Andromeda Gun Read Online Free Page A

on his nonexistent clothes and money, but there was the possibility he might be refunded for the imaginary ticket to Green River.
    “I sympathize with you, Mr. Birnie, but I wasn’t under no contract to get your stagecoach to Shoshone Flats. You sold me contract to get me to Green River. Since I ain’t getting there, I think you ought to give me my money back.”
    “Where’d you buy your ticket?”
    “Pocatello.”
    “Mr. McCloud, I can’t give you money that’s back in Pocatello, but I’ll play fair with you. We got another stage coming through, Tuesday. You can ride it, free of charge, if the durned driver can get it around Dead Man’s Curve.”
    “Tuesday!” Ian exploded. “You mean I got to set here till Tuesday, with all my money and clothes floating down the river. How’m I going to eat and sleep till Tuesday?”
    “Times is hard, son”—Birnie shook his head dolefully—“but I ain’t no innkeeper. I run a stage line.”
    “Least you can do is give me the driver’s meal ticket. He ain’t going to use it.”
    “Son, that’s the company’s meal ticket.”
    “Give him the meal ticket, Birnie”—a tall, red-haired man shouldered his way through the crowd—“or, so help me, if I catch you eating on that ticket at Miss Stewart’s, you’re going to lose about three hundred of them five hundred pounds before you get off the stool.”
    Birnie flinched at the big man’s anger and reconsidered his position. “Well, seeing as how you brought in the horses, Mr. McCloud, I reckon the company can afford to be generous. Here’s the meal ticket.”
    As Birnie handed up the meal ticket to McCloud, still astride the horse, the tall man turned and said, “My name’s Bain, Mr. McCloud. You can take the ticket to Miss Stewart’s. Her place is right across from my saloon. As far as your sleeping arrangements are concerned, you can hole up, upstairs over my barroom, till Tuesday, if you don’t mind a little female company.”
    “No, Mr. Bain,” a man called from an outer circle of the crowd, “he can have the choice room at my hotel till Tuesday. He did his Christian duty by Brother Trotter and I’ll do my Christian duty by him. If that meal ticket runs out before Tuesday, son, you tell Miss Stewart to charge your meals to Jack Taylor.”
    Ian appreciated all that was being done for him as he used his last few seconds atop the Clydesdale to survey the horses up and down the street. From where he sat, he could not see a horse he judged capable of outrunning a Tennessee walker. Still, all the palaver going on around him was about nothing. He’d take their meals and room, if he had to, and stay long enough to find a decent horse, but, come Monday, he’d ride out of here with all their money, heading for Green River and Colonel Blicket.
    Followed by admiring looks from the crowd, he slid from the horse and angled across the street toward Miss Stewart’s Restaurant.
    So it was that Ian McCloud, alias Johnny Loco, coming in part from the defeated armies of Robert E. Lee and in part from the great nebula in Andromeda, arrived in Shoshone Flats, Wyoming Territory. The stride carrying him across the wagon ruts was given additional jauntiness by the success of his plan, so far, to rob a bank and murder a colonel and by the first stirrings, deep in the nodes of his brain, of a drive toward sainthood.
    Of saintliness Ian knew little, only a remembered aphorism dragged laboriously from McGuffey’s Third Reader that virtue had its own rewards. Awaiting him at the restaurant was the second lesson: that virtue could be as parsimonious as the Territorial Stage Lines. Inwardly the nobler being now diffused along the neuron paths of McCloud contemplated with keener awareness a different observation: In this small cluster of the breed called “man” it had observed pride, avarice, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth—six of the seven deadly sins.
    Awaiting it in the restaurant was the seventh, lust.

2
    Sunlight