Читать книгу Painted Ponies - Alan Le May - Страница 13

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NOW that yo’ heah, why not stop a while?” said John Chase in a southern drawl much like that of his daughter. “I need a riduh. Not that I’ve got much stock around, since I made that drive; but what with the Injuns up in the White Clay country, this is a kind o’ leaky place to hold stock in. A man has to hold his stuff pretty well togethuh, if he’s goin’ to have anythin’ left at all.”

He was a man of more than fifty years, years spent in a life that makes men old before their time; his mustache was dark, but his well-kept beard, combed outward toward the sides, was almost white, and his hair, whacked off in back just above his neckerchief, showed a silvery glint.

“I kind o’ promised Jake Downey—” Slide Morgan began.

“He doesn’t need riduhs,” said Chase. “Anyway, a riduh heah will do him ’bout as much good as one o’ his own.” He added hastily, “O’ co’se I’m not urgin’ yuh. I don’t think most riduhs would like this place. Too liable to see action.”

Morgan shot a swift grin at the stocky old man, and the broad, genially whiskered face grinned back.

“That don’t figure,” said Slide. “I’d like to ride here, if it’s all right with Jake.”

John Chase finished his unsaddling, and they stood idly for a moment or two, waiting for the stranger who had returned with the old man.

Slide noticed how squarely Chase stood on his flat heels, and how his good-humored old eyes traveled with a sort of caressing satisfaction over the little buildings, the fruits of his toil.

“That old felluh ain’t no riduh o’ mine,” Chase told him in an undertone. “He’s jest stoppin’ by, like you. Seems to be checkin’ up on the situation, or somethin’.” A faint flicker of mockery twinkled in his eyes.

“Happy Bent is the only riduh I got now,” Chase went on with good-natured openness. “Nice boy; but lackin’ in expe’ience.”

The stranger now came forward from the small shelter under which he had tied his horse, and John Chase perfunctorily introduced them as they started for the house.

“Mr. Geer, meet up with Mr. Ben Mo’gan.”

The man called Geer was elderly, with a trailing iron-gray mustache under a fierce ax-like nose. His hair was unusually long, more than brushing his neckerchief in back, but placed behind his ears as if to demonstrate that those members had not been cut off for thievery, as long hair sometimes implied. His appearance was not otherwise eccentric, except that his trousers were of buckskin, worn black and shiny.

As Geer extended his hand he seemed to be studying Morgan quizzically with eyes that carried an unusual boring force, even through the dusk.

“Morgan, eh?” he said in a friendly voice.

Then as his dry old fingers clasped Morgan’s hand, he suddenly spoke half a dozen syllables of some Indian dialect. Morgan started, not because the strange old man had spoken something unintelligible, but because the odd jumble of sounds had seemed weirdly familiar.

“Huh?” said Morgan.

Geer repeated the jargon, slowly and distinctly, his eyes boring into Morgan’s face. Vague memories stirred in the back of Slide’s mind, as if some signal had reached him from a past which he could not recall. To his own mystification he realized that he now understood what the old man had said: It had been some trivial remark about the weather—something to the effect that he thought it would be warmer before morning.

Syllables fumbled to Morgan’s lips, as he replied haltingly in the same dialect, “I think so, too.” He knew that he had spoken in the Cheyenne tongue.

The whole incident had consumed something less than half a minute, but as Geer dropped his hand and turned casually away Morgan felt mystified and shaken. As he trailed after the others toward the house he feverishly sought to drag the lurking memories in the back of his mind into a clearer light. A practical man, living in the action of the moment, he had seldom given thought to his past. He now recalled that he had been able to speak the Cheyenne tongue as a small boy. Mental pictures returned to him of long trains of oxen, two by two; there were four, five, or six yokes of them to each of the great covered wagons, and there were sometimes one, sometimes three or more of the heavy wagons in the train.

He could recall his father distinctly, a man with a brown curly beard, and dark, hollow eyes that were always watchful, yet always at rest. He remembered times, too, when the heavy wagons were warped into a little circle, with the restless, bellowing oxen inside, and the air filled with the smell of powder and the barking roar of guns. When Slide had been eight years old his father had died in a delirium of fever on the floor of one of the wagons as it creaked and jolted over an endless plain. The little boy had been afraid to climb into the wagon in which his father lay dead.

No doubt, he thought, his father had taught him the remnants of the Cheyenne tongue which had returned to confuse him out of the past. That was the simple explanation of this experience that had called up old ghosts. He wondered that those fragments of Indian tongue had never stirred in his mind, so far as he could remember, for almost fifteen years.

Geer, who had unexpectedly addressed him in Cheyenne, still puzzled him. He took an opportunity to speak to the old man apart from the rest.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” Morgan asked.

“Have you?” said Geer without expression.

There was a vague hostility in the man’s attitude, and Morgan realized that his question had been a personal one. Many of the men he had known had been touchy about questions pertaining to the past.

“I dunno,” he concluded feebly. “I guess not.”