Read Katy Run Away for Free Online

don’t have it right, but you don’t have anything to say,” he said, summing up her situation and quite obviously growing annoyed by it.
    “We’re not friends, Mr. Beckton. In fact, we’re barely even acquaintances anymore. I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to. There’s no law that says I do.” Katy feigned as if she were going to step to his right and when he moved to block that, she ducked around his left and started walking again. He just as quickly caught her arm, using her own momentum to swing her around until she stamped her foot and stopped and they were once more facing one another. “You may like sleeping in the dirt, but I don’t! I am hot, sweaty and tired.”
    “So am I,” he snapped back.
    “Then stop wasting time! We’ve got a long way to walk, the sun’s going down and we’ve got nothing. No food, no water, no bed to sleep in. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to spend the night in the middle of nowhere with some no-account bounder who doesn’t know how to keep his hands to himself!”
    Cal laughed, though he hardly looked amused. “Sorry I’m such poor company, but maybe a little bit of hardship will help teach you not to go jumping off of trains! We do have a long way to walk. I reckon about seven miles. But we’re not going to make it before dark and I’m not about to let you go wandering when you can’t see the snakes, scorpions, cactus or prairie dog holes. Hell, we get just a little off course and we could walk right by Dustwallow—it being nothing more than a speck in the damn sand—and never see the lights of town. If you want a fire tonight, you get down off your high horse and start looking for something to burn while we still got light enough to see. You want water, there’s prickly pear all over the place. Kind of cannibalistic, if you ask me, but you can suck on the meat. Ain’t enough to bathe in and it’s bitter as hell, but maybe that’s what suits you. As for supper…”
    With a tug at the clasp, Cal unholstered his gun. He turned his back to her and stalked off, kicking over rocks as he wandered. The third rock he upset provoked an ominous rattle and a warning hiss that lasted only the few seconds it took him to point and shoot. Picking up the snake, he came marching back to slap the still writhing and smelly creature into the palm of her hand.
    “ Bon appetite ,” he growled, and then he walked away.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    They sat in silence on opposite sides of a very small fire, started on sage brush and currently kept alive by bits of wood scavenged from a broken, burned out husk of an old wagon someone had just left to rot, fallen branches from a spiny twist of a tree (the only one she’d been able to see in all directions) and dried chips of cow manure. Cal cooked the snake on slabs of flat rock and, once she’d got past the smell on its scaly skin and, to a lesser degree, the dark pink meat, it hadn’t been as unpalatable as Katy was at first inclined to think. Or maybe that was just because, by that time, she was really hungry.
    It had taken almost one third of that snake before the aching gnaw in her belly had been sated. Now she was cold. Hot as desert days could be, the nights were lessons in opposite extremes. She wasn’t likely to freeze before dawn, but the chill was more than enough to leave her shivering and uncomfortable. She kept trying to get closer to the fire, which actually put out a fair amount of heat. Just not enough to combat the chill in the air around her.
    “Get any closer and you’re going to set your skirt on fire,” Cal said.
    It was the first words they’d spoken to one another in hours. Hugging her knees to her chest, Katy moved closer anyway. She huddled in on herself, trying to get small and warm.
    A few minutes later, he sighed and got up from where he was sitting. “Prickly as a damn desert pear.”
    And getting pricklier by the second with every