Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 10

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Shep Daniels went on up the river, easily taking handsome profits, not only on the remaining Daniels mules but on the Ashland culls, in the biggest boom market for draft animals he had ever seen. He could have got the job done in a hurry at the normal landings of the Tealwing if he had been willing to take first offers. He would have liked to stay with her, on the supposition that Julie and Captain Delorme would board her again upon her return to Ash Landing, but it would have cost him many a hundred if he had done that. He worked as fast as he could, if only to keep his mind occupied, for he was bored and discontented with Julie gone out of his world. Even so, the conscientious milking of each deal took time ashore, and he soon lost his free ride.

All along the river he met the continuing rumours of disorder and chaos in the southern counties of Missouri, but he didn’t believe them much. Had they been true, a flood of quick-cash, stolen farm animals should have beaten down the market, which certainly showed no signs of it. A lot of the rumours cancelled each other or soon proved exaggerated, if not false altogether. One story had it that a band of a hundred runaway slaves had armed themselves and were terrorising the Kansas border; this later dwindled to a group of six wretched fugitives who were chased into Kansas and brought back. A tale that the entire town of Lick Skillet, on the Big Niangua River, had been sacked and burned by Jayhawkers came to nothing at all, for Lick Skillet was still there and had never heard of it. Something seemed to be happening down there, in the back country into which Pap and Trapper had gone, but communications were so bad it was impossible to judge just what it was.

Pap had hoped to meet Shep in Kansas City, but he wasn’t there, nor any message from him. It was not surprising. They were always being delayed, or making an unforeseen detour, or starting for one place and ending up at another. Livestock was where you found it, and so was the demand for it. Commonly you chased will-o’-the-wisps of misinformation and just stumbled on what you wanted. Shep was already out of stock-in-trade and, without instructions as to his next consignment, there was nothing he could do about it. He took the fastest packet he could find and went booming down the Missouri to St. Louis, where word should have been waiting if Pap had been able to send any; and was let down to find none there either.

But now something else happened to change Shep’s way of life, for the second time that summer. Captain Delorme most abruptly gave up hiding his too-marriageable daughter up the once wild but now steamboat-teeming Missouri. He returned with her to the Mississippi, where he established his headquarters aboard the Royal Oaks, newest and biggest of his packets, a great showpiece, automatically flagship of his lines. He had a reason for this decision, which Shep would presently find out. It was in no way pointed at Shep, who probably did not exist at all in Jim Sam’s mind when out of view; but if affected Shep anyway, to an unreasonable degree. Except for a short run now and then, Shep never had any call to ride the Mississippi. What he saw at once was that only by an occasional miracle would he ever see Julie again—to talk to, at least—in the course of his natural life.

There was no sensible reason why this should have been important to him. He had no plans connected with her; if a sneaking hope was hiding in the back of his mind that he might somehow come to mean something to her someday he was not even aware of it. It’s better this way, he tried to tell himself. She’ll get married, in any case, and be gone from the rivers, pretty soon. These things wear off. Someday I won’t even remember who it was used to lean on the rail beside me, watching the fireflies in these long twilights.

He sat in a tilted-back splint chair on the veranda of his hotel, bored and disgusted, listening to the moaning of the steamboats on the Mississippi. After a time the mosquitoes rose in clouds from the shrubbery to sing about his ears:

Bazoo, bazee,

Honey, you’re for me—

That’s the Mosquito Song.

And presently it occurred to him that maybe he did have an excuse for taking off down the great river. Looking for Pap was out of the question. He had once lost six weeks trying to catch up with Pap in the back country and had caught hell for it. Meantime he had Pap’s orders to please Tyler Ashland at all costs, and he had Ashland’s request that they search Mississippi and Louisiana for horses. He could get started on that. There were a few holes in this line of reasoning: St. Louis was where Pap expected to reach him, and it was where he would be handiest when needed. But Pap could snatch him back by telegraph fast enough, couldn’t he? He sure could. He left his forwarding address as “The Royal Oaks, southbound run, en route,” and got out of there before he should get some word he didn’t want.