Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 13

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Shep always remembered the clean evening light, and the sense of peace upon the quiet water, as he finally stood alone with Julie for a few brief moments at the forward rail of the promenade. He said, “I’m in love with you, Julie. You know that, of course. Will you marry me?”

She must have seen it coming for a long way and kept an answer ready at all times, though perhaps it was not the same answer from day to day. Without any special hesitation or lifting of her eyes from the water, she simply said, “Shep, I don’t know.” And right after that Rodger Ashland came along the rail.

Rodge ignored Shep, as he very often did, speaking only to Julie. “Are you sure you can bear it here?” he asked. “There’s an overpowering smell of mules.... Oh, excuse me, Shep—I didn’t see you there.” It was fairly raw, and a weak link in his gambit; but once past that flaw it ran smoothly for him, and Shep could not have come out undamaged whatever he had done.

“You see me now,” Shep said, and flicked the back of his hard fingers across Rodger’s cheek. It was the kind of reproof you gave a mule, meant to sting and not to injure, though a sort of whip-snap got into it, so that every finger left its mark. Ashland was expecting it, of course. He did not flinch, or blink, or put his hand to his face. He reddened briefly, in spite of himself, but returned to normal colour at once, so that only those four pale stripes remained, conspicuous across his cheek.

Julie Delorme turned on Shep in a fury. “You leave that! And quick! You want to be called out?”

“That’s up to him,” Shep said.

Rodge said, “He knows an Ashland can’t call out a mudsill. He never was safer in his life. And he understands that perfectly well.”

Shep hit him with closed fist, a blow that should have torn Ashland’s head off if he had held as still as before. Rodge partly evaded it this time, so that the blow caught him high on the side of the head, nearly breaking Shep’s hand. Even so, Rodge was knocked off his feet. He made a grab at the rail, missed it, and sat down, teetering briefly on his rump before he tipped over, flat on his back, his legs waving absurdly. Then suddenly he was up again, with a spring like a jumping trout.

Instantly Julie had her arms around him, and the panicky tumble of her words swept her into deep-South elisions seldom heard in her speech. “He apologises—I swea’ he does——”

“I do not!” Shep said.

“Now you keep hold you’se’f!” Julie held herself hard against Rodge, her arms wrist-locked around his lower ribs, through a moment of uncertainty. “Just a mudsill—not accountable—you said so yo’se’f——” Rodge began to relax, and Julie got him turned away, her tone slacking off into honey-chile coaxings that bit Shep like a cottonmouth. “You come along, now. That’s enough such carryin’s-on! We haven’t time, you and me, for any such sorry class of people....”

And down come the cobhouse, Shep thought when Julie had got Ashland away from there. Oh, I done it now! He supposed they’d have to pistol-fight, of course.

But after that what seemed peculiarly ominous, because mystifying, was that nothing happened next. The incident called for somebody’s sudden death, by Rodger’s code; but no reprisal came, and none of the three ever acknowledged by any sign that this thing had ever taken place. He remembered his mother’s despairing insistence—“You are quality—you are, you are!”—and he had never believed her less. I’ll never understand these people, never, he thought, as if answering her. Ain’t in me to understand ’em, I guess. They live in some different world....

Before he entirely regained his balance from this bewilderment a new puzzlement hit him from another direction. At Cairo, by the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio, a telegram—or part of one—came aboard for him. It was a week old, and its point of origin was Buffington, Missouri. This was end of track for a little sprout of railway that had pushed a few miles into south-eastern Missouri, heading hopefully for Texas and California from a point opposite Cairo. The telegraph lines were developing fast, but so far, in the Mississippi Valley, you could count on finding them only where the railroads were. The message said, in handwriting:

Meet me immediately at—

Service interrupted. Line believed

down again.

It had to be from Pap, of course. Shep judged that the unnamed meeting place was more likely ahead of him than behind. Couldn’t very well be Buffington, or Pap would have said, “Come to——” instead of “Meet me.” Pap usually sent casual messages, beginning “Mosey down here to——” or like that; so now Shep imagined a tone of emergency, and it fretted him. About the only thing the message told him for sure was that he was about at the end of his string. Time, which he had once thought was in his favour, had all but run out on him.