Shiloh Read Online Free Page A

‘Scram.’”
    â€œJudd Travers has the right to name his dog anything he likes or nothing at all. And you’ve got to get it through your head that it’s his dog, not yours, and put your mind to other things.”
    The Jeep bounces along for a good long mile before I speak again. “I can’t, Dad,” I say finally.
    And this time his voice is gentle: “Well, son, you got to try.”
    I eat my peanut-butter-and-soda-cracker sandwiches with Dad at noon, plus the zucchini bread Mrs. Ellison had left in her mailbox for him, and after all the Sears catalogs and mail is delivered, we head back to the Sistersville post office. I get my Coca-Cola at the gas station while Dad finishes up, and we start home. I forget all about looking for cans and bottles. The can I’m holding is the only one I got. “Judd Travers goes hunting near every weekend, don’t he?” I ask Dad.
    â€œI suppose he does.”
    â€œYou can shoot at just about anything that moves?”
    â€œOf course not. You can only shoot at what’s in season.”
    I’m thinking how, ’bout a year ago, I was fooling around up on the ridge and come across a dead dog. A dead beagle, with a hole in its head. Never said anything because what was there to say? Somebody out hunting got a dog by mistake, I figured. It happens. But the more I think on it now, I wonder if it wasn’t Judd Travers shooting a dog on purpose—shooting one of his own dogs that didn’t please him.
    Dad’s still talking: “We’ve got a new game warden in the county, and I hear he’s plenty tough. Used to be a man could kill a deer on his own property anytime if that deer was eating his garden; warden would look the other way. Butthey tell me the new warden will fine you good. Well, that’s the way it ought to be, I guess.”
    â€œWhat if a man shoots a dog?” I ask.
    Dad looks over at me. “Dogs aren’t ever in season, Marty. Now you know that.”
    â€œBut what if a man shoots one, anyway?”
    â€œThat would be up to the sheriff to decide what to do, I guess.”
    The next day I start early and set out on the main road to Friendly with a plastic bag. Get me eleven aluminum cans, but that’s all. Could walk my legs off for a year and not even have enough to buy half a dog.
    The questions I’d tried not to think about before come back to me now. Would Judd Travers want to sell Shiloh at all? And how much would he want for him if he did? And even if I got Shiloh for my very own, how was I supposed to feed him?
    There aren’t many leftover scraps of anything in our house. Every extra bite of pork chop or boiled potato or spoonful of peas gets made into soup. If we’d had enough money for me to have a dog and buy its food and pay the vet and everything, I would have had one by now. Dara Lynn’s been begging for a cat for over a year. It isn’t that we’re rock-poor; trouble is that Grandma Preston’s got real feeble, and she’s being cared for by Dad’s sister over in Clarksburg. Haveto have nurses anytime Aunt Hettie goes out, and every spare cent we got goes to pay for Grandma’s care. Nothing left over to feed a dog. But I figure to get to that problem later on.
    I wonder if maybe, in time, if I never see Shiloh again, I’ll forget about him. But then I’m lying on the couch that night after everyone else has gone to bed, and I hear this far-off sound again, like a dog crying. Not barking, not howling, not whining even. Crying. And I get this awful ache in my chest. I wonder if it is a dog. If it’s Shiloh.
    â€œI know you want a dog, Marty,” Ma says to me on Thursday. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with cardboard boxes all around her, folding a stack of letters and putting them in envelopes. Ma gets work to do here at home anytime she can. “I wish we had the money so every one of you kids could have a