I Travel by Night Last Train from Perdition by Robert McCammon

Author:Robert McCammon [McCammon, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Two

“Ready?” Lawson asked. “Ready,” Ann answered, with a purple-gloved hand’s quick touch to the holstered pistol under her coat. They set off. Positioned some fifty yards from the front porch of the aptly-named Perdition Hotel was the completely misnamed—and misspelled, on its sign—Cristal Palace. Or it might have been wishful thinking, that a saloon and gaming house nailed haphazardly together with raw green boards and roofed with corrugated tin might somehow stand fast during a long hard Montana winter. For the moment it was standing, though half of it seemed to droop in sad acceptance of its ugly frontage. Its windows were glassless, covered with oilskin paper, its front door a curtain of canvas doubled to keep the cold from blasting through. Smoke rose through a chimney that might have been formed of metal cans joined one on top of another in a crooked insult to the builder’s art, and was dashed away by the constant wind with an occasional flying pinwheel of indignant sparks.

As Trevor Lawson and Ann Kingsley crossed what was purportedly a street, Lawson contemplated how a heavy fall of snow could ease the most repellent features of a ramshackle town like Perdition. All yesterday and last night the white snow had come down. Inch after inch of it had first frozen and then shrouded the town’s foundation of black mud. It had settled upon the roofs of the general store, the fledgling bank, the railroad depot and the assay office and made them groan like old men in tortured dreams. It had softened the hard vista of a primitive place situated in a valley between ancient mountains, from which the promise of a goldstrike was both a blessing to some and a curse to others depending on luck and fate.

Such was Perdition in gray twilight on the sixth evening since Lawson and Ann had met with R. Robertson Cavanaugh. They had been at the hotel since night before last. Not inconsiderable attention was paid to them, since their clothes and coats marked them as being on business other than the search for gold; indeed, it appeared that their strike had already been counted. But the people of Perdition were not ones to ask too many questions or nose into anyone else’s business, as long as no claims were jumped and no killings were done in the street. At present the below-zero weather kept the miners in town, kept the Cristal Palace busy and raucous, and also in town—and sooner or later in that same Palace, Lawson guessed—would be the Deuce Mathias gang. He reasoned that wild bucks such as they would have a short resistance to cabin fever, and they would have to find steady release at either the gaming tables, the bar or the backroom bordello.

Lawson and Ann waited for a wagon carrying a load of barrels to creep past, leaving black trails in the snow, and then they continued on their route. Though the light was low Lawson wore his dark-tinted goggles. He was

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