Savage Texas: The Stampeders Read Free Page B

me Pepper when I was small. I grew up some and decided I liked my first name better. I’ve gone by Julia ever since.”
    “Where’d you grow up, Julia?”
    “Georgia. Southern to the core. My papa taught me to follow his ways and be true to the South. I have been, all along.”
    “I carried arms for the South back in the late conflict.” He skipped over telling her that the arms he’d carried had been in company with extra-military rebel insurgents, not gray-clad official soldiers. “Which sometimes ain’t as ‘late’ as folks like to imagine it is. Was your father a fighting man?”
    “No. A chaplain. Father was an ordained minister before the war, a chaplain throughout, and then a church minister again afterward. He died two years ago. Bad heart.”
    “I’m sorry. What was his name?”
    “George.”
    Cross faithfully scrawled “George Canton, reverend” on his tablet, though he couldn’t have given a sensible reason why. The truth was, he had no good grounds for this interrogation at all. The incident at the church had merely provided a half-believable pretext for spending some time with this pretty young lady, and finding out more about her. He suspected that Julia knew what he was up to. No lady of such loveliness could go through even such a young life as hers without becoming aware of the effect she had on men.
    He managed to look serious as he asked her, “Did your late father ever preach from the Book of Pepperday?”
    Her eyes twinkled and she grinned. “Heard about me saying that, did you?”
    “I was told it by two or three of the folks there in the congregation. They thought it was right funny.”
    “By the way, it’s not just ‘Pepperday.’ It’s ‘First Pepperday.’”
    “I ain’t no Sunday school superintendent, but I don’t recall ever seeing a Bible with such a book in it.”
    She laughed. It sounded like harpsichord music to Johnny Cross. “You’d be hard-pressed indeed to find a copy in any Bible,” she said. “I don’t know what possessed me to make such a silly joke at a time like that. I just opened my mouth and out it came.”
    “I heard about the rest of it, too. The part about the wicked man and his teeth, or whatever it was.”
    She found reason to stare at the top of Preacher Fulton’s desk. She was seated in front of the desk, Johnny Cross behind it, in Fulton’s chair.
    “Oh, dear Lord . . . I’m so ashamed to have been so, so crude!” she said, reddening. “I should never have spoken so in the house of God. It was wrong of me.”
    Cross shook his head, stifling his smile. “You weren’t wrong. He did exactly what you said he would.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The man you hit with the collection plate. The jailer told me that when he dumped out the overnight slop jars Monday morning, there were that fellow’s teeth glittering amidst his mess. He’d ‘beshat’ his teeth just like you said he would.”
    She was red-faced, but couldn’t help but chuckle. Johnny Cross grinned broadly at her and said, “And don’t you worry about being ‘crude,’ Julia. Crude don’t bother me a bit.”
    She fired him a chiding look, an obvious put-on. He winked at her and she had to grin.
    “I guess that man will be wearing waterloos to chew his supper from now on,” she said.
    “I reckon.”
    “Why do they call them that, anyway? Waterloos, I mean. What does that have to do with artificial teeth?”
    “Well, Julia, you’ve chanced to ask me something I know the answer to. From what I hear, after that Napoleon fellow fought that big fight at Waterloo, there were so many dead men lying about that some enterprising folks pulled teeth from the corpses, and they were turned into false choppers by them who know how to do such things.”
    “Oh! What a dreadful thing!”
    “That’s the way life is, Julia. Dreadful . . . and dreadful hard. Especially in a town like Hangtree, out here on the rump-end of nowhere. This is a rough place. There’s some good folk,