How the Stars did Fall Read Online Free

and when they find the master dead they will kill us all.”
    “I can’t help you any more than I have. Have you knowledge of any craft or trade? If I were you, I would flee this place to a city and there find a living with whatever talent God bestowed upon you.”
    The woman fell into sobbing then, perhaps realizing that to survive she would have to leave the children behind to fend for themselves.
    Now Faraday went back outside and found that Daniel and the two horses were no longer parked in front of the house. The tracks on the ground showed the way by which he had left, the four lines made by the carts unmistakable on the dirt road. This new development shocked Faraday, almost causing him not to notice a pair of black men passing in front of the house, down the same road, pushing wheelbarrows filled with grain.
    “Hey!” Faraday called out to them.
    The black men continued on without even looking back. Faraday set out towards them but stopped. Instead of trying to keep up with the men, he drew his revolver and fired a round at the sky. This made the slaves stop and crouch in terror and then Faraday was upon them, revolver still pointed at them.
    “You Tuttle slaves?”
    The black men looked one at the other in bewilderment.
    “No hablamos inglés,” one of them said.
    “No English? Okay. Dónde encontro uno caballo? Necessito caballo.” Faraday pantomimed the riding of a horse.
    “Sí, caballo. En la villa.” The black man pointed far in the distance to a cluster of buildings just barely visible on the horizon.
    “Gracias,” Faraday said.
    That cluster of buildings turned out to be nothing but a bunch of old huts where the slaves lived and at that time of day it was almost entirely deserted save for a few slaves, men and women, coming and going on some errand or another. These slaves, catching sight of Faraday, stared at him as if he were not human like them but an aberration from some other plane or world. As soon as he found the stable, Faraday broke out into a run and, finding an open window into the space, discovered there were no horses there. But he did find another building, this one better preserved than the slave huts. It had a chimney and from it issued a steady stream of smoke, and it had a porch and tied to the beams were three horses, their heads dipping into a trough that had been left in front of them.
    These horses were saddled and Faraday came up to them at a run, certain that they must belong to Tuttle’s men. Three guards, three horses. Faraday picked out the larger and stronger of the three and began to untie its reins from the wooden beams when he heard a door open and a drunken man stumble forward, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Faraday crouched, his back against the trough. Then the man came and stood over the trough and unzipped his pants and pissed into the trough. The horses neighed at him.
    “Settle down, ye crowbaits,” he said and placed his hand over the head of one of the horse’s. “I’m almost done.”
    The piss seemed to never end. Faraday felt a few droplets graze his arm and he pulled back, compressing his body against the trough as much as he could. He would wait it out and then leave, he thought. No one would see him.
    “What in God’s name?” the drunkard said as the stream of urine finally came to an end. “Jeremiah, come out here.”
    “What you hollering about?” Jeremiah said.  
    Now Faraday looked back the way he had come and saw the same thing those men were seeing. Two slave girls stood some eighty paces from the cabin, large twine baskets filled with oranges in their hands. They stood staring directly at the cabin. Directly at Faraday.
    “Get on back to work,” Jeremiah yelled at the girls. “Goddamn foolish girls. Get on back.” The man had begun his descent of the porch when Faraday, left no other choice, got up and fired at him. The first bullet hit Jeremiah in the shoulder. The second went into one of his rib cages. The other man, drunk as