Listen to the Mockingbird Read Online Free

of honey. A thin white scar ran along the jaw all the way to his ear.
    He made a small, annoyed smile then looked me up and down, clearly trying to decide whether he should doff his hat. Desperately hoping that some tattered evidence of good breeding still remained to me, I was greatly relieved when he lifted the hat a few inches. His hair was yellow and tidy, his eyes like bright blue pebbles. “Lieutenant Beau Jenks, U.S. Army.”
    I apologized again, trying for the dulcet tones my voice had once learned but had now nigh forgot.
    “No harm done, no harm.” He marched off stiff-legged and, by the look of his back, still annoyed.
    But at least he had not treated me like some strumpet out for a stroll and blinded by the daytime sun. I smoothed my hair, slowed my pace and watched where I was going.
    Zeke Fountain swung his huge feet off his scarred and blackened desk when I opened the door. He was a big man with tufts of carroty hair and a neck like an ox. A dent circled his head where his hat perched. His eyes were small and set wide in the broad, fleshy face. This morning, the eyes looked vexed.
    Zeke’s wife had run off with a drummer the summer before, and I can’t say I blamed her. He was ham-fisted and block-headed, the sort no woman would want to be seen with.
    He was more interested in the newspaper spread out on his desk than he was in my story.
    “It wasn’t one of my hands did it. Nacho says they were all in their bunks. Must have been some vile drifter. He even killed a mule,” I finished.
    Zeke grunted. “There’s always some such varmint about. Like as not drunked up on tarantula juice.” He brought one ham of a fist down on the newspaper. “I knew there’d be trouble. Horse breeding’s no fit work for a woman on her own hook.”
    “It hardly has to do with me,” I sputtered.
    Zeke leveled his mean gaze on me. “If you was after knocking off a Mex kid, would you do it out to your place where there’s nothing but a spindly Mex foreman or out to Jess Parker’s?” Parker viewed everyone as a potential cattle thief and ran off anyone who so much as set the toe of a boot on his land.
    “That’s nonsense.” I gulped back the rest of my retort and lowered my voice. “I have plenty of men about, Zeke, and they’re all armed.”
    “Knew I shoulda kept an eye on the place.” He moved his head slowly back and forth. “I knew there’d be trouble. It just weren’t meant to be. Woman jefes,” he snorted.
    If there was anything I didn’t want, it was more of Zeke’s—or anyone else’s—eye on me. I stared at him, and he must have taken the look for strength because he nodded stiffly and muttered, “No Mex missing I know of. Guess you just got to dig him under.” He shrugged and went back to his newspaper.
    Jamie O’Rourke’s office was just around the corner. Jamie was the government surveyor. It was he who had told me about the ranch and sweet-talked me into buying it. I’d been a stranger to the valley with no mind to stay. I was headed for San Antonio; but truth be told, I had no idea what I would do there, either. I had thought that after everything else the rest would be easy. But I’d no more than found myself and the cherrywood chest a room at the boardinghouse for the night when I suffered a terrible attack of panic. Perhaps it had to do with calling myself Matilda Summerhayes. That was the first time. And the name did not set easy on my tongue.
    My heart began to beat like that of a dying bird, my breath went from me, and my thoughts rammed into each other. I slept not a wink that night and the next morning it was fair more than I could do to get out of bed. I missed the stage for San Antonio; and when I did venture out, I learned there wouldn’t be another headed in that direction for a fortnight.
    As it happened, Jamie’s sister-in-law was staying at the boardinghouse. A bulldog sort of woman, short and solid, with bright brown eyes that snapped sparks, Eliza O’Rourke