The High Missouri Read Online Free

Noir, they called him, Father Black Cat, for his feline features and black robe. “Speak to him for me. Or give me a letter to him.”
    Ian Campbell’s owl eyes clicked sideways, toward Dylan, and clicked back. Stared straight ahead.
    “Stupid,” he muttered.
    “Daddy Ni,” Dylan whined.
    His father stood up, fixed Dylan with an imperious eye. “You’re a fool,” he said. “What would the Church want with you?” He took his pince-nez off the little table by his chair and clamped them onto his nose. Set down his snuffbox. Lifted his snifter. Glared at Dylan through the glasses.
    Dylan turned his back on Ian Campbell. He heard his father move to the buffet, pour himself beer. Dylan twisted his insides until he could hold them still.
    “Daddy Ni,” he began, “I need help getting started in the world.”
    His father, stalking with owllike awkwardness, moved back toward Dylan holding the snifter of porter. He put his owl-beak nose into his son’s face. “You spit on my help,” he said.
    It was intended to provoke. But Dylan couldn’t help himself. He felt the hot words rise through his gullet like vomit.
    “You bloody hypocrite,” rasped Dylan, “you—”
    Ian Campbell flung the beer onto Dylan’s neck and chin. It soaked his neck cloth and dribbled down his waistcoat.
    “Bastard!” screamed Dylan, and grabbed for his father, and missed.
    Dylan was surprised at Ian Campbell’s agility, for a sick man. Campbell stepped back and picked up the small side table. Dylan felt transfixed by the sight, unable to move. Campbell hoisted the little table overhead. The snuffbox sailed into space. Campbell cocked the table and crashed it toward Dylan’s head.
    Their movements seemed retarded in time, as though for permanent memory. Dylan raised one arm. The table banged off that arm, but he didn’t react. He simply looked at his father’s face. They faced each other as enemies.
    In this suspended time, Dylan shot his right fist slowly into the middle of that enemy’s face. Mashed into the nose and pince-nez.
    The pince-nez fell away. A thin cut marked the bridge of his father’s nose. One drop of blood beaded up brightly on the cut, broke, and trickled down.
    Dylan registered a glimpse of that owl eye, irate, stymied, confused, lost.
    A scream palpable as bloody meat filled his throat, choking him.
    Dylan brought it forth—a primal howl, raw, malignant, father-killing.

Chapter Three
    The dark figure in the garden waited. Dylan would come hurtling out the front door in a moment, he was sure of that. When the lad comes, this man said to himself, I will shadow him through the dark streets.
    Through the French windows he took a last glance at Ian Campbell, his rival of more than twenty years. On one knee now, a hand to his cut nose, looking after the fleeing son.
    The man in the garden, who was known as the Druid, had watched the Campbell family occasionally through these windows for twenty years. He had felt himself an outsider, shut away from hearth and home. He had wondered whether it was worth it, to give this up to go adventuring, to roam the world seeking the true face of the trickster life. Now he felt what else he had missed—the rivalries, the disappointments, the griefs, the bitterness native to families. And he felt compassion for Ian Campbell.
    They always flee, thought the Druid. Don’t you know that, Mr. Campbell? Because they must.
    The front door slammed, and it was time to shadow Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell. After twenty years, this was the Druid’s chance.
    He stepped lightly behind Dylan, flitting from tree to tree, melting into shadows. First to the grocer, who was closed but sweeping up, and now where, laddo? Mr. Gleason’s stable, perhaps? Dylan crossed the muddy street toward the back of the property. Yes, a good place on a night like this for a homeless boyo. The Druid himself and many another voyageur had slept on Mr. Gleason’s hay.
    A homeless boyo indeed. Well, the Druid believed the