Read Online skeletons by Glendon Swarthout - Free Book Online
Authors: Glendon Swarthout
Tags: crime and mystery
Ads: Link
Now.”
“Fine. I wish you and Tyler well. Please extend my affection to her.”
“I will. By the way, sir, the transcripts of the two trials are missing. I went through the lot downstairs.”
“Oh?”
Either he had only half-heard me or decided on a change of venue. “I suppose it’s impossible for us to conceive today, what things were like in those times,” he mused. “I remember my father discoursing once. I was quite young, but I have never forgotten his words. ‘This is how it goes,’ he said. ‘First you must have order. You get it however you can, usually with a gun and a rope. Then you need law. You write that and try to live by it. Order and law—these come first, even among animals. When you have them, you can take time to think about wallpaper and a choir for the church and sunsets and indoor privies. Oh yes, and justice.’”
As the town waits, breath held, and watches, eyes wide, Buell Wood continues to walk the center of a soundless Gold Street.
Rather than slapping leather and riding out, the young ranch hands, Tigh Gooding and the Pennington boys, have reeled into the Luna again, mumbling oaths and ordering beers and being unable to drink. They cannot yet comprehend how a few rounds in the air for the fun of it could have resulted in the runaway of a horse and the death of a woman and the injury, perhaps, of a child. But now they sober enough to recognize that the law will be looking for them, that discretion might be the better part of hullabaloo. They spill out of the saloon, head for their horses.
It is not the law looking for them. It is a husband and father. Surprise stops them in their tracks. Bill Pennington takes a reasonable step. It is Buell Wood, and there are guns in his hands.
“Mr. Wood,” he begins, “we didn’t mean no—”
The attorney halts, raises his right arm, fires. The range is only thirty feet, and he intends to hit Pennington in the heart, but he has not used a weapon in four years and is unfamiliar with double-action, hence the round is low. It enters the right upper quadrant of the liver through the short ribs, causing that organ to burst blood in the abdomen. Bill Pennington sinks to his knees, pitches forward, lies still in shock, breathing rapidly.
His brother George and Tigh Gooding have never heard a gun fired in fury, have never seen a human being felled by a bullet. They take to their boot heels, tearing along the sidewalk to careen through the first open door.
Wood follows.
The first open door is that in the center of a brick-fronted building with large glass windows on either side of the door. It is the entrance to the showroom of the local Ford agency. On one of the large windows a slogan is painted in capitals, “WATCH THE 4’DS GO BY!” and on the other “20 HORSES UNDER YOUR HOOD-ALL HIGH-STEPPERS!” Inside the showroom, three new Model T’s are displayed. The center model, near the door, is the Runabout, which features a second, separate “mother-in-law seat” detached from the body at the rear. Behind the Runabout at the right is a completely enclosed Coupe, described waggishly as a “telephone booth on wheels,” and at the left rear of the room, a four-door Touring Car with side curtains attached. All three vehicles gleam in Brewster green with black high-lighting and red striping on the wood wheel spokes, since the entire 1910 mid-year factory run was painted identically. From the radiator cap of each is hung, like a feedbag on a horse, a price placard. The Runabout sells for $650, the Touring Car for $950, and the Coupe for $1,050. And there are, this afternoon, besides the automobiles, four people in the showroom—a salesman, two “lookers,” and perched on a stool at a high desk in a wire-mesh cage by the door at left which connects the room with the garage, the agency bookkeeper, Mrs. Gladys Marsh.
Their interest is aroused by the entry of two young men in cowboy attire who rush for the wide rear door, then by that of
“Fine. I wish you and Tyler well. Please extend my affection to her.”
“I will. By the way, sir, the transcripts of the two trials are missing. I went through the lot downstairs.”
“Oh?”
Either he had only half-heard me or decided on a change of venue. “I suppose it’s impossible for us to conceive today, what things were like in those times,” he mused. “I remember my father discoursing once. I was quite young, but I have never forgotten his words. ‘This is how it goes,’ he said. ‘First you must have order. You get it however you can, usually with a gun and a rope. Then you need law. You write that and try to live by it. Order and law—these come first, even among animals. When you have them, you can take time to think about wallpaper and a choir for the church and sunsets and indoor privies. Oh yes, and justice.’”
As the town waits, breath held, and watches, eyes wide, Buell Wood continues to walk the center of a soundless Gold Street.
Rather than slapping leather and riding out, the young ranch hands, Tigh Gooding and the Pennington boys, have reeled into the Luna again, mumbling oaths and ordering beers and being unable to drink. They cannot yet comprehend how a few rounds in the air for the fun of it could have resulted in the runaway of a horse and the death of a woman and the injury, perhaps, of a child. But now they sober enough to recognize that the law will be looking for them, that discretion might be the better part of hullabaloo. They spill out of the saloon, head for their horses.
It is not the law looking for them. It is a husband and father. Surprise stops them in their tracks. Bill Pennington takes a reasonable step. It is Buell Wood, and there are guns in his hands.
“Mr. Wood,” he begins, “we didn’t mean no—”
The attorney halts, raises his right arm, fires. The range is only thirty feet, and he intends to hit Pennington in the heart, but he has not used a weapon in four years and is unfamiliar with double-action, hence the round is low. It enters the right upper quadrant of the liver through the short ribs, causing that organ to burst blood in the abdomen. Bill Pennington sinks to his knees, pitches forward, lies still in shock, breathing rapidly.
His brother George and Tigh Gooding have never heard a gun fired in fury, have never seen a human being felled by a bullet. They take to their boot heels, tearing along the sidewalk to careen through the first open door.
Wood follows.
The first open door is that in the center of a brick-fronted building with large glass windows on either side of the door. It is the entrance to the showroom of the local Ford agency. On one of the large windows a slogan is painted in capitals, “WATCH THE 4’DS GO BY!” and on the other “20 HORSES UNDER YOUR HOOD-ALL HIGH-STEPPERS!” Inside the showroom, three new Model T’s are displayed. The center model, near the door, is the Runabout, which features a second, separate “mother-in-law seat” detached from the body at the rear. Behind the Runabout at the right is a completely enclosed Coupe, described waggishly as a “telephone booth on wheels,” and at the left rear of the room, a four-door Touring Car with side curtains attached. All three vehicles gleam in Brewster green with black high-lighting and red striping on the wood wheel spokes, since the entire 1910 mid-year factory run was painted identically. From the radiator cap of each is hung, like a feedbag on a horse, a price placard. The Runabout sells for $650, the Touring Car for $950, and the Coupe for $1,050. And there are, this afternoon, besides the automobiles, four people in the showroom—a salesman, two “lookers,” and perched on a stool at a high desk in a wire-mesh cage by the door at left which connects the room with the garage, the agency bookkeeper, Mrs. Gladys Marsh.
Their interest is aroused by the entry of two young men in cowboy attire who rush for the wide rear door, then by that of
Similar Books
