Escape from Five Shadows by Elmore Leonard

Author:Elmore Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061839955
Publisher: HarperCollins

It was almost ten o’clock, the next morning, before Karla finished helping her father with the monthly report to the main office. She put aside the mail for the convict camp, then saddled her horse and brought it around to the front of the adobe. The next quarter of an hour was spent carrying in water from the pump to the big wooden tub in her bedroom. Her cold-water bath took only a few minutes and after it she brushed her hair and put on a fresh blouse and skirt.

John Demery’s eyes studied her appraisingly as she came out of her bedroom. “Something special about today?”

Karla smiled. “I don’t have time to be drawn into one of your traps.”

“You’re the only girl I know who can look dressed up in a man’s shirt. Maybe if Willis had seen you, he would’ve stayed.”

“Mr. Falvey was here?”

“He waved going by. Headed for the bar at Fuegos.”

“The last time he was here,” Karla said, “I think I frightened him. I told you—he was talking about wanting somebody to talk to—I felt sorry for him, but the way he was going about it I had to tell him to leave.”

“Well, I don’t imagine even his wife understands him,” Demery said. He picked up the small bundle of convict camp mail from the desk and handed it to Karla. “There’s a couple there for Willis. I didn’t think about it…I could’ve given them to him.”

“I’ll give them to Lizann,” Karla said.

“Don’t get too close to her,” Demery said. “Some of that gild might brush off.”

“Now…you can’t judge people just by looking at them.”

“It seems to me I said the same thing not too long ago—about a man not having to look like a jailbird to be one.”

Karla shook her head. “When you look at Corey Bowen, you know he’s good. When you look at Lizann, you give her the benefit of the doubt.” She leaned toward her father and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m going now. Before you think of something else to argue about.”

She rode for the willow stand, passed through the dim silence of the trees, then entered the vast sunlight of the slope beyond and followed the sweeping curve of wagon tracks to the shoulder of the hill. There she left the tracks, riding straight on, up into the close-growing pines that covered the crest of the hill, following a horse trail now that twisted narrowly through the trees. Coming out of the trees, the horse trail dropped down a steeper grade, crossed the wagon ruts that had circled the hill, then followed the length of a narrow grama meadow before climbing again up through fields of house-sized boulders.

A mile farther on Karla emerged from a thin, steep-walled pass to stand above the canyon which the new road followed. Far below her, the dead end of the canyon was choked with pinyon and mesquite. The brush clumps thinned gradually as they spread and finally the dusty green patches of color disappeared completely, almost evenly, before reaching the end of new road construction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.