The Story Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

soon gut ya like them hogs out back as look at ya. Ain’t bound to cross ’im.”
    A chair slid over the well-worn floor, and dust mist sifted throughthe planks, catching the long rays of afternoon light, beautiful against the ugly. “I be takin’ the horse and gone then, reckon. Make it back this way again, mayhap I’ll stop and see what I missed out’a with the girl.” Footfalls crossed the floor, the sound heavy and unhurried, the boards groaning neath the giant of a man.
    “Wait.” Brown Drigger’s protest stopped the walking. “You leave the horse. Hist yerself by here four days yander   —the bargain be up then. Girl’s yourn if her pappy ain’t showed hisself yet.”
    A shifting, a turning, a curtain of dust against light, and then the striking of a bargain. “Reckon I’ll take ’er now and make sure the man don’t show his face nowheres n’more.”
    CHAPTER TWO
    Rand Champlain whistled to himself as he wandered upward from the creek toward Brown Horne Drigger’s cabin. He riffled through his field notebook as he walked, checking his sketches against the leaves in the underbrush alongside the path. It was one of his purposes during this year of wanderings to catalog the flora and fauna of the Blue Ridge Mountains and points beyond, as well as the customs, languages, and cultural variations of the peoples he found. He was by no means a professional   —as an artist, a naturalist, or a student of the anthropological disciplines   —but the pursuit of scientific knowledge had been one of his justifications for leaving behind Charleston, and the expectations of family, for this singular year in the wild.
    He intended to return home, having preserved much of it by way of his sketches and his Hüttig & Sohn folding camera. With thedawning of a new century just over a decade away, and railroad tracks spreading in all directions like climbing vine, he suspected that the days of untraveled lands were numbered. He intended to see them, discover all he could of the unspoiled places, before they were gone. These months traversing the Appalachian wilderness were the beginning of a journey westward from which he eventually planned to return by waterway and steam train.
    His toe struck a stone in the path, and he stumbled before catching himself near a growth of hemlock. This pest he had learned of when the muleteer had assured him that by merely touching the hemlock in order to preserve a leaf between the pages of his pressing form, Rand had condemned himself to certain and agonizing death. It was all for the sake of a joke on the muleteer’s part, but the ruse had continued for hours while Rand waited for the first signs of death by hemlock to occur. Ira Nelson had proven to be a disagreeable, if competent, mountain guide.
    A soft, slight jingling caught Rand’s ear as he squatted on the path, observing what appeared to be a small patch of low-growing alpine pennycress just beginning to show autumn bloom. It shouldn’t have been there. Pennycress hadn’t been known to grow east of the Rockies, but he’d seen it in the mountains of Europe while on holiday, and this looked for all the world like it.
    He was so taken by it, as he reached for a leaf to see if tearing it would produce the familiar, noxious odor, thus confirming its identity, that the jingling failed to capture his focus until it was directly overhead on the rough, rutted wagon trail that had brought him to the Driggerstore. He recognized the sound quite suddenly as what it was: the muleteer’s wagon moving away . . . without him. The mules were tracking at a good pace, causing the brass buckles to ring against the tugs.
    What in heaven’s name?
    His heart paused a beat before he snatched a leaf from the pennycress, then abandoned the path and dashed uphill toward the wagon road, leaping stands of huckleberry and tumbles of rock. Tree trunks flashed by, his feet sliding in the damp blanket of forest moss. Fortunately, he was both fast and