Williamson, Penelope by Heart of the West

Author:Heart of the West
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-20T23:44:37+00:00

Drew Scully turned away from the bar, balancing two tin pails of beer in one hand.

He waited while a man jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon before he crossed the line of fire. He fended off the groping hands of a hurdy-gurdy girl and sidestepped around the jabbing elbow of a man shooting billiards. Jere was waiting for him at a table against the back wall, wearing a face down to his chin.

Drew said nothing when he put the pail of beer into his brother's hands. And he said nothing when Jere downed nearly all of it in one breath. They both had a bad case of the sours.

He sat down and let a groan run silently through him. He felt so dead tired and full of misery, and he had a pain so deep it was like a bruise on the bone. He wasn't one for drowning his guts in drink of an evening, because he didn't like waking up the next morning with a head that felt as big as a bushel basket. But he wished now he had gotten some whiskey while he was up at the bar, a whole bottle of it. If he didn't get stewed tonight he was going to wake up screaming.

As the nipper had screamed.

Tears pressed against the backs of Drew's eyes and he squeezed them shut. God's Teeth... He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried. The boy's death had unleashed years' worth of tears. They kept filling his eyes, clogging his throat, and he hated himself for the tears. And for his cowardice.

He had cried earlier that night when he had at last stepped off the cage into the fresh night air. Air that had the bite and tingle of fermented cider straight from a cold cellar. He breathed it deep, tasting it on his tongue and in his lungs, and that was when the tears had come.

Later, sitting in a bathtub at Luke's barber shop, they had come again, running down his cheeks like rain on a windowpane, mixing with the sweat and the steam, and his chest had shuddered with the effort it took not to sob aloud.

He shook his head now, trying to shake off thoughts of the mine and death. He looked around the Best in the West, impressed by this Wild West pleasure palace, by the flocked wallpaper and varnished wooden floors, the glittering diamond-dust mirrors and the tinsel tarts in their silk stockings and short skirts.

But the Gandy Dancer was more his kind of place. Tawdry as a ha'penny peep show, it was, with sawdust on the floor and walls so full of bullet holes it wasn't weatherproof anymore. The whiskey was so cut down there it tasted like river water with a tang to it. But excitement always quivered in the air, as if all hell was about to break loose at any moment. It was a miner's place, where a man dropped his bucket on the bar and slapped

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