Storm's Thunder Read Free Page B

stairs. “Some fresh coffee, straight away. Do sit, Mister Two-Trees. Make yourself at home.”
    â€œBest I stand, sir. I ought not foul up your sitting chair.”
    â€œNonsense,” Garber says. When I glance back, the missed button of his waistcoat seems to have found its proper hole. Then his fingers make quick work of the ditto buttons, and just like that, he is soberly attired. “Please, sit.”
    â€œI took a splash through the Grande about an hour ago. It cut the stink, but my clothes still a mite dusty.”
    â€œYou bathed in the Rio Grande?” he says, crinkling his nose. “This morning? What on earth were you doing all the way out there?”
    â€œI amble out that way after last we talked.”
    Milton J. Garber, land agent, stares at me like I had switched to a foreign tongue. “Mister Two-Trees, you were here . . .” He turns his head, squinting in disbelief at a bank calendar hanging on the wall, “fifteen days ago.” He gawks at me, expecting me to speak, so I just go on letting him have a right long look. Then I nod and ease down into the chair. Garber sinks slow in the leather chair behind a desk cluttered with paper and doodads. “You mean you’ve just . . . been out there, at the Rio Grande, for over two weeks?”
    â€œI fell in behind a band of pronghorn for a couple days. That swung me northwest a fair piece, but I followed the river back.” Some cups rattle on a tray at the top of the stairs, followed by the careful footsteps of a woman. “You said to give you a week or so. I reckon I lost track of the rest. Pronghorn is pretty quick.”
    â€œI’ll take your word. Never seen one myself,” he says. “Ah, Xenia, my dear.”
    A pretty negro girl, about my age, maybe nineteen, reaches the bottom step and lets out a breath, relieved at descending with only minimal spillage. Sweat beads along her brow and neck, and I can smell the sex on her before the aroma of coffee fills the air. She catches my gaze and darts her eyes away quick. She does not look at Garber at all. Rather, she sets the tray down on his desk, curtsies—embarrassed—as if I had caught her in the state of nakedness she had been in five minutes prior. As she turns for the stairs, I see that Garber is not the only one who missed a button.
    â€œI am not much of an outdoorsman,” Garber says, handing me a thin china cup overfilled with hot coffee. I hold it with both hands, unsure how any grown man’s fingers fit though the tiny handle. “But I am most impressed at people who can just ‘live of the land.’”
    â€œYou fixed up a nice garden,” I say, nodding to the window. Storm’s long head undulates through the wavering glass. Beyond him stretches the burnt umber balustrade of the Palace of Governors.
    â€œXenia’s handiwork entirely. Blessed with the green-thumb of a sharecropper’s daughter.”
    â€œMister Garber, last we spoke you said you might could sell my land up Caliche Bend.”
    â€œIndeed, Mister Two-Trees. I’ll confess, when you brought me your business, I did not think much would come of the proposition. But that was because I was ignorant of two very important pieces of information, the first being your identity.”
    â€œI give my full name when I called on you.”
    â€œYou did, and I’ll beg forgiveness that the name Harlan Two-Trees did not resonate as it should have.” The man ducks behind his desk, rooting among the stacks of paper piled on the floor. “Imagine my surprise when I opened the Gazette the following morning to learn that the stranger who knocked on my door in the middle of the night, granting me full power of attorney to sell eighty-five acres in Caliche Bend at whatever price the market would bear, was the same man who rescued the residents of said hamlet from certain financial ruin by returning—damn near to the dollar —what