Doubtful Canon Read Online Free

Then, with a heavy grunt, knee joints popping, he flattened himself on the ground and stared into our frightened faces.
    “I’m your friend, kids. Name’s Grey. Whitey Grey. Come on out. Let’s talk a mite.”
    We did what any twelve-year-olds would do when ordered by a grown-up. We obeyed.
    Whitey Grey dusted off our clothes as best as he could, although his efforts left us dirtier, and reluctantly handed Jasmine the sack of beans and peaches. “Where’s that other boy?” Whitey Grey demanded. “He ain’t run off, has he? Why, the way he scrambled through that li’l’ hole! Can you fetch your friend back, young ’uns? I got a proposition to make y’all!”
    “Ian!” I yelled. “Ian Spencer Henry! Come back here.”
    Nothing.
    “Come on, Ian Spencer Henry!” Jasmine echoed.
    “Hey, there!” Squatting, Whitey Grey peered closely at Jasmine, his monstrous eyes squinting. “Criminy, you ain’t no boy. You’re a gal.”
    “Ian Spencer Henry!” Jasmine called again, ignoring the white-skinned man’s observation. “Are you yellow?”
    “He’s not going to hurt us!” I yelled, though I couldn’t say that I had completely made up my mind yet.
    At last, there came a faint reply. “I ain’t getting my heart ripped out and ate up!”
    “I was just funnin’, boy!” the strange man called out, and let out a little chuckle. “Funnin’ is all. I need…I need…need me some pardners.” The laughter died abruptly, and the pale face hardened with seriousness. “For thirty thousand dollars in…”—he lowered his voice—“gold.”
    “Gold?” I asked, a little too loud for Whitey Grey’s liking, because he cringed, his face now angry, and gave me a chilling look with his dead eyes before he looked around to make sure no one had heard. There was no one around but us.
    A fortune in gold, I thought. Shakespeare was a silver town. Most attempts at finding enough gold to make mining worthwhile had failed, but the word had prompted Ian Spencer Henry to pop his head through the small opening in the fence. Seeing that Jasmine and I were still alive, our hearts remaining inside our chests, he snaked his way through, brushed off the dirt from his trousers and shirt, and approached us tentatively.
    “Let’s get out of the sun.” Whitey Grey led us to the opening of the Lady Macbeth. Once inside, he sat cross-legged facing the entrance, and we gathered around him.
    “You gonna eat ’em there beans?” he asked.
    When Jasmine shrugged, and I understood his meaning, I took the sack from Jasmine’s hands and passed the grub to him. He withdrew the pail from the sack, returned the airtight of peaches to me, and attacked the cold beans with a vengeance.
    “What about the gold?” Ian Spencer Henry asked.
    Since my family’s arrival in Shakespeare, Ian Spencer Henry had been my best friend. He turned out to be an outcast, much like Jasmine, much like, after the Dunivan tragedy, me. His father worked in the assay office in town while his mother lived somewhere in Michigan with his stepfather—at twelve, I didn’t quite understand the scandal of this—and to hear Ian Spencer Henry talk, his father didn’t know he even existed, keeping his nose buried in books and ore. My best friend passed his time reading the five-penny dreadfuls Mr. Shankin peddled, and, when he had memorized the text of those stories, he would sell them to eager miners for a profit of two cents, things costing higher, even half-dime novels, in a rawhide mining town like Shakespeare, New Mexico.
    He stood about my size, with sandier hair and green eyes instead of my blue, prone to go off on a whim or a dare while I remained the cautious one. As voraciously as he read, his true calling came in math. He could cipher figures better than his father, or anyone else, at the assay office. I figured he’d grow up to be about as wealthy as Colonel William G. Boyle, whose mines had brought Shakespeare to new life back in ’Seventy-Nine. Although