Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 9

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Tyler Ashland was then working several hundred head of mules and a large variable number of saddle horses, all of which he was continually weeding out, swapping, or adding to. For a long time he had been virtually a captive customer; he trusted no trader but Pap, from whom he would sometimes buy sight unseen. But his value to the Danielses went far beyond the profits they made on him. What was good enough for Ashland was good enough for many others, so that his patronage brought the Danielses many times more business than his own.

Nothing about the look of Ash Landing, whether asleep or bustling, suggested that for four years, ending only two years back, it had been as vehement a source of violence as there was on the Missouri River. Actually, except for a considerable coming and going of riled-up mounted riflemen, it had looked no different then; no fighting ever took place there. But in the years of the Border Wars it had been so active a gathering point for raiding societies that it had virtually amounted to the mouth of a smoking pistol, and might again. Tyler Ashland was the pistol.

The Ashland antecedents traced back to a fire-eating family in the Carolinas, and throughout most of his life Tyler was widely known as a fire-eater himself. He was tall, fierce-whiskered and fierce-eyed; his black hair showed only a token salting of grey. He scared some people, and these claimed it was dangerous to bid him good morning before breakfast lest he call you out on the spot. Certainly he had been of sufficiently violent temperament to lead an unauthorised company of cavalry in the Border Wars with Kansas and was credited with have cut a broad swath.

What the Ashlands were willing to forget was that for the last few generations their branch of the family had hung on the ragged edge of a poor-relation status. The opening of vast lands in Missouri had given Tyler Ashland’s father his chance, and Tyler had built upon his father’s beginnings, chiefly, it seemed, by an inexhaustible energy amounting to ferocity; until now he could regard himself as one of the planting aristocracy in his own right. It was a proud ranking, and one of as great security as there was. But having recovered the position that had eluded his people for more than half a century, Ashland almost at once saw his gains threatened by the flood of abolitionist settlers poured into Kansas by the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, with the avowed purpose of hemming him in, pressing him down, and eventually destroying the only way of life he had ever thought worthwhile.

Now, why under heaven did they want to do that? New England’s interference was incomprehensible to Ashland. Few among the men who came, or the men who sent them, had ever seen a Negro; almost none had seen a slave. They knew nothing about grand-scale planting or about plantation labour, either its uses or its needs. Loudly they clamoured for the turning loose of a million slaves in the Missouri and Mississippi valleys—without any suggestion whatever for their placement, feeding, or control. The plantations would go back to the wilderness, of course; and those hundreds of thousands of chattel field hands would wander homeless, as dangerous as only a helplessly starving horde can be....

The invaders of neighbouring Kansas had to be driven out or destroyed; Ashland saw no other choice. In dumbfoundment, but also in high anger, he over and over led his Cavalry Club into Kansas....

This was the man Shep Daniels now had to learn to deal with.

Twenty-three head of subgrade Ashland mules stood around switch-tailing and flap-earing in one side of a divided yard, and Shep’s forty head of young stock shuffled themselves in the other. Shep Daniels and Tyler Ashland leaned against the fence, trying to make a deal. If Pap Daniels had been handling the trade, Ashland would probably have said, “Pick me out some good young draft, in place of this chicken-croup museum, and let me know the difference.” Trading over. But for Shep it didn’t work out like that.

Ashland was in a bad mood, highly incensed that Pap had not appeared in person and resentful of excuses. Pap should know better than to send a boy to do a man’s work, by God. He was sick and tired of maunderings about night-rider troubles and didn’t mean to stand hitched for one damned word more of it. If he wasn’t in bad need of mules he’d tell Shep to take his damned string to hell or Cincinnati, he didn’t give a good God-damned which.... He finally got around to pointing through the fence at a flea-bit grey, demanding a proposition.

Shep judged that no reasonable offer would do any good. He must either start with a tough offer, and make it hard to whittle, so that he would have room to ease off later, or he could try to disarm Ashland with a giveaway such as would astonish him. He decided on the latter.

“Mules have gone out of sight,” Shep began mildly. “Take this big bay here. Last year that would have been about a sixty-dollar mule. To-day he’ll bring a hundred in the St. Louis yards.”

Ashland said that so had his old rack of ruin gone up just as much and he had come on sorry times when he had to stand around being told his business by an apple-cheeked boy.... Was this arrogant crank the gracious gentleman famous for his hospitality? Sure he was. Depended on whom he was talking to, was all.

“I’m allowing for your mule going up,” Shep said. “I want your mule and twenty dollars for the bay colt.”

It didn’t work.

“That’s preposterous! I say forty!”

Shep was taken off-balance. “How’s that again, sir?”

Now followed a weirdness in which Ashland insisted on paying double the boot asked of him, and Shep argued against it.

“My price gives me eighty dollars for what I call a sixty-dollar mule,” Shep said. “We’re not trying to get rich off a market fluke.”

“And I don’t need any financial favours from you either,” Tyler said. “If I catch you lying to me on the going price, I’ll know how to make you sorry, quick enough.” It was a simple statement, without emphasis, but it carried the conviction of certain fact.

“Pap’s going to break my neck for robbery—you know that, don’t you?”

Ashland expressed his disinterest in Shep’s neck. And that was the way it went, Ashland never softening, never conceding. He insisted on dealing for one mule at a time, never for a span, let alone half a dozen teams together. Shep took to quoting the dead centre of the market, while Ashland managed to wrangle by balancing a price too low with another too high—anything for a dispute. It took all day long, and before it was over Shep was certain that something deeper and more abiding was gravelling Ashland than his resentment over Pap’s absence. Up to now Ashland had never seen him except as a hostler, holding lead ropes in the background, or sometimes demonstrating a critter’s gaits. Inasmuch as they had never exchanged two words in their lives before, Shep could not surmise, as yet, what Ashland was holding against him.

“Tell your father it’s horses I want,” Ashland said, when the bills of sale had been signed. “A lot of horses; fifty or sixty head, to begin. All fast quarter-horse types, standing fifteen or sixteen hands, able to carry well upwards of four hundred pounds; ages four to six; no whites or greys ...” As he went on with the description, Shep recognised the U.S. Cavalry specifications; stiffened up, perhaps, to an unreasonable degree but plain of purpose just the same. “Do you understand?”

I understand all right. Never heard such requirements. Adds up to a cross between a beef bull and a kangaroo. We’ll play hell filling this bill, ornery as you be. And whistle a long time for our money.

“Tell your father, to hell with city dealers’ prices. I want him to search Mississippi and Louisiana ...”

Plain what he’s up to. He’s bringing back his old irregular cavalry. Only tougher. Last time they just rode whatever they had. He sees something I don’t see. And I’d damn well better figure out what it is before too long.

Aloud he said, “All right, Colonel.” It was the first time he had rung in this title, and he saw Ashland notice the recognition of military purpose.

They did not shake hands as they parted; but Tyler did say something that might have passed for an apology if Shep had let it stand. “I realise,” he said grudgingly, as if with pain, “I sometimes speak my mind in a manner you’re not used to. If we stood on equal footing, and I were not an older man, doubtless you would have been tempted to hit me, a couple of times, to-day. But ...” What was he going to say? Probably just that that was the way he was, whether Shep liked it or not. An apology to himself, perhaps, rather than to the other. But as he paused to phrase his thought, Shep flashed a brief ghost of a grin and gave his answer.

“No, Colonel Ashland; I don’t think so. I wouldn’t dare stand here at all if I thought you could make my temper break. Because if you ever did, I’d hit you, all right. I’d hit you to kill you.”

Well, he had got through it, somehow. He had unloaded three horses and twenty-three mules, at prices a little on the high side if anything; but for the life of him he could not have said whether he had done pretty well or very badly. He had a sense of something turning spooky in Missouri, of something hidden going wrong in a lot of ways. A fair number of passengers were going on with the Tealwing to St. Joe, but the decks seemed bleak and empty without Julie anywhere. As he went aboard in the warm candle-lighted dusk he shivered meaninglessly, in the way some people would have said meant a stranger had stepped over his grave.