Read Online Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman - Free Book Online Page A

Freddy, regaining his composure. “If you knew what an arduous process it was to arrive at this agreement, you would not ask, sir, you would instead express your eternal thanks for the generosity of the Sage Hen here, and of Woodworth.”
    He abruptly left us, strode to the balcony railing, and screamed, “R.T., will you please strangle yourself!”
    I looked at my father, feeling sorry for him. It appeared as though they had him boxed in.
    Scott returned, smoothing his hair and face.
    Freddy said, addressing the whole group, “Begging your pardon for any discomfiture it might cause, but I would like to express an answering offer to you all.”
    His bearing silenced them. My father could be almost regal sometimes.
    The trio of handlers, a quartet now with the addition of Estes, waited on him, expectant.
    “My offer is . . . nothing.”
    They had leaned forward a few inches to hear him, and now they fell back as a group, nonplussed.
    “Nothing,” Scott said softly.
    “Not a penny,” Freddy said.
    Scott managed to conquer his surprise by going into high dudgeon. “An outrage, sir, you waste our time, we come to you in good faith,” he said, sputtering out the phrases.
    “I tol’ you we was pushing him too far!” Jake Woodworth shouted.
    Scott was not quite through working himself into a paroxysm of wounded indignation. “That is all, Mr. Delegate, we do not have to endure your abuse. Leave this place at once.”
    “I will, but I will take Savage Girl with me.”
    New squeals of rage from the quartet. “You shall not, Delegate, you shall not! Mr. Woodworth, I must tell you, is an expert in all forms of fisticuffs, a man mountain who flattened the Truckee Giant with a single blow!”
    “You will meet me in court!” shrieked Estes, stepping on Scott’s last words.
    “Thief! Thief!” called out the Sage Hen, as though raising an alarm.
    Freddy merely turned away from them, opened the door, and summoned in from the alleyway outside Colm Cullen and the stranger in the derby hat.
    “Gentlemen, the Sage Hen,” he said, “this is Marshal Jack Pite, duly empowered authority of the Second Judicial District, State of Nevada. He is here to remind you, although it really does not need to be said, that to hold human beings in any form of peonage, slavery or illegal indenture, or in any way against their will, can under the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution draw federal felony charges down upon the perpetrator.”
    Pite did not look big, but he had an air of calm authority to him. And Cullen appeared able to handle anything that might be put forth by the eighty-year-old, white-haired man-mountain vanquisher of the Truckee Giant.
    Hurrah! I thought. Lincoln freed the slaves!
    Many things happened at once.
    “I tol’ you, I tol’ you and tol’ you!” Woodworth shouted.
    The Sage Hen withdrew an evil-looking twin-barreled derringer from her person and pointed it at Marshal Pite.
    My father leaned over the railing and summoned Savage Girl. As if under the spell of a djinn, she rose immediately and padded across the barn.
    The Toad tried to block her, but with an effortless fake move Savage Girl made him trip over himself and fall. She walked around the man and went below the balcony to appear, only a second later, at the top of a ladder at the far end of the gallery.
    Marshal Pite stepped over to the Sage Hen and took the derringer from her. Somehow frozen by his gaze, she did not resist. He tossed the little pistol back over his shoulder, and it clattered to the barn floor behind him.
    “I’ve got a bigger one,” he said, extracting an enormous Colt from beneath his suit jacket.
    And that was that.
    I had never been so proud of my father. Foxing the con artist and endorsing the rights of man in the bargain. Life, liberty and the pursuit of et cetera.
    Freddy threw open the door to the alley and motioned Savage Girl to accompany him outside, as if into the heady atmosphere of freedom.
    She