Read Online Steel by Richard Matheson - Free Book Online

tightened with that rigidity we Southerners contracted in the presence of our conquerors.
    But there is something stronger than pride, and that is loneliness. It was what made me look back to the young man and once more see in him something of my own two boys who gave their lives at Shiloh. I could not, deep in myself, hate the young man for being from a different part of our nation. Even then, imbued as I was with the stiff pride of the Confederate, I was not good at hating.
    â€œPlanning to live in Grantville?” I asked.
    The young man’s eyes glittered. “Just for a while,” he said. His fingers grew yet tighter on the bag he held so firmly in his lap. Then he suddenly blurted, “You want to see what I have in—”
    He stopped, his mouth tightening as if he were angry to have spoken.
    I didn’t know what to say to his impulsive, half-finished offer.
    The young man very obviously clutched at my indecision and said, “Well, never mind—you wouldn’t be interested.”
    And though I suppose I could have protested that I would, somehow I felt it would do no good.
    The young man leaned back and braced himself again as the coach yawed up a rock-strewn incline. Hot, blunt waves of dust-laden wind poured through the open windows at my side. The young man had rolled down the curtains on his side shortly after we’d left Austin.
    â€œGot business in our town?” I asked, after blowing dust from my nose and wiping it from around my eyes and mouth.
    He leaned forward slightly. “You live in Grantville?” he asked loudly as overhead the driver, Jeb Knowles, shouted commands to his three teams and snapped the leather popper of his whip over their straining bodies.
    I nodded. “Run a grocery there,” I said, smiling at him. “Been visiting up North with my oldest—with my son.”
    He didn’t seem to hear what I had said. Across his face a look as intent as any I have ever seen moved suddenly.
    â€œCan you tell me something?” he began. “Who’s the quickest pistolman in your town?”
    The question startled me, because it seemed born of no idle curiosity. I could see that the young man was far more than ordinarily interested in my reply. His hands were clutching, bloodless, the handle of his small black bag.
    â€œPistolman?” I asked him.
    â€œYes. Who’s the quickest in Grantville? Is it Hardin? Does he come there often? Or Longley? Do they come there?”
    That was the moment I knew something was not quite right in that young man. For, when he spoke those words, his face was strained and eager beyond a natural eagerness.
    â€œI’m afraid I don’t know much about such things,” I told him. “The town is rough enough; I’ll be the first man to admit to that. But I go my own way and folks like me go theirs and we stay out of trouble.”
    â€œBut what about Hardin?”
    â€œI’m afraid I don’t know about that either, young man,” I said. “Though I do believe someone said he was in Kansas now.”
    The young man’s face showed a keen and heartfelt disappointment.
    â€œOh,” he said and sank back a little.
    He looked up suddenly. “But there are pistolmen there,” he said, “ dangerous men?”
    I looked at him for a moment, wishing, somehow, that I had kept to my paper and not let the garrulity of age get the better of me. “There are such men,” I said stiffly, “wherever you look in our ravaged South.”
    â€œIs there a sheriff in Grantville?” the young man asked me then.
    â€œThere is,” I said—but for some reason did not add that Sheriff Cleat was hardly more than a figurehead, a man who feared his own shadow and kept his appointment only because the county fathers were too far away to come and see for themselves what a futile job their appointee was doing.
    I didn’t tell the young man that. Vaguely uneasy, I