Читать книгу The Dry Ridge Gang - Bertha Muzzy Sinclair - Страница 5

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I’ve given myself a week or two for getting acquainted with Ray’s family and the people around Porcupine, and then when I have the feel of the country, the atmosphere, if you know what I mean, I shall settle down and seriously begin what I have chosen as my life work. That is authorship. The West is as good a locale as any for a first novel. The breeziness and the spirit of adventure lend themselves to lighter fiction, though of course I shall aim much higher than that as soon as I have had some practice and have acquired the ease that makes for a smooth, flowing style.

As a preparation for my real start, I shall from time to time write down the happenings here on the Big Bend ranch. I’m beginning to see the vague outlines of my plot already. I had hoped to take a high dive into adventure of some sort, but I suppose one never does in real life; or very seldom. Still, I have an idea that I can take the Dry Ridge gang, put more pep into them and a good dramatic climax and make quite a story. Have them raid the ranch and kidnap Ellie, perhaps. A kidnaping is always good, and it could be as a challenge to her sheriff father, the price of her safe return being his promise to resign or something like that, and never run for office again.

That judge would make a fine villain, the secret enemy working under cover. Maybe he wanted his son to have the sheriff’s job—something of that sort. I’ll work it out when I get down to business. A political angle will sort of tone up the Wild West action and keep it out of the dime-novel class. But that can wait. I’m not building plot now—just jotting down my impressions and the little everyday incidents that will make good filling and give authenticity to the whole thing.

Descriptions, too. I don’t want to overlook my on-the-ground descriptions. And of course I mean to study the characters. I want to see a lot of the sheriff. He’s a card. I’m glad I sat down and wrote up my arrival right away. Got it down while it was hot, and now I can bring myself up to date.

Ray took me out on horseback first thing, to show me wild country as he had promised. I had better set it down, I think. It’s necessary to have it where I won’t forget.

The Whitcome ranch was called Big Bend because the Missouri River almost surrounded his tract of land. A map would show it as a great loop of the river which came within a mile or so of meeting on the end toward Porcupine. Probably two thirds of the land was rich grass that must have made fine grazing. And there were large hay meadows down next the east side of the Bend. The other third ran back from the home ranch for miles and was certainly wild enough for anybody, though I deviled Ray a good deal about it and told him it reminded me very much of certain portions of Long Island.

Most of it was spotted with white sand dunes which shifted with the wind and never looked twice the same, except that the sides were always steep and wrinkled with wavy lines, like the ripples on water when a breeze passes over. A man could easily lose himself in there if he got back away from the river and didn’t know his thickets and scattered groves of cottonwoods and box elder. There was a creepy look about the whole of it. Even the wooded hollows had a secretiveness, hemmed in with those ghostly sand hills, some of them higher than the tallest of the trees.

I wanted to look over my shoulder to see if anything was following my tracks. I imagined I heard things easing off into thicker brush as we rode past—and I haven’t a doubt that my imagination came pretty close to the truth. There were deep unexpected gullies like ragged gashes in the earth, and these were rock-rimmed and difficult to cross. There were wild cattle that tossed horns and tails and scampered off with a great crackling of brush when we rode up close. In the grassy openings we found them mostly. Back among the dunes there were tracks of wolves and bobcats, just as Ray had said there would be, and other animals I didn’t ask about.

For two or three hours I let Ray lead me around through that ungodly mess before I would admit it was wild enough to suit me. Then I told him I’d had enough, and for the Lord’s sake to lead me out of there. Which he did finally, after a harrowing season of riding to the hilltops and looking this way and that, trying to get his direction by the way the river ran. Trouble was, he couldn’t always see the river, and when he did, he didn’t seem sure which way it was running. He kept saying we couldn’t get lost, really, because we’d have to cross the river to get out of the Bend unless we passed within sight of the ranch. But I noticed he looked mighty relieved when at last we came up a grassy knoll and saw a gate just down the other side.

That’s the Big Bend. Six or eight miles it must be to the end of the loop, probably farther. I’m not much good at judging distances, but I know it took us a good two hours to make it from the farthest tip to the gate. I had my watch for evidence of that. I ought to add that the river where it swung around the tip was wide and deep and ugly looking, and the opposite shore was all steep bluffs and rock-rimmed ledges, where the scant soil was dull red or yellow, and the rocks themselves looked old and worn and blackened by the weather of ages.

When we topped the knoll just before reaching the gate, Ray pointed out Dry Ridge, away across the river to the south. He said we would ride over there some day and take a look at it. And while I was not at all eager for a closer view, I know better than to let Ray see any lack of enthusiasm on my part. From where we sat our horses, Dry Ridge looked very much like any other high and barren ridge ten miles off, with the sun shining on it. It certainly didn’t seem to offer much cover for bank robbers and I told Ray so. But he merely replied that I had better wait until I got over there.

Beyond the gate we climbed another hill and had a fine view of the whole country, from the Highwoods and the Belt Mountains on the east to the Rockies, shining white against the sky far off to the west. I could see the great loop of the river, and I got then my first clear impression of the Big Bend as a whole, and how a little more erosion—say a few thousand years or so—would have eaten a channel straight across the narrow north end of the loop and turned it into an island. Three or four miles away to the west, just where the river started to swing south around a point of the high plateau—Ray called it a bench—I saw another ranch and asked Ray whose it was.

“Oh, by George! One of my old sweethearts lives over there—or did, last time I was home. Named Mollie—no, Mabel—well, something like that, anyway. Big black eyes and a mouth made to be kissed. You know. Used to be chummy with Sis. We’ll ride over there to-morrow, Walter. You like black eyes and kissable mouths, as I happen to know. She’s just your type. I’ll have to lay off, now I’m engaged to Beatrice. But I’ll take you over and introduce you, anyway. No harm in that.”

“Not a bit in the world,” I replied, “except that I won’t have much time for girls this summer. I’m going to work, remember. And if I get in some time fishing, that’s about all the recreation I’ll need.”

But you can’t head Ray off, once he gets an idea into his brain. Next day he insisted on taking me over to meet the girl named Mollie, or Mabel perhaps, with the black eyes and the mouth made to be kissed.

Well, she had a nice mouth, I admit, and her eyes were a soft dark brown. But her name was neither Mabel nor Mollie, but Florence. I could have kicked Ray all the way home for the way that girl looked at him and for not even remembering her name. Here she had stayed home and dreamed her dreams about the young ape, and he had gone off to new loves and had all but forgotten her. Just at the time I hated him for the way her eyes lighted up when he told her none of the girls in the East would have a chance if she was around—all that blarney. I’d heard him talk along that same line to fifteen or twenty different girls at different times in the four years I had known him, and I wished I had the nerve to tell her so. She was too nice, really, to make a fool of herself over a good-looking scamp like Ray. I know he never meant harm to a living soul in his life, but that didn’t help the girls much who took his love-making seriously.

Incidentally, I met the father, whom men called old Jack Johnson behind his back, though he seemed to me almost in the prime of life; and her two brothers, Fred and Steve. They owned a horse ranch and seemed fairly prosperous, and more up-to-date than the general run of farmers—or ranchers, I should call them.

I took quite a fancy to Steve, perhaps because I discovered he was as crazy about fishing as I am. He offered to take me back in the hills across the river to a trout stream where he swore the fish would jump clear out of the water to strike a fly, and then fight like the devil to get rid of it.

He certainly had me all hopped up, as Ray would put it. I had about come to the conclusion that trout streams were about as scarce as buffalo and wild Indians in Montana. What I had seen of the country so far seemed to run to extremes, with all the water in the State running down the channel of the Missouri, and the rest of the country dry as a bone. There wasn’t a creek that I had seen in all the Big Bend country we had explored, and I couldn’t see anything but bald prairie and rocky hills across the river.

It had worried me a lot more than I had let on. As a matter of fact, I had come West with Ray chiefly for sake of the fishing and hunting in new and untamed country. Ray had led me to believe that I could walk out from the ranch at sunrise and catch a mess of trout for breakfast any day in the season. It had been quite a jolt when the sheriff had carelessly told me he believed there were lots of trout “up in the hills”, and had pointed to a hazy group of hills off on the sky line.

So you can see why I cottoned to Steve Johnson. By the time Ray jarred loose from his absorbing conversation with the girl and was ready to start home, I was counting the hours until I could feel against my legs the push of a cold mountain stream such as Steve described, and hear the singing of my reel when an eighteen-inch trout darted off with my hook in his gills. If I could just have one day in the hills such as Steve had described to me, I thought, I’d consider well spent the time and money it had cost me to get here. I could settle down then to my desk perfectly satisfied and ready for work.

I’ve jotted that down just to get the contrast between my hopes and intentions and the things that really did take up my mind and my time when I rode to the hills.