Читать книгу Under Three Flags - Bert Leston Taylor - Страница 5

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A loud pounding on the door of his room in the tavern at South Ashfield awakens Mr. Jack Ashley from a dream of piscatorial conquest.

“Four o’clock!” announces the disturber of his slumbers, with a parting thump. Ashley rolls out of bed and plunges his face into a brimming bowl of spring water.

It is early dawn. A cool breeze, laden with the scent of apple blossoms, drifts through the window.

“God made the country and man made the town,” quotes the young man, as he descends to the hotel office.

“Ain’t used to gittin’ up at this hour, be ye?” grins the proprietary genius of the tavern.

“The habit, worthy host, has not fastened upon me seriously. This is usually my hour for going to bed. Hast aught to eat?”

“Breakfas’ all ready,” with a nod toward what is known as the dining-room.

Ashley shudders as he gazes at the spread. It is the usual Vermont breakfast—weak coffee, two kinds of pie on one plate, and a tier of doughnuts.

“Gad! This country is a howling wilderness of pie!” he mutters, surveying the repast in comical despair. “And to flash it on a man at 4 a.m.! It is simply barbarous!”

During his short vacation sojourn Mr. Ashley’s epicurean tastes have suffered a number of distinct shocks. But the ozone of the Green Mountains has contributed toward the generation of an appetite that needs little tempting to expend its energies. He makes a hearty breakfast on this particular morning, drowns the memories of the menu in a bowl of milk, and announces to Landlord Howe that he is ready to be directed to the best trout brook in central Vermont.

Mr. Howe surveys the eight-ounce bamboo with mild disdain. “Them fancy rigs ain’t much good on our brooks,” he declares. “Ketch more with a 75-cent rod.”

“I am rather inclined to agree with you on that point, most genial boniface; but it’s the only rod I happen to have with me, and I expect to return with some fish unless the myriad denizens of the brook which you enthusiastically described last night exist only in your imagination. By the way, what do you think of the bait?” passing over a flask.

Mr. Howe’s faded blue eyes moisten and a kindly smile plays over a countenance browned by many summers in the hay field.

“Didn’t buy that in Vermont,” he ventures.

“Hardly. I’m not lined with asbestos.”

The landlord grins. It is a habit he has.

“I keeps a little suthin’ on hand myself,” he confides in a cautious undertone, although only the cattle are listening. “But fact is, there ain’t no use er keepin’ better’n dollar’n a half a gallon liquor. The boys want suthin’ that’ll scratch when it goes down. Now that, I opine,” with an affectionate glance at the flask which Ashley files away for future reference, “must a cost nigh onter $3 a gallon.”

“As much as that,” smiles Ashley. “That, most appreciative of bonifaces, is the best whisky to be found on Fulton street, New York. Well, I must be ‘driving along.’ Where’s this wonderful brook of yours?”

“Follow that road round through the barnyard and ‘cross the basin to the woods. Good fishin’ for four miles. And mind,” as Ashley saunters away, “don’t bring back any trouts that ain’t six inches long, or the fish warden will light on ye.”

“Thanks. If I should run across the warden—” and Ashley holds up the flask.

“That’d fetch him, I reckon,” chuckles Mr. Howe. Ashley vaults over the bars and strides across the meadows.

Ashley is in high feather. “This air rather discounts an absinthe frappe for stimulative purposes,” he soliloquizes. “Ah, here’s the wood, there’s the brook, and if I mistake not, yonder pool hides a whopper just aching for a go at the early worm.” But it doesn’t and Ashley enters the forest.

The farther he plunges into the spice-laden wilderness the more is he enchanted with his surroundings. Picture a cleft in the mountain whose sides drop almost sheer to a gorge barely wide enough to accommodate a wood road and a brook that parallels and often encroaches upon it. Tall pines interlace and shut out the direct rays of the sun and every now and then a cascade comes tumbling somewhere aloft and plunges into a broad, pebble-lined basin.

As Ashley sits by one of these pools, his wading boots plunged deep in the crystal liquid, and pulls lazily on a briar pipe, the reader is offered the opportunity of becoming better acquainted with him.

He is a prepossessing young fellow of something like 27, medium height and rather well built. Blue eyes and an aggressive nose, on which gold-bowed eyeglasses are airily perched, are characteristics of a face which has always been a passport for its owner into all society worth cultivating. A well-shaped head is adorned with a profusion of blond curls, supplemented by a mustache of silken texture and golden hue, which its possessor is fond of twisting when he is in a blithesome humor, which is often, and of tugging at savagely when in a reflective mood, which is infrequent.

Ashley is noted among his friends for chronic good humor and unbounded confidence in his own abilities. He is one of the brightest all-round writers on the New York Hemisphere, and he knows it. The best of it is, City Editor Ricker also knows it. All the office sings of his exploits and “beats” and does their author reverence. Jack always calls himself a newspaper man. That is the sensible title. Yet he might wear the name of journalist much more worthily.

Ashley is in Vermont for his health. Five years of continuous hustling on a big New York daily has necessitated a breathing spell. He was telling Mr. Ricker that his “wheels were all run down and needed repairing,” and that he believed he would take his vacation early this year.

“I’ll tell you where you want to go,” volunteered the city editor, who was “raised” among the Green Mountains and served his apprenticeship gathering locals on a Burlington weekly.

“All right; let’s have it.”

“Take three weeks off and go up into Vermont.”

“Vermont—Vermont—where’s Vermont? O, yes, that green daub on the map of New England. Railroad run through there?”

“Now, see here, Jack,” retorted Ricker, “you’re not so confoundedly ignorant as you imply. That’s the trouble with you New Yorkers who were born and bred here. You consider everything above the Harlem River a jay community. You’re a sight more provincial than half the inhabitants of rural New England.”

Jack laughed. “Come to think of it, you hailed from there.”

“Yes, and it’s a mighty good State to hail from. Now, you run up to Raymond—it’s a little town about in the Y of the Green Mountain range. You’ll not have Broadway, with its theaters, and restaurants, and bars, but you’ll get a big room, with a clean, airy bed to sleep in—none of your narrow hall-chamber cots—and good, plain, wholesome food to eat. Those necessities of life which Vermont does not supply, good tobacco and good whisky, you can take with you. You’ll come back feeling like a fighting cock.” And before his chief finished painting the attractions of the Green Mountain State, with incidental references to John Stark and Ethan Allen, Ashley was willing to compromise and two days later found him en route for Raymond.

Jack fishes the brook as he does everything else—without any waste of mental or physical exertion.

Landlord Howe did not deceive him. It is an excellent trout brook, and by the time the sun is well up he has acquired a well-filled creel. He is sauntering along to what he has decided shall be the last pool, when, as he turns a bend in the road, he runs upon a man lying beside the path, with one arm shading his face and clutching in the other hand a package.

“Hello!” sings out Ashley, stopping short in surprise. The man arises and passes his hand over his eyes in bewilderment.

“Off the main road, aren’t you?” queries Ashley. The stranger makes no reply. He bestows upon Ashley a single searching glance and hurries down the road in the direction of the village.

“He’ll be likely to know me again,” is Jack’s comment. “Gad! What eyes! They went through me like a stiletto. What the deuce is he prowling around here for at this time o’ day? He isn’t a fisherman and he can’t be farming it with those store clothes on. Well, here goes for the last trout.”

The last trout is not forthcoming, however, so the fisherman unjoints his rod, reloads and fires his pipe and strolls slowly back to the hotel. Landlord Howe sees him as he comes swinging across the basin and waits with some impatience until the young man gets within hailing distance, when he informs him dramatically:

“Big murder at Raymond last night.”

“How big?” asks Ashley, with lazy interest. Murders are frequent episodes in his line of business.

Well, it is the largest affair that Mr. Howe has known of “round these parts since dad was a kid.” Roger Hathaway, cashier of the Raymond National bank, has been found murdered and the bank robbed of a large sum of money, and there is no clew to the murderer. The details of the tragedy have come over the telephone wires early this morning, and the whole county is in a fever of excitement.

“No clew?” muses Ashley, and his interest in the affair grows. Then he thinks of the man he encountered on the brook an hour ago. “Seen any strangers around here?” he inquires of Mr. Howe.

“No one ’cept you,” replies that worthy, contributing a broad grin.

“Oh, but I can prove an alibi,” laughs Jack. “I came down from Raymond on the early evening train, and everyone was alive in the town then, I guess. Are the police of this village on the lookout?”

“Well, rather. The local deputy sheriff is on the alert as never before in his life.”

“It is not impossible that my early morning friend on the brook was mixed up in last night’s affair,” thinks Ashley. But he says nothing of the meeting. What is the use? If the unknown was fleeing he must be pretty well into the next county by this time. But in what direction?

The Raymond murder is the one topic of the day at South Ashfield. The villagers are gathered in force about the hotel veranda and Ashley fancies that they regard him a trifle askance as he hunts up a chair and kills an hour while waiting for the up-train, in listening to the rural persiflage of the group and the ingenious theories of the local oracle.

“At what time did the killing occur?” he inquires of one of the loungers. Somewhere around 8 o’clock the night before, he is informed.

“And no clew to the murderer,” he meditates. “Now, if this was New York I’d take hold of the affair and work it for all it was worth.”

He little dreams what effect the “affair” is to have on his future. Yet as the train bears him to Raymond the instinct of the newspaper man tells him that it is a cast possessing phases of peculiar interest. And he is not wholly unprepared for the telegram that is thrust into his hands when he leaves the train.

“One of the disadvantages of telling your paper where you intend spending your vacation,” he remarks as he glances at the dispatch. Then to the telegraph operator: “I’ll have a story for you after supper.”