Hard Money Read Online Free Page B

ridges, the town disappeared, and there was nothing, save this rocky and rutted road, to indicate that man had been here. The desert swallowed it up, the long gray sage-stippled miles of sand and rock to the east meeting the rise of the foothills in an unbroken line.
    Perhaps in defiance of this awesome sight, Sharon said, “Is Mr. Comber back yet, Ben?”
    â€œYes, Miz Bonal. He got back last night, late, I reckon.”
    â€œToo late to see Dad?”
    â€œYes ma’am.”
    The road angled in toward the mountains here and then fell abruptly into a little valley. The eye was drawn immediately and irrevocably to one spot in this valley, for here were three tall cottonwoods, the only green of this landscape. The house beneath them was only secondary, although it tried bravely to be the main attraction. It succeeded only in being defiant.
    Of cut stone, masoned with the skill which only wealth can buy, it stood sturdy and square, three stories, with a gallery running across the front and white painted gables jutting from its slate roof. A graveled drive looped a wide fountain in front of the house where a thin stream of water rose high and fell upon itself in this still desert heat.
    A woman was waiting on the porch, and when Ben wheeled around and pulled the team to a halt at the steps the woman said gruffly, “Ben, you look at that pair of bays.”
    Ben said, “Yes, Miz Comber.”
    â€œThey look black to you?”
    â€œNo, Miss Comber.”
    â€œWhy ain’t the blacks hitched?”
    Ben spat heartily and pushed his hat back off his forehead. He acted now as if he were used to this, and on more familiar ground. “Miz Comber, you can’t keep a pair of high-blood horses like this penned up without they don’t get fatter ’n hawgs.”
    â€œThen use the brown buggy, you fool!”
    â€œYou tole me to take the black one.”
    â€œBrown with the bays and this one with the blacks!” Maizie Comber glared at him, and entirely without ill feeling. She was a middle-aged woman with a pleasantly blowsy face holding deep lines of character incised beneath the flesh of easy living. Her hair, black shot with gray, was piled high on her head and held a magnificent shell comb. Her gown was a gorgeous and elaborate affair of red silk, and down the front of it were food stains. A pair of easy-fitting and worn Indian moccasins peeped out from beneath its hem.
    â€œCome in, Sharon, away from that old fool,” she said bluffly.
    Sharon was smiling as Ben, grinning sheepishly, helped her down. A monstrous fortune dug from the Tronah field had not changed Maizie Comber from the rough and good-natured wife of a rough and good-natured freighter. She was as plain as in the days when she used to water her husband’s freight teams at the stage stop west of Placerville.
    Following Maizie, Sharon walked through the foyer and into the wide hall that ran almost the length of the house. Inside was a kind of opulence that was breathtaking. Through the great double doors to the right the oak parquetry floors stretched through three big rooms, the first a salon, and was brought up against the far wall of the third room where a great fireplace, flanked by tall fluted pillars of Carrara marble, rose almost ceiling high. This room was the library, where ordered rows of books, some of them collectors’ items, filled three big walls. They were dusted weekly and never opened, for neither Abe nor Maizie Comber liked reading. The big salon held a great bronze piano with mother-of-pearl keys. On the far wall was a Romney portrait, untastefully flanked by two huge tapestries, one depicting the story of the prodigal son, the other the siege of Troy. Frail gilded chairs were grouped about the wall. A vast mirror, edges a gilded writhing of rosebuds, covered the wall opposite the piano. The windows, of French plate glass, were hung with Venetian lace and blinds. Overhead twin crystal