    “My horse!” The words rattled out in Brown Drigger’s liquored slur. “You ain’t leavin’ here with my horse. Double or nothin’.”
    Silence. Sarra stopped her breath along with it. Brown Drigger was as prideful of the palomino stud as of his own left hand. He’d sooner lose one as the other.
    “We’ve gambled enough.” The voice had a dangerous sober to it, and Sarra knew the voice too   —the man with the pockmarked face, the one Brown Drigger had made uneasy trades with three weeks before, not long past the time Sarra’d been left here. “Take my advice, old man. Quit before I figure there’s anythin’ else here I got a hanker for. Believe I’ll be ridin’ on now.”
    Overhead, chairs shifted and bodies moved. Pegleg Molly’s wooden foot dragged the cabin floor, her heavy steps moving toward the door. “Git gone with you’uns now.”
    “Not with my horse, they ain’t!” Brown Drigger come desperate then. “I give a gold bag fer the beast, and come spring he’ll earn it back in breedin’. He ain’t leavin’ this place, less’n it’s with a bullet in ’im.” A pistol cocked, and Sarra reached for the tiny carved-bone box that hung at her neck   —the other thing she’d brought from Aginisi’s when her daddy led her off. Long as she could remember, she knew it’d be hers when Aginisi shed this world for heaven.
    “Ain’t no reasonin’ with a fool, now is there?” The man with the scars again. “Yer woman best put down that gun and be friendly-like, friend. You trade me outta that horse if’n you want ’im. Ain’t seen much else here I got me a need of, but ya want the horse back, I’ll trade ’im for the girl. The one with them blue eyes. She yourn, ain’t she?”
    Air caught in Sarra’s throat. Turned solid.
    “Ain’t yet. Not for four more days yan, leastwise. Her pap left ’er for promise agin a money pouch. He don’t clamber back with my goods, I’ll keep the girl, let Molly make a little business outta her. They’s plenty come by here who’d pay to get under the blanket with somethin’ looks like her.”
    “Guessin’ you got yerself some decidin’ to do. The horse stayin’ here when we shuck off . . . or the girl? It’s one or t’other.”
    A fist slammed the table. “I give my word a the man. Ain’t no livin’ soul can say Brown Horne Drigger ain’t good as his word. ’Sides, the girl’s daddy, he’s copperhead mean. Man’d as