Territory Read Online Free Page A

instincts. So long as they don’t lead you to jail or to court, you might as well see if there’s anything to ‘em.”
    “I just set type. No instinct needed.”
    “Hm,” he said again, and struck a match on the flank of the stove. “Maybe you ought to get on with that.”
    She went back to her page. On the stand beside Harry’s copy were six of the thin lead strips she spaced lines of type with. They teetered on their narrow edges, forming three chevrons with their points toward the door like a compass needle.
    Mildred swept them back into the type case. She wasn’t sure why Harry shouldn’t see them, but he was the one who said she should trust her instincts. She was certain the heat in the six strips of lead was her imagination.

 
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    The red paper banners flapping on a handcart made Sam jump like a cat. An old man sprang out of the way and screamed at the horse. Jesse looked down from the saddle, dazed, and the old man shifted his stream of high-pitched abuse to him.
    Jesse frowned, ransacking his memory for Chinese words and inflections. When the old man slowed down, Jesse said carefully, “Sorry thousand times. Unworthy—” The noun escaped him. Or should he have already used the noun?
    The old man peered up at him, snorted, and hobbled away. Jesse sighed and turned Sam’s head into the flow of traffic.
    It was not, strictly speaking, flowing. They’d been on the main street a moment ago, and Jesse would have sworn to a judge that he hadn’t turned off it. But the passage that Sam picked his way down now would have been an alley, if alleys were ordinarily busy and crowded and loud.
    On both sides, wooden buildings and canvas tents compressed the pedestrians, horses, mules, wagons, livestock, and bins of merchandise into a dense, nearly undifferentiated mass, like nougat candy. Jesse could smell incense, raw meat, cooked rice, and a faint odor of chicken coop in an oddly homely combination. Except for the old man, people seemed to dodge him without looking at him.
    A grocer dragged a basket of pale green leaves out of a cart and set it with other baskets under his awning. Two middle-aged men in high-collared padded jackets met, smiled, and bowed to each other while the crowd jostled by. Two women, their hair rumpled, wrinkled silk wrappers clutched around them, stood at the flaps of a tent and scolded a man outside stirring a kettle of rice gruel. He growled, and they screamed with laughter.
    In front of a squat adobe, a little boy plucked
bao
out of a steaming pan with a pair of tongs so big he had to use both hands. The sight of the rolls, the smell of steamed bread, made Jesse’s stomach rumble. An apothecary stoodbehind a pine plank laid across two barrels. Behind him stood an antique hundred-drawer chest of polished mahogany. Jesse recognized ginseng root on the plank counter, but nothing else.
    Through the door of a wooden house Jesse could see a glitter of gold and scarlet paint and the glowing tips of joss sticks burning at an altar. A handcart loaded with wooden cages of shrieking, flapping chickens made Sam throw up his head and snort.
    He was in Chinatown.
    Well, of course he was. But this was Tombstone’s Chinatown. He realized that for the last few minutes he’d been riding through the Hoptowns of Silver City, Virginia City, Sacramento, and San Francisco, unconscious and unsurprised. It was so familiar that he felt almost at home.
    And why shouldn’t home be five minutes in a place you’d never seen, because a signboard or a doorway or an accent reminded you of something you took for granted long ago?
    Jesse shifted his aching left arm, rolled the shoulder. He wouldn’t stop here, but he needed to find someplace soon—he should feed Sam and let him rest, get himself a bath, change the dressing on his arm. And sleep.
    When he was tired, time ceased to be railroad-track linear and became like a school of fish. That was probably how he’d ended up in the newspaper office. Just