Sins of Summer Read Free Page B

had been three difficult years of adjustment for both of them. Now he realized just how empty his life
     would be without her.
    “I’ll talk.” Ben hung his hat back on the peg and shrugged out of his coat. “Stay with the lady,” he said to Odette and was
     relieved when she nodded.
    Without another word to his sister, or a greeting to his niece, Louis led the way from the kitchen into a hallway. Away from
     the fire, it was cold. Along the hall on one side was the stairway and beneath it a door that opened into a small room. Inside,
     Louis lit a lamp and flung open the door of a round Acme Oak heater. The firebox was full of tinder that caught when he struck
     a match on the ornamental rim of the stove and tossed it inside. With a grunt of satisfaction, he slammed the door shut and
     reached into a cabinet for a bottle of whiskey.
    Ben stood inside the door of the sparsely furnished room. A rolltop desk, its contents neatly arranged, occupied one wall,
     a leather-covered lounge the other. The only other furniture was the glass-front cabinet that held several bottles of spirits.
     There were no pictures on the walls and no rug on the floor.
    He accepted the half-glass of whiskey when Louis handed it to him.
    “That’ll warm your insides while we wait for the fire to take the chill off.” Louis pulled the chair away from the desk, sat
     down, and motioned toward the lounge. “Sit. Not much here in the way of records,” he said, indicating the desk. “We do business
     at the mill.”
    Thirty-four years of hard life had left Ben Waller little room for trust. He was especially leery of a man who flew off the
     handle and made quick, unfounded accusations. He waited for Louis to speak. Waiting was something Ben knew how to do. His
     thoughts reverted to what had led up to this abrupt change of mind on the part of his potential employer. Louis Callahan had
     been giving him the boot until he had mentioned working over on the Saint Joe.
    Before coming here, Ben had studied the area carefully. Malone’s was the only mill of any real size on the Saint Joe. Callahan’s
     and Malone’s used the same waterway to the river that flowed into the Coeur d’Alene Lake, where “boom men” would sort out
     logs stamped on their ends with the marks of the upstream loggers.
    “I’m not a hard man, Waller,” Louis said, interrupting Ben’s thoughts. “It’s not been easy lookin’ after a woman like Dory
     in a place where men outnumber women ten to one.” He waited for Ben to comment and when he didn’t, he went on. “Dory’s got
     wild blood. So has James. He ain’t got sense enough to pour piss out of a boot. Their ma was a hot-blooded little piece if
     there ever was one. She was after my pa before he had time to get my ma in the ground. She got him so heated up he married
     up with her and from then on she was queen of the roost. She paraded around with her hair hanging down her back, a-smilin’
     and touchin’ Pa all the time. The old fool was bedazzled. Whatever Jean wanted, Jean got.”
    “I thought we were going to talk about the job.”
    “We are. I’m tryin’ to tell you why I acted the way I did.” Louis set his glass on the desk, leaned back in the chair, and
     hooked his thumbs in the wide galluses he wore over his broad shoulders to support his britches. Ben noticed that the wool
     shirt Louis wore was neatly mended and wondered if the work had been done by the sister with the wild blood.
    “Your family history has nothing to do with the job I’ll be doing here.”
    “I think it does,” Louis said belligerently. “Dory’s already got one bastard, mister. I mean to see she don’t get any more.”
    “You’re talking pretty blunt to a stranger, Callahan.” There was a hard ring in Ben’s voice.
    “Maybe. It ain’t somethin’ we’re proud of.”
    “As I said before, your family problems have nothing to do with me.”
    “But now you know why I was rankled when I found you