Territory Read Online Free Page B

sleepwalking, after leaving the city marshal: get the local paper, get a feel for the place. But he wasn’t stopping in Tombstone.
    When he’d remembered that, standing in the office of the—what was it?—the
Daily Nugget,
it was like waking up. Waking up to find Mrs. Benjamin before him, deep in her work. She’d eyed him as if he were a varmint and she was trying to recall if he was the trapping sort, or the shooting sort.
    None of that explained why he’d pretended he might stay in town. The sun through the window had turned her curling, untidy hair into a crown of fire. She’d worn the craftsman’s face as she bent over the page: focused and distant at once. And when she’d raised her head, her dark eyes had seemed to pull him into her, so that those quick, tapering fingers seemed to be his, and when those eyebrows went up, he could feel them on his own forehead. That, too, was probably because he was tired.
    Mrs. Benjamin. She’d been mad enough to spit when her boss had given him her name. Pretty—well, prettyish, mostly in the way her face moved. Photographs probably didn’t do her justice.
    That was Mr. Benjamin’s problem. Jesse was going to Mexico.
    When the dentist, Holliday, had reminded him about his pistol, he’d answered without thinking. Already sleepwalking. Well, he’d buy anotherdamned gun. Better than turning back into the center of town, where the air seemed thick and clinging for all its dryness.
    Sam stopped short. Jesse lurched forward over Sam’s neck as a streak of black passed almost under his hooves. Then he heard a jangle of Chinese, and a small boy dashed under Sam’s nose.
    “Hey, careful!” Jesse yelled after him, and realized he’d spoken in Chinese, out of the shoals of memory. The black streak, he saw before the boy and his quarry disappeared, was a pig.
    He looked up. The plaque nailed to the doorpost beside him was gilt-edged scarlet with the Chinese characters for “physician” in black. There was a notch in the bottom edge where a knot had fallen out of the wood and been painted over. The sign painter had smudged the last upright stroke of his calligraphy.
    San Francisco.
“Everyone else puts his name on his sign,” Jesse protested as he stood at the door that led up to Chow Lung’s second-floor rooms.
    “Perhaps everyone else needs to,” Lung replied. “My patients know my name, and those who are not yet my patients only want to know there is a doctor within.”
    “So using your name would be false humility?”
    “Exactly,” Lung said, beaming.
    “You’re a madman,” Jesse told him.
    Sam tossed his head. Jesse realized his hands had tightened on the reins. “Sorry,” he said, and stroked Sam’s neck. He slid out of the saddle before he’d quite decided he would do it. Someone else might own the sign now. But at least he could ask the someone else if he knew Chow Lung, lately a physician in San Francisco.
    A Chinese boy of about ten stepped out the door with a broom in his hands. He saw Jesse and stared. Jesse tried a smile. The boy dropped the broom and ducked back through the door, shouting in Chinese too quick for Jesse to understand.
    Now what did I do?
He had an urge to throw himself back in the saddle and gallop off.
    Then Chow Lung stuck his head out the door, squinting into the sunlight. “Ah. There you are,” he said in Chinese. “You took uncommonly long to arrive.”
    For a moment, he doubted; this was another fish in the school. But Lung stood in the door, tall and square-shouldered as the warlords in old Chinese tapestries, his arms folded over his chest. There was something unfamiliar in the shape of his head, half-hidden by the dark doorway.
    Jesse wanted to say so many things at once, he couldn’t speak at all. Themost pressing was,
How could I have taken uncommonly long to get to someplace I didn’t know I was going?
    Lung raised his eyebrows, a silent, satirical question.
    “I happiness see you?” Jesse offered in