Vengeance Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

yer pa, Nate?”
    â€œGot himself hanged.”
    â€œFor horse thieving? High-grading?”
    â€œMy pa weren’t no criminal,” I says.
    â€œSo why a hanging?”
    â€œIt were a murder, and I’m fixing to find out why. Hopefully whatever Abe’s been holding’ll help.” I drop my fork and wipe my face clean. “What was it you had for me?”
    Jesse stands and motions for me to follow him. In a small bedroom, he pulls open a desk drawer and dumps the contents. Then he lifts away a piece of wood lining the bottom to reveal a hidden compartment. There ain’t nothing in it but an envelope. He hands it to me.
    â€œA letter?” I says, doubtful.
    He shrugs. “I’ll give you a moment.”
    I sink into the desk chair and turn the envelope over in my hands. It’s yellowed with age, and there ain’t a mark of ink on it. Not my name or nothing. I slide my finger beneath the wax and break the seal.
    The pages I pull out are brittle and coarse. Pa’s script is formal and elegant, so unlike his speaking voice.
    Â 
If you’re reading this, it means bad folk came for me, and I’m terribly sorry I never told you the truth, Kate. I always planned to, at the right time, but maybe time got away from me. Maybe I thought we were safe.
    The short of it is, your mother and I found gold when we were very young. Not here in Wickenburg, but farther south, in the Salt River Valley. There’s a mine and a couple caches sitting in the Superstition Mountains, and we only found our way to it because of the journal. We crossed two burro skeletons while prospecting, and a pair of human ones accompanying them. The saddlebags were still loaded up with gold, but the men had their skulls shot through, and the journal was sitting there among the bones. Leather bound, thick. The very one I keep under my bed. It had maps and directions. Instructions based on the sun and the cactuses and the canyon rock forms. It had everything, Kate, and we found one of the caches. Not the mine itself, but even still the cache was overflowing with ore.
    I reckon it was someone’s wealth, stored up. Probably the dead mens’ or whoever shot ’em through the head, unless that were Indians. I didn’t want to touch the stuff—I had a bad feeling—but Maria said we could live easy off it. We took as much as we could carry and never looked back.
    The problem, see, is that gold tends to leave a trail. Back in Tucson, people wanted to know where we’d struck. They asked too many questions. Some even came to the house in the night, aiming to kill us for the prize. Once you were born, I knew we had to move.
    In Wickenburg, I switched my name from Ross Henry Tompkins to Henry Ross Thompson. I prospected a few months until I got “lucky.” Then we took the gold we’d had all along and moved to Prescott, claiming henceforth that our money was earned in a strike near Vulture Mine, though we never let on the true sum of our fortune. Not even Abe knows the full story, and he’s a good, honest friend. He let us live in his barn those few months when we pretended to have no money or means to raise a shelter.
    Abe might be the only person left I trust in this world, and you’re to stay with him. He’ll be a good father, and he promised me he’d look out for you. Take on his last name and don’t look back to Prescott. Don’t return to the house. Don’t ride after whoever came for me and the journal. Gold makes monsters of men, and they’ll kill you for information, even a letter as simple as this.
    Stay with Abe in Wickenburg. No matter how old you are when you read this, stay with Abe.
    I love you, and I’m sorry.
    Â 
    I stuff the papers back in the envelope.
Stay,
he says.
Stay!
    Like he can command me round when he’s dead and every bit of our past is a lie. My father’s first name is Ross, not Henry. I ain’t even truly a