Andromeda Gun by John Boyd Page A

girls, a book writ by somebody named Louisa Allcock…”
    “Alcott, mother.”
    “… who didn’t know mountain oysters about raising girls… Gabe’s father was a great reader, and Gabe inherited the family curse. Reading’s what got her pa killed.”
    “Mother! You know daddy died in a fall from a horse.”
    Horrified reproach in the daughter’s voice stopped the pellmell speech of her mother abruptly, and Ian filled the embarrassed silence with a comment. “I ain’t never read much, myself, excepting McGuffey’s books.”
    He hoped the remark would put an end to book talk because literary discussions embarrassed him, but Gabriella would not let his modesty go unchallenged.
    “You were doing all right with Bacon’s essays.”
    “Yes’m but I thought he was a cookbook.”
    The widow had been weighing a course of action which she took. “Gabe don’t want me to talk about her pa, but I feel I got to warn you anyhow—reading can kill you.”
    Feeling he was forced to take sides, Ian tried to balance himself between the two women. “Yes’m, I reckon, though I ain’t heard of anybody getting gunned down by a book.”
    “You almost saw it done to Billy Peyton,” Liza corrected him. “He drawed on you because he wanted to be like them dead-eye Dicks in the dime novels he reads to impress Gabe… Her curse is catching, Ian. Reading most nigh got her beau killed. John Milton killed her pa.”
    “Mother!” Gabe’s exclamation was an order the widow obeyed.
    It was plain to him that there was a skeleton in this family’s closet, but he accepted the knowledge with equanimity. There was a skeleton in the McCloud family’s closet, and he was it. At the moment he was more curious about this John Milton, a gunfighter he had never heard of, and he was even more intrigued by the thought processes of the widow. She might well be right about Billy Peyton, whom Ian had already suspected of being jealous of his own reading ability. For an ignorant, uneducated woman, the widow had a good head on her shoulders.
    “Leastways,” Liza continued, “the Alcott woman didn’t know doodly squat about the tribulations of a widow raising an orphaned daughter.”
    Ian listened sympathetically as Liza outlined the problems of bringing up a daughter without a man around to help, but inwardly he didn’t feel too sympathetic. Her husband had been dead for less than a year, had died after Gabriella had started to teach school, and Liza seemed to be doing well with a four-room house, a chicken ranch, and the family restaurant.
    Still, to commiserate, he suggested that she might sell boxed chicken lunches to the stage passengers to eat on the road. “Give Mr. Birnie two cents’ commission on each twenty-five cent box, and he’ll sell the boxes for you, maybe put them on the cost of a stage ticket.”
    “One cent would do it, Ian. By golly, that just shows you what the guidance of a man can do for a poor widow woman. I’ll corner the old skinflint in church this morning. If you decide to settle in Shoshone Flats , I’ll cut you in for a nickel a box just for the idea.”
    He thanked her for her generosity and told her if it wasn’t that he had to get back to El Paso and his cattle-buying office, he would take her up on the offer.
    Liza, with her appreciation for men and her quick head for making money, would make some cowpoke a good mother-in-law, Ian thought. As a matter of fact, Liza, with her common sense and enthusiasm, and Gabriella, with her book learning and modesty, would make some Mormon a well-balanced pair of wives.
    No. It would never do for the Gentile mother and daughter to wed the same Mormon. Gabe was too sensitive to be married to her stepfather. Any son of hers by the man would be her stepbrother, which would make Gabriella, as the stepsister of her own son, her own stepmother, and Gabe was too young to have an eighteen-year-old stepdaughter. Ian realized the idea was whimsical, but the speed at which he made