The Eye of the Hunter Read Online Free Page A

with a couple of hundred silver pesos in it, which he admitted he had won on a bet of some kind. It was about as close as he had come to earning any money in all the time they had been married. The ranch was going downhill and they owed every innocent merchant who would trust Rip.
    But what could you expect of a man you met in a graveyard and married a month later? Marrying any man named Rip had to be the act of a crazy woman. But she had been half insane with grief, visiting the churchyard every day to sit on a camp stool and commune with Papa, reading him the poems he loved and keeping wildflowers in a jar on his grave.
    And now, at last, she understood that she had leapt from the frying pan into the fire, like a lot of women before her. For Richard Parrish was a gambler, a part-time drunkard like his uncle, a skirt chaser, and a trifler. Her father could have told her—anyone could have. All the clues were there. His preposterous behavior in the graveyard! She simply had hypnotized herself into thinking he was heaven-sent. She had been in a half-mad condition....
    A number of other people had come and gone that day, two years ago, a few of them Mexican, more of them Anglo. Some of the Mexican people brought flowers, but most of them were uneasy in the Protestant cemetery, and they lit candles for him in their own church instead. El Doctor Weemgard had understood the Mexican people and their language, having practiced during winters in Sonora and summers in Nogales, after the desert got too hot. But of the gringos, only she brought flowers to the grave of Dr. John Wingard, who had delivered babies in this town and kept a lot of people out of this very graveyard. No one else came to pay his respects; not one hypocritical, Bible-quoting person!
    Then one day a tall, high-shouldered man she had never seen before showed up carrying flowers. He wore a fringed leather coat and dark gray pants, a teal-blue Stetson with a silver band, fancy boots, and elaborately engraved spurs. His dark hair was abundant, with a few threads of gray, and his jawline beard and down-curving mustache made her think of Tennyson, one of Papa’s favorite poets. His spurs clinked as he walked down the aisle to another new grave. Surreptitiously, Frances watched him stop at a weedy plot marked only with a small galvanized iron stake and a card behind glass. He was an arresting figure and she could not keep her eyes off him. She caught her breath as he drew a pint bottle of whiskey from his coat pocket. It was still sealed, and he cracked the tax stamp, drew the cork with a squeal, and, after a lift of the bottle toward the grave, drank some of the whiskey. As though it were a part of a ceremony, he poured the rest of the liquor on the gritty earth.
    Frances covered her mouth to keep from giggling. He was having a drink with his—with whoever it was!
    Solemnly, then, he thrust half the flowers he carried into the neck of the bottle. Frances was charmed. Half! What would he do with the rest? Take them home to his wife?
    For a full minute she watched as, hat off, head bowed, he stood at the foot of the grave. Once he cleared his throat, and she heard him say, “ Adios , Uncle Hum. Acey-deucey-dicey, you old varmint!” The grave was unmarked, but Frances knew it was that of a man named Humboldt Parrish, an occasional patient of her father’s who had owned a little ranch up the Santa Cruz River road. He had died only weeks before her father. An enigmatic, free-spending man, an occasional drunkard, Hum Parrish had won the ranch in a poker game. So this man was his nephew.
    Frances brought herself back to the business of grieving, closing her eyes and asking God to forgive the ungrateful citizens of Nogales, Arizona Territory, for faulting a doctor who had done nothing every other doctor in the nation had not done, which was to prescribe drugs that turned out to be habit-forming. Nor was the new drug law his fault.
    Suddenly she sniffed an