Early Dawn by Catherine Anderson Read Free Book Online

than Matthew felt over shooting a rabbit for the roasting spit. Bastards. They were worse than animals.
    Removing his Stetson, Matthew stood beside the old man’s grave. Another heavy rain would pack down the freshly turned earth. In only a short while, the peddler’s final resting place would look like nothing more than a rock heap. Passersby wouldn’t even realize someone was buried here.
    The thought sent Matthew back to the perimeters of the clearing with his hatchet. He worked up a sweat cutting two lengths of green wood to form a cross, which he bound together with rawhide thongs. Then he spent a good half hour carving A peddler killed by the Sebastian Gang into the crossbar. As he drove the marker deep into the dirt at the head of the grave, he could at least console himself with the certainty that the old fellow’s resting place would be recognized as such for a couple of years.
    Afterward, Matthew mounted his horse, collected his mule, and went to find the tracks he’d seen earlier. His blood surged with excitement, which he quickly tamped down. The brothers had cut a broad swath through the brush, the trail so clear that a child could have followed it. Matthew was going to catch up with them this time. He felt it in his bones.
    Time to ride. If he’d learned anything over the last three years, it was that the Sebastians had a talent for vanishing into thin air. Matthew wasn’t about to let them slip away from him again. Nohow, no way. Not this time. He would make up for the delay and catch up with them again or die trying.
    Scanning the horizon every few seconds, he followed the tracks. The Sebastians were shrewd. If they suspected someone was on their heels, they’d double back to pick him off. Matthew flexed his shoulders and released a taut breath. Letting down one’s guard was a greenhorn’s mistake, and he was no greenhorn, not anymore. Being on the trail had taught him a host of lessons, the most important being that it wasn’t always speed with a gun that saved a man’s life. Sometimes it was pure, old-fashioned common sense and having eyes in the back of his head.
    Determined to stay alert, Matthew settled into the saddle for the long ride that lay ahead. At the start of this mission, he had always been in a hurry, a feverish eagerness burning in his veins even as he slept, but he’d soon realized that only dogged determination would enable him to succeed where so many posses had failed. It was a lonely and often boring endeavor. Except for changes in the weather and coming upon dead bodies more often than he liked, one day was pretty much like the next, a monotonous repetition of riding mile after mile, followed by sleeping along the trail with only his saddle as a pillow and his animals for company. His rare brushes with civilization occurred only when he fell in with a posse, needed supplies, or went digging for information about where the Sebastian Gang had last been seen. He seldom met anyone intriguing during those brief sojourns in a town. Shopkeepers, sporting women, and drifters. After a while, their faces all looked the same and their stories all sounded alike.
    In the beginning, Matthew had kept a journal, but after a time, he’d given up on that. His Gaelic-speaking mother, born in the old country, had studied relentlessly to attain a good command of English and insisted that her children do the same. Though Matthew had only five years of formal schooling, he’d developed a good vocabulary and spelling skills, but he still wasn’t a great hand at writing. He penned his thoughts pretty much like he talked, simple and to the point. When he wrote home to let his folks know he was still alive, he kept it short. Hello. I’m fine. Hope you are, too. He had no way of knowing if his letters reached their destination because he never stayed in one place long enough to get return mail. Hell, so far as he knew, both his parents could be dead by now.
    The thought saddened Matthew, but not in