Build My Gallows High by Geoffrey Homes Read Free Book Online Page A

right arm patting your own back that way. Come on, Ann, I’m hungry.’ Caldwell stood aside for her, his round, pale blue eyes trying to tell her how much he loved her. She was sure pretty, and every day she got prettier. Desire for her came up into his throat and choked him. He took a deep breath and followed her out. On the sidewalk he took her arm possessively, straightened his shoulders and guided her across the street toward the Acme Home Cafe. She was his and no ugly, red-haired bastard was going to mess things up.
    Ann sensed what he was thinking. She threw a sober, fleeting glance up at his round, tanned face. Poor Jimmy, she thought. Poor, good, dependable Jimmy. Such a nice, solid, unimaginative boy. But that was the trouble. He was too solid, too nice.
    A couple waved at them from a pick-up rattling down the street. They waved back. Caldwell smiled down at her.
    ‘What a day!’ He pulled the thin, cool air into his lungs, ‘boy! How’s about taking a run out to my new joint after lunch?’
    She started to refuse but changed her mind. ’All right.’
    ‘It’s a pip,’ Caldwell said.’Wait till I tell you what I’m going to do with it.’
    The old Carlisle place had been there since 1880, but the man who built it had known what he was doing. In this neck of the woods you built for keeps, using redwood and heavy timbers, pitching your roofs so the snow would slide off, planting rows of trees to break the force of the icy winds that swept across the level plateau all winter long. The house was a big one badly in need of paint, but not a shingle was loose, not a board out of place. The porch was just as solid as it had been sixty years ago, the floors as sound. Caldwell stopped on the top step and stared proudly around him. Five hundred level acres, crisscrossed by little creeks. A great warm barn. He saw it not as it was—shabby, paintless, the fences down in places, the corrals broken, the fields empty of cattle and sheep—but as it would be a year hence. White-faced cattle sleeping in the sun. Great balls of white wool that were fat sheep nibbling the thick meadow grass. The two-story house white and shining on the hill. The barn bulging with hay. He’d put a silo over there—a cement one. Green lawn would slope down to the road. Over there by the cottonwoods, maybe a swimming pool. A pool with a couple of dressing rooms near the edge and maybe a paved court and a barbecue pit. A really swell layout. He looked down at Ann on the step below him. A good, strong, slim girl in a white linen dress—just the sort of wife a man needed.
    ‘Boy!’ Caldwell said. Ann threw a smile up at him. He found a key in a pocket, went to the front door and opened it, stood aside with a courtly bow. ‘Enter, madame.’ Ann brushed past him.
    The house smelled of mold and dust. The air was cold and dead for the doors and windows hadn’t been opened since old Mrs. Carlisle died a year ago. Nothing had been touched. The sitting room was just as she had left it—the furniture standing around stiffly in the dim, high-ceilinged room, the flowered carpet almost as bright as the day it was bought. And why not? No one had used the sitting room. This was the first rime Jim Caldwell had been in it. The only room he had seen was the kitchen. That was a long time ago when he was a kid and used to bring Mrs. Carlisle’s groceries up from town.
    ‘We’ll open her up,’ Caldwell said. ’Put a big window there so you can look out over the valley. Tear that little bitty fireplace out and put one in a man can get warm by.’
    ‘That will be fine,’ Ann said, her voice impersonal.
    We? Not me, she thought, and then she was very sorry for him. Poor old Jimmy!
    They went into the big kitchen where the huge wood stove took up almost one wall. Caldwell explained how they were going to put in a sink and electric lights and a big window over the sink so you could see what was going on in the world when you washed dishes.
    ‘A fireplace