Free The Outsider by Penelope Williamson Page A

wanted posters that offered a thousand dollars in pure gold for his capture dead or alive. But the only reward, so it was also said, that anyone had collected thus far was hot lead from the end of the desperado’s blazing six-shooters. Mose sure wished he could’ve gotten a look at those six-shooters. It was just the sort of wild tale to give the shivers to his girl, Gracie. Sometimes if he got Gracie worked up enough, she’d let him put his arms around her and hold her close.
    Mose suddenly realized that Mrs. Yoder was still standing there smiling at him, and probably wondering why he didn’t get on with it. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and backed up, and stumbled when his boot heel caught on a warped board. “I’ll just be at that wood, then.”
    He got halfway to the chopping block before she called after him. “Mose? Why don’t you knock on the door after you’re done and I’ll give you some dried apple duff to take home with you.”
    Mose spun around, grinning broadly, and touched the curled brim of his new black derby in a cocky salute. She hadn’t actually invited him inside, but maybe he could get a gander at the desperado after all, might even get a chance to exchange a howdy with the man. Wouldn’t Gracie be impressed when she heard about that, he thought, although his father would likely have a conniption. Old Deacon Noah was of the mind that all a Plain boy had to do was get within hailing distance of the world outside, with all its evil and corrupting influences, and he would be damned. As if the purity of a body’s soul could be corroded by exposure to the world, the way a rake got rusty if it was left out too long in the rain.
    Mose looked back at the house, shading his eyes from the dazzle of the sun striking off the tin roof, but Mrs. Yoder had gone inside. He looked flashy, she’d said, flashy as a tin roof in his new clothes. He grinned to himself at the thought of it.
    There’d been a lot of talk lately about his father and Mrs. Yoder marrying. It wasn’t any secret the old man had been hankering after her for years. It didn’t appear like she was going to have him, though, not even with Mr. Yoder dead and buried nigh on a year. Mose didn’t really like to think of how beaten down and sad his father had been looking lately.
    Mose wished it would happen—them two getting married. He liked Mrs. Yoder a lot. She had a nice way of smiling and touching him in little ways, like patting him on the shoulder and brushing the hair back out of his eyes, and she was always asking him whether his coat was warm enough and giving him food, like the offer of dried apple duff. He’d often imagined that if his own mother had lived she’d be like Mrs. Yoder. But his mother had died having another baby when he was only a year old. His aunt Fannie had moved in after that, to keep house for him and Da, and if she’d ever spared so much as a smile for either one of them, he sure couldn’t remember it.
    Even with the sun shining, the wind still had winter’s bite to it, and Mose shivered as he shrugged out of his four-button cutaway. He didn’t want to sweat stains into his new coat before Gracie got a look at it. She probably wouldn’t recognize him in it, she was so used to seeing him in that ugly brown sack coat that all the other Plain boys wore.
    He ran his finger over the skin beneath his nose to see if anything had started sprouting there yet, but he didn’t feel so much as the prickle of a single whisker. He’d bought a tonic at the drugstore in Miawa City that guaranteed togrow hair on a man’s bald head, but it seemed to work squat-all when it came to mustaches. He wanted to grow one of those mustaches that curled up on the ends. He’d really look flashy then.
    And old Deacon Noah would have himself another conniption.
    As it was, his father’s lips puckered up as if he’d been sucking on a lemon every time Mose stepped out of the house wearing his mail-order clothes with all their