Town Tamers by David Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

her hand on his arm. “I’m twenty-two now. I suppose I should be getting on with my life. Maybe find a husband and settle down and have a nice house and kids, like Ma did.”
    “That’s what normal people do,” Byron said.
    “We’re not normal,” Noona said.
    “I want to be,” Byron said to Noona. “And I’ve put it off long enough. Hell, I started giving him hints two years ago, but he wouldn’t take them.”
    “What hints?” Asa asked.
    “How many times have I told you I’m tired of the killing? How many times have I said I’m sick of all the traveling around? If they aren’t hints, I don’t know what is.”
    Asa didn’t say anything.
    “I thought as much,” Byron said. “You only notice when it suits you.”
    “Byron,” Noona said.
    “I’m not holding back anymore.” Byron stood. “You listen, Pa, and you listen good. This is the last one. When it’s over, I’m going back east. I’ll take what I have saved and live like ordinary folks for a change. You can go on making the world suffer for what it did to Ma, but count me out.”
    “Suffer?” Asa said.
    “As if you don’t know,” Byron said. “You didn’t take this town-tamer business up until after she died.”
    “I still don’t savvy,” Asa said.
    “Sure you do. You hated how she was treated when she was alive, how no one would have anything to do with her because she was married to a breed. Or that’s what they take you for, anyhow. So you get back at them by killing as many of them as you can.”
    “That’s not it at all.”
    “Oh, really?” Byron said. “Explain it to me, then. Explain it so I’ll finally understand why one human being makes his living exterminating other human beings.” Byron paused, then quoted, “‘Yet this was not the end I did pursue, surely I once beheld a nobler aim.’”
    “You and your poetry,” Asa said.
    “That’s another thing you hate, isn’t it? That the fruit of your loins has the soul of a poet?”
    “Don’t talk about loins in front of your sister.”
    “And don’t change the subject. Explain it to me. I’m waiting.” Byron folded his arms.
    Asa looked at each of them and at his son and felt a knife pierce his heart. They didn’t know how much it meant to him, working together as a family. He’d always known this day would come, though. That one or both of them would have enough. “I don’t justify myself to anyone.”
    “Not even me, your own son?” Byron said in mock surprise.
    “I have to admit,” Noona said quietly, “that there are occasions when the ugly parts bother me.”
    “Sometimes the ‘ugly parts,’ as you call them, are the only way to settle it,” Asa said.
    “Sometimes?” Byron said, and snorted. “Name one town you’ve tamed where you haven’t had to kill somebody.”
    “
We’ve
tamed,” Asa corrected him.
    “There you go again,” Byron said. “You avoid answering when you don’t like the question.” He stood and stepped to the door. “This is getting me nowhere, sis, as I knew it would. Let’s go.”
    Noona looked into Asa’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
    “What for? He’s the one who’s quitting on us.”
    Noona pecked him on the cheek. Byron cracked the door and glanced both ways, and they slipped out and were gone.
    Asa shut the door after them, leaned his brow against it, and closed his eyes. “Oh, Mary,” he said.

16

    T he Griddle House was popular. The woman who ran it made some of the best flapjacks this side of the Mississippi River, and her other food was equally delicious. Breakfast and supper were her busiest hours, but the middle of the afternoon still saw a lot of people at different tables.
    “After you, Mr. Delaware,” Weldon Knox said, holding the door open.
    “No. You first,” Asa said. He’d waited at the end of town, and when a half dozen riders appeared, he figured he’d been lied to. But they’d stopped a ways out and Knox came on alone, true to his word.
    Now Knox entered, saying, “You