The Rise of Ransom City Read Online Free Page B

town was divided. Some people wanted to side with Grady against the outsiders, because he was a bastard but he was our bastard. Some people wanted to get rid of Grady before the misfortune that had fallen on Grady fell on us all. Some thought that if they got in good with the Line it would make their fortune. All along my father had been neutral. Like a priest, he did not involve himself in politics. But now he spoke out against Grady, and for the Line. People listened to him.
    And not long afterwards some fifty or a hundred men from town set off up the hill to Grady’s Mine. They were armed with picks and a few rifles. They banged on locked doors and shuttered windows with pick-handles and called for Grady’s surrender. From up on top of a tower one of Grady’s men let fire and in the ensuing daylong skirmish two men died and many more were injured. Some of the explosives went off and Shaft Number Three enjoyed a brief but noteworthy career as a volcano. And so of course the Linesmen had no choice but— for our own protection and for the maintenance of public order— to intervene and to resolve the situation by force, with noisemakers and poison gas. Then in order to maintain the operations of Grady’s Mine, which they said was vital for the War, they were forced to seize it. Mr. Grady was taken to Harrow Cross for trial and he was an old man and he did not make it all the way. Since then East Conlan has been a Line town, in some ways openly and in some ways that are not obvious or easily spoken of. And nobody ever listened to my father in the same way again. His foreignness, which had formerly been considered a sign of his great and exotic wisdom, now marked him as untrustworthy—hot-blooded, a rabble-rouser, of unsound judgment.
    The other debt was only money, but it lasted the rest of his life and he never repaid it. He never came close, though he lowered his dignity and took on odd jobs and worked himself to death. He sold our better furniture and what remained did not fit his giant’s frame and it is on this that I blame the stoop that afflicted him more and more, as year by year he seemed to shrink until nothing was left and he died with nothing. He and I never talked much and I do not know how badly he regretted his bargain.
    My sister May recalls all of this quite differently and says that bad business deals were to blame, but I know what I know.

    I have worked all day and not said a whole lot of what I meant to say. I have not talked about how I first got interested in mathematics. That was while I was still laid up in bed— because though the Linesmen’s treatment set me back on the path to health I did not at once get up and walk around like in a miracle. My father had some old books and later I sent off for a set of books published in Jasper City by a company owned by Mr. Alfred Baxter, some Encyclopedias and some books on business and a whole lot of almanacs of various kinds. I sold them at a small profit to the few literates in town and to business travelers and to some gentlemen who could not read, but who thought the volumes gave their homes a touch of big-city sophistication. Before I sold them I read them myself. I do not mean to boast but I am what is called an Autodidact . That means I taught myself just about everything I know and that is why some of my notions are unorthodox, and it is why when I write letters to the Professors in Jasper City they do not write back. The Autobiography of Mr. Alfred Baxter came free with the set and that is how I came to read that book over and over dreaming of greatness and fame and the freedom that comes with them.
    I have not talked about how one of Jess’s gentleman friends taught me to shoot, though not very well, or about what it was like when Line troops started moving into town, or about the boy in town who fell down an old shaft and stayed down there for weeks and we got reporters up from Gibson City and how I tried to impress them so they would take