In the Rogue Blood Read Online Free Page A

blew out the lamp. Girl might be loony as a coot but she got more grit than many a man I could name.”
    Then he saw the look on his wife’s face, saw she was pleased that the girl had absconded, and his good humor vanished and he cursed her for having raised a worthless thief of a daughter.
    John wanted to go in search of her right away. It was his guess she had gone to Pensacola, the nearest town of size. Daddyjack agreed. “It’s the surest place she’ll find a whorehouse to work in,” he said, and gave his wife a spiteful look. He stroked his mustaches in thought for a moment before deciding to let the brothers go after her. “I don’t care if she comes back or not, but I want that horse. You catch sight of it you fetch it home, hear?”
    A few minutes later they were mounted bareback on the bridled mules and ready to go. They each carried a small croker sack of food and a knife on his belt and each had three dollars in his pocket. “Don’t be long about it,” Daddyjack said. “If she’s there you ought find her right quick.”
    “What if she’s hid out, Daddyjack?” John said. “I guess it’s lots of places she could hide in a town.”
    “Don’t matter if she’s hid out or not,” Daddyjack said. “If she’s there you’ll find her. Blood always finds blood. If she went clear tother side of the damn world and you followed after you’d find her. Blood
always
finds blood. Now yall get goin.”
    All show of pleasure had fled their mother’s face. She hugged herself tightly and regarded the brothers with a darkly fretful look that John was oblivious to in his distraction over Maggie and that Edward pointedly ignored, reasoning that if she wanted to say something she could damn well open her mouth and do it. “Let’s go,” he said, hupping the mule forward with his heels.

7
    Pensacola was loud with celebration on the sultry afternoon the brothers rode into town. It was America’s Independence Day and the first Fourth of July for Florida since gaining statehood four months earlier. A brass band blatted in the main square and boys dropped firecrackers from the red-tiled Spanish rooftops onto the sand streets below and laughed to see how they frighted the animals. The brick sidewalks were thronged with uniformed soldiers and swarthy sailors, toothy Negro dockhands, straw-hatted farmers, burly timberjacks and sawyers, finely outfitted gentlemen escorting ladies in frill dresses shading themselves with lacy parasols. Jugs flowed freely and yapping dogs raced through the crowd.
    “Whooee! They kickin they heels, aint they!” John said.
    Edward grinned back at him. “I’d say we picked the right day to be here, son.”
    On a high wooden platform a dark-suited man in white muttonchops orated about Florida’s glorious future while overhead fluttered the American flag and alongside it a flag striped in five bright colors emblazoned with the words “Let us alone.” A salt breeze blew off the bright harbor just a block beyond the square and rattled the palm fronds and the brothers hupped the mules to the foot of a long wooden pier. They dismounted and walked out onto the dock and stood looking at the cargo ships laying ready to receive lighters bearing lumber and cotton and naval stores. A flock of pelicans sailed past just a few feet over the water and a flurry of screeching seagulls hovered above the docks. When they first settled in Florida the brothers had sometimes smelled the sea when the wind came strong from the south but this was their first view of it. In contrast to the close and deepshadowed world of tall timber the vast blue expanse of ocean and sky made them lightheaded.
    They hitched the mules in front of a tavern on the corner of the square, agreed to meet back there at dusk, and split up to conduct their search, Edward in the side streets and John in the square. As Edward wended his way through the crowds he fixed closely on every blonde woman he spotted. Then he rounded a backstreet