The Rise of Ransom City Read Online Free

minds are not like ours, but their ostensible purpose in town was straightforward enough. They wanted Grady’s Mine.
    There was a war on. There was always war somewhere or other, like weather, and at that time it was blowing quite close to East Conlan. Line was at war with Gun, whose sinister and fabulous Agents had infiltrated some nearby towns and were working their corruption in secret. So the Linesmen said, or so Jess told me they said. She snuck into the town meeting where the Linesmen’s demands were debated, and heard everything, though she may not have understood it all.
    Have I said what Jess looks like? It’s been years since last I saw her but she was quite tall, and very beautiful. She was brown and green-eyed and thick-haired. There, now she is immortalized in a way. Let’s call that a portrait of my sister. It is very strange this business of turning flesh-and-blood people into words.
    Anyhow a neighboring county had thrown in with the Line’s enemies and there had been some acts of terror and sabotage, affecting the Line’s chains of supply, which were vast and far-flung beyond East Conlan’s imagining. To avoid further incidents it was necessary for the Line to assert control over the means of production in the region. The price they were offering Grady was not unreasonable— so Jess said they said— and the alternative unthinkable.
    Well, after considering the offer but not for long Mr. Grady stood up in front of the meeting and the old man leaned on his stick and shook with rage like a proper old-fashioned prophet of doom and he said:
    “Go to hell. Go to hell and fuck you. The things you serve should never have come up out of hell. They may steal everything else in the world in their greed but they shall not steal a single thing I have built. I will burn and bury it all first. Good day to you and go to hell. Go to hell! And as for the rest of you. Half you provincial dunderheads have never known a damn thing in all the years I have worked for this town, and yet I can see you are trying to think . Here are two things you should think about. First, their demands will not end with me and what’s mine but they will eat you up too. Second, any man who is not with me who sets foot near my properties will be shot. Good day to you all.”
    And Mr. Grady stumped on out the back door of the meeting-hall and up the road up the hill, and he settled into his territory with those of his miners who were loyal to him, and they broke out rifles hoarded against maybe exactly this particular emergency, who knows, and Grady’s Mine turned into something like a fortress, lit at night by torches. Attempts were made by the town’s accountants to calculate the tonnage of explosives Grady might possess up there but they could not come to agreement. Honest traders started to pass Conlan by but we were visited by a plague of life-insurance salesmen. Dr. Forrest fled town without giving notice and I hear he later set up a practice in Sweet Water where he operated drunk and killed a child and was shot by her father, in a duel and in accordance with both law and custom. The Linesmen stayed in town in their rooms on Main Street and seemed to do nothing, which only made everyone even more afraid of what they might do. And nobody in East Conlan much remembered or cared that that odd little Ransom boy was still sick, except for my father.

    He went into town and he called on the Linesmen. As I imagine it, it was one of those good old Conlan mornings when the sky was gray-black like coal dust, and my father stooped and stared at his feet and held his hat in his hand and tried to make himself look small and forced himself to be humble. For the Line had machines that no one else in the West could begin to understand, and back north in Harrow Cross there were sciences that only the Engines themselves fully comprehended, and while their ingenuity and their productive capacities were mostly turned to War they had medicines too.