Читать книгу Tiger Eye - B. M. Bower - Страница 6

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"ANYTHING yo'all want me to do—milk, or anything like that?" The kid stood by the door with his bullet-scarred hat in his hand, trying to keep the red out of his face.

"No—oh, no—oh, feed the pinto—and feed the team—" The little woman still rocked the baby, speaking jerkily like that between her moaning.

The kid went out and led Pecos and the pinto down to the stable. Pecos, because he never separated himself very far from his horse when he was in strange country. In the stable everything was neat and orderly. Even in the gloom of a dusk fast deepening to night, the kid could see that the stalls were clean. No use wasting hay, though, keeping the horses inside when there was no man to use them. He turned the team into the corral where he heard the gurgle of water running into a trough in one corner from some spring back among the rocks, piped down to water the animals.

Pecos he led behind the stable, where the rock wall came down sheer, ten feet away. Dark, back in there. Pecos snorted a little, but he'd stand, all right. No use having him out in sight—not in a country where the nesters hollered "Draw, you coyote!" and then started popping it right to you, without waiting to see if yo'all were going to draw. Holler and shoot. That was the way Nate Wheeler had done. More spunk than brains, the kid decided, with youth's readiness to judge.

The chores were soon done; the pinto unsaddled and turned into the corral, the saddle riding an empty manger, because the kid did not know where Nate Wheeler kept it. There were no cows to milk, though there should be, with that baby on the ranch. The kid was finished in ten minutes, and yet he lingered at the stable, hating to go back into the room where that woman sat rocking and moaning and squeezing her baby so tight it kicked.

How about a grave? There ought to be one dug—but maybe she had some particular place picked out in her mind where she'd want it. Women did; his mother, for instance. She always took the say when it came to digging a grave for some of the family. The kid found a pick and shovel in a little shed by the grindstone, but he only looked at them and stood them back again, shaking his head. Plumb foolish to start digging, unless he knew where to dig. She ought to have the say about that, but he hated to ask her.

Riders coming. Poole men, maybe, after Nate Wheeler. They oughtn't to bother the widow now, the way she was feeling. The kid started running, slipping through the shadows with no noise at all scarcely; running like an Indian, and not with heavy, clumping steps that could be heard a mile. He reached the cabin door and opened it while the riders were still at the gate. In the dark he could not see the woman, but he heard the creak of the rocking chair pause and he heard the baby's sleepy little whimper, protesting because she had stopped rocking.

"Men a-comin' heah, Ma'am. If yo'all don't want 'em—"

"Oh, let 'em come," she answered wearily. "They can't do any more damage. They've got Nate—they ought to be satisfied with that."

She got up and crossed the room, and presently the kid saw her face, dead white in the flare of a match she was drawing across the lamp wick. She blew out the match and slipped the glass chimney within the little brass guards, working with one hand, the baby drooping over the other shoulder, staring sleepily at the light. Clean chimney, the kid noticed. Clean, with little flecks of lint that disappeared in the heat of the flame. Good housekeeper—Nate Wheeler had a good wife, anyway.

The riders stopped outside the cabin and some one whistled a call—but it was not the night-bird call Babe Garner had taught the kid. Different. This was the first strain of that old war song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." The kid's lips puckered thoughtfully and he repeated the strain, standing just inside the closed door. Friends, they must be; that is, friends of the Wheelers. He wouldn't have to dig that grave, after all. The kid was glad, for he hated grave digging. It was a job they always put off onto him at home and he had got so he hated the sight of a pick and shovel. Still, of course, when it was a case of have-to—

He opened the door and the men came in; four of them, one after the other. Shaggy, farmer-looking men, with stubbly cheeks that stuck out on one side with great cuds of tobacco. The kid felt a vague distaste for them. They better look out where they spit, he warned them mentally. She'd just scrubbed the floor that day and they better be careful.

They halted at sight of him, huddling just within the room instead of scattering, as they ought to have done if they meant to start something. But the kid's hat was off, and though it dangled from his left hand he looked at home there, somehow. Besides, they had got their signal all right. The leader, a tall man with eyes too close together and separated only by a high, thin beak of a nose, glanced around the room and relaxed when he saw the little woman in the chair, rocking her baby to sleep and patting its little pink dress with soothing, stroking motions of her right hand. He did not see what was on the bed, for that was behind the door in the shadow, and the kid stood in the way. The tall man relaxed, dropped his hand to his side.

"We come to tell Nate there's a meetin' over to Hans Becker's place and we'd like to have him go along." He cast another suspicious glance toward the kid and checked what more he would have said. "You better get ready and go too. The women are talkin' about stayin' all together over there, where it's a big house and plenty of room, till we git the Poole—" He stopped again. "This boy workin' for you?" he asked brusquely.

"He's—been helping me—"

"Oh. I don't call him to mind. Yuh want to look out for strangers. Where's Nate?"

The little woman lifted her hand from patting the baby, and pointed one finger sternly to the corner where stood the bed.

"Sick?" The tall man lowered his voice, scowling a little. The kid sensed that a sick nester would be considered a nuisance.

A headshake was his answer, and the kid did not move. The man's scowl deepened.

"No time to go on a toot, with the Poole—"

"They got him." Nate's wife spoke in that dull, level tone which the kid hated to hear. "Shot him on the road somewhere. The boy found him and brought him home."

The kid stood aside for them, as they rushed to the bed to look at Nate, but no one paid any attention to him. Not then. The tall man brought the lamp and they examined the body rather thoroughly, stooping with their heads almost touching, lifting the arms and turning the body this way and that. They muttered together, but the kid could not hear what they said, because he stayed back, near the foot of the bed. Near the door too. No use letting them block the way out, even if they did think he was working for the Wheelers. He would have been, he reckoned, if things had gone different.

One man went to the wash bench and filled the basin with water.

"There's clean rags on the lower shelf of the cupboard there behind the stove," said Nate's wife, without turning her head or looking any way except straight before her. She knew what was going on, then. The kid let out a careful breath. She wasn't so upset she didn't know, and she wouldn't say anything to give him away. Well, come to think of it, she couldn't. She didn't know anything to tell.

One man held the basin, another the lamp, a third man washed where the tall man told him to. The kid's eyes went again and again to the tall man's face, bent down in the full light of the lamp. Mean looking, that nester. Plumb ornery and mean and tricky. The kid thought that even if the tall man was a friend you wouldn't want to turn your back on him. Just looking at him made yo'all feel like lifting your hair and showing your teeth like a dog.

There was a sudden and significant pause in the washing. The tall man leaned over and probed carefully with a finger, then stood up and spat over his shoulder into the shadows. The kid's tiger stare became more fixed and malevolent at that, but he craned his neck to hear what the man was going to say about that hole in Nate Wheeler's head. The tall man did not mention the wound, however. Instead of that, he looked past his companions, fixing his unpleasant gaze on the kid.

"You over there, what's yore name?"

"Bob Reeves," said the kid, looking down at his hat, which was about on a level with every gun butt in the room.

"Reeves—don't know that name. Where you from?"

"Brazos." The kid did not lift his eyes—much. But he got a pretty comprehensive view through his lashes. He saw the three move a little away from the tall man, as if they expected something.

"He brought Nate home to me. And he did the chores." The little woman in the rocking chair, holding the sleep-slackened form of her baby in her arms, stopped rocking and turned her anguished eyes upon the tall man. "He's been awful nice and accommodating, Pete Gorham."

"Accommodatin'!" The tall man snarled the word like an oath. "Prob'ly one of the Poole's new Texas killers they shipped in! You heard him—he's from the Brazos. That's in Texas. Accommodatin'! Accommodated you, mebby, by killin' Nate. Willin' to take Nate's place, mebby!" The sneer in that sentence was so obvious that the man with the basin spilled half the water while he growled a remonstrance.

The kid lifted his eyes now, though one was squinted shut and the other was the eye of a tiger. They did not see him draw his gun, but the little woman jumped and caught her baby up against her breast at the shattering roar of the kid's shot.

"That's to earmark yo'all so white folks'll know and walk wide of a skunk," drawled the kid, as the tall man clapped hand to his head. "And that's for spittin' on the floor," he added, on the echo of another shot. "Scuse me, Ma'am—I couldn't stand to see him insult yo'all that-a-way."

No one in that room saw the kid make a hurried move, but the door opened, fanned the acrid haze of powder smoke and, shut with a bang. Where the kid had stood there was empty space. They looked at one another, and they looked at Pete Gorham, with the blood trickling down each side of his neck from bullet holes bored through the gristly tops of his ears that stood out against the black brim of his hat.