Andromeda Gun Read Online Free Page B

through a western window fell on the golden hair of a waitress, sole occupant of Miss Stewart’s Restaurant, who stood behind the counter reading a book with such intentness that she did not look up until Ian was seated on a stool across from her. When she lifted her head and he caught her eyes, cool yet friendly, their blueness accented by a swash of freckles beneath them, he took off his hat.
    “Ma’am, I got a meal ticket from the stage lines that belonged to Will Trotter, deceased. If Miss Stewart should question you…”
    “I’m Miss Stewart,” she said, moving down the counter and leaning slightly over it to smile toward him, “Miss Gabriella Stewart. I saw you bringing in Brother Trotter’s body, so you must be Mr. Ian McCloud.”
    “Yes’m,” he said. He had placed her age at eighteen, but she had to be older if she owned the restaurant and read books. He wondered how she had learned his name so quickly, since she had not been among the spectators gathered to see the body. “Hope I didn’t turn your customers’ stomachs, hauling a dead man past your window. I must have been a sight.”
    “Oh, no, sir,” she assured him as she handed him a menu. “ ‘I wad some power the giftie gie us,’ as Sir Walter Scott says, so you could have seen yourself riding into our town as a Sir Galahad on a draft horse bearing Brother Trotter like the Holy Grail. Brother Trotter was respected among us Methodists. He was a deacon of our church.”
    She had taken a peculiar stance to deliver her benediction, backing toward the front window as she spoke and leaning across the counter, as if she were shielding her face from a view from the street.
    Without looking at it, he laid the menu down. “I’d like steak and potatoes, ma’am.”
    “Mr. McCloud, I can’t recommend my steak this week. It’s a little gristly. But my fried chicken is the best you ever tasted.”
    He glanced at the book she had laid on the counter and said, “All right, Miss Stewart. I’ll take fried chicken and potatoes.”
    He could decipher the word “Bacon” on the front of the book. Assuming it was a cookbook, he said politely, “I’d like to compliment you on your choice of reading matter, ma’am. Ain’t many young ladies who’d be reading up on their work while they’re working.”
    “Yes,” she agreed, putting a place setting in front of him, “but I have to sharpen my mind for my children.”
    She wore no wedding band, so her remark interested him.
    “How many young ones you got, ma’am?”
    “Fourteen, but I’d have more if I could get help from the Mormons in this valley.”
    His soaring expectations suddenly fell as he realized she was a schoolteacher. That accounted for the children, the book and the “Miss” everybody put in front of her name.
    “Ma’am, I’d think every man in this valley would be glad to do anything you wanted.”
    “The lower half of the valley is all Mormons,” she said. “They won’t put their children in a Gentile school. Mr. Bryce Peyton, the stake superintendent, says he doesn’t want to get his angels mixed up with our angels.”
    “Still, you must be busy with fourteen, teaching them and running a restaurant.”
    “My mother helps during schooltime. Pa used to run the restaurant, but he was killed this spring in a fall from a horse.”
    Her cooking range, set back in an alcove, was within talking distance of his stool. He watched as she bent to put in more firewood and turned to slice his potatoes. All schoolteachers had high ideals, he knew, but this girl had something more—lean flanks, well-turned shanks, and the prettiest haunch he had seen north of Sonora.
    Schoolteachers went to respectable places, he reflected, like church, and a church hitching rack would be a good place from which to steal a fast horse. Ranchers would be riding their best animals to church, and the preacher would keep them occupied for at least an hour while the beasts went unguarded. Schoolteachers