Читать книгу Trails Meet - B.M. Bower - Страница 8

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BOB lighted a fresh cigarette with the stub of the last one. "Been talkin' that way for a week," he said more calmly. "Offered to sell me some secret he had—or take me in on it, either one. Some blackmail scheme, I took it to be. Say anything to you?"

"Well, he started to. Did he tell you some treacherous devils were after him and would kill him for what he knew?"

"I'll say he did! Why, I had to hunt the place over with a flashlight the other night. He claimed men was hiding behind the haystack with hand grenades. Next night it was rifles."

Jess looked astonished. "What gets me, Bob, is that a man like Senator Wolsey would have Parsons for a ranch manager," he said.

"Yeah," Bob agreed, "that does look queer till you know the inside. They was friends before the War. Senator was a dollar man. Parsons served overseas. Captain or something. Gas and a touch of shell shock. Senator put him in charge here to kinda keep him where it's quiet. I got to hand it to him, Al Parsons was sure all there when it come to handlin' the books and looking after the business end. Course, he let Tom handle the outside. He didn't know which end of a cow was the front, hardly, but he was hell for figgerin'. I don't guess all this craziness would of broke out on him again if he'd 'a' let the booze alone."

Jess got up, flinging out both hands with a dismissing gesture. "Well, that accounts for the whole thing, doesn't it? Shell shock and whisky. I don't think we need to look any farther than that. Do you, Bob?"

Bob waited while he turned the matter over in his mind. Then he too straightened with an unconscious air of satisfaction.

"You said it, kid. Soon as you told me the way he talked last night, I had him pegged. Same old nutty notion. Lord, we been hearin' that for a week, over at the ranch. Old stuff. No, I don't guess we need to worry no more. He done it his own self, just like he said he would."

Jess tested the water in the tub with his finger, drawing an invisible scroll. His face had brightened wonderfully.

"It certainly takes quite a load off my mind," he confessed, looking across at Bob with a half smile of relief. "I'm sorry it happened, of course. But I won't have to worry about those shots any more, that's one comfort. It's safe to assume that I heard five."

"Sure, that's all you heard. All you could hear. The first time he fired was down the road about a mile. Anyway, that's my guess, and it's as good as any. It's where the trail from here comes into the main road. I thought maybe Chuck had met up with him there and they both stopped and took a few drinks, and maybe had words or something. I was just guessin', understand."

"Pretty wild guess, I'd say."

"Well, I found the bottle there where Parsons had ditched it. Empty, of course, and I know for a fact he started off with a full pint. Didn't look like he'd drink all that in them few miles—not unless he had help. His horse was away this side. He'd tried to beat it back toward home, but a bridle rein got caught in some bushes, so he stayed right there. Dead gentle; Parsons couldn't ride anything else." He flipped his cigarette into the ashes and resettled his wet hat on his head. "Well, I got to be ridin'. You set tight, kid, and don't say nothin' to nobody. Ritchie's bankin' on yuh."

He left as abruptly as he had arrived, and Jess went to work on the cabin floor man fashion, sprinkling condensed lye on certain gruesome splotches, sloshing on warm water with a basin and scrubbing the boards vigorously with the stubby broom. He brought in Chuck's blankets and hung them before the fireplace, built up a hot fire and watched them steam while he cleaned the cupboards. He whistled and sang over his work, because he did not want to think. Yet the day dragged interminably. By late afternoon the rain ceased. Chuck could come at any time he pleased. His blankets were dry and his bunk made up ready for use, the floor was clean, with no glaring stains, and there was nothing whatever to rouse curiosity or comment, so far as Jess could discover.

Drying those blankets had used up the cut wood and Chuck hated an empty woodbox, probably because it suggested cutting more, which he abhorred. Jess went out to the woodpile, glad of a valid reason for leaving the cabin for awhile. He wished he could think of as sound a reason for riding home that evening, and he stood debating with himself while he gazed down through the low pass and out across the misty level. Pale sunlight threw a delicate radiance upon the hills beyond, giving to the wide arms of the JR coulee a specious smiling look of invitation, as if they waited expectantly, ready to welcome him home.

Jess sighed. Whatever welcome there was for him there would be as inarticulate as the hills, he told himself. And whatever there was of harsh disapproval would be expressed with look and word. In twenty-four years Jess had learned quite well what to expect and had built a barrier of aloofness between himself and his home. Unless he knew his father was gone, he would not ride without reason through his own gate.

And it was his own gate, though his father chose to ignore the legal fact. It had been his grandfather's ranch in the first place, and his grandfather had stood protectively between Jess and the father who hated him. Dave Robison had wanted a girl child. He did not like boys, he said. He wanted a girl, and he meant to name her Jessie. It happened that Jess was born. He got the name and his father's displeasure along with it. A few years later that became hate when Jess inherited the ranch, to be held in trust for him until he was twenty-five. Grandfather Robison, meaning to be prudent, unwittingly left his favorite a bitter gift when he added that clause.

Jess had never seen a copy of that will. No one except his mother had ever talked of it. But he remembered in a general way what his grandfather had wanted. The home ranch was to be held in trust for Jess until he was twenty-five, then turned over to him with all cattle and horses running under the JR brand. In the event of his death, or if he should prove to be unworthy or incompetent to own and manage such a piece of property, then the title should pass to his father if living, or to his other heirs.

An odd arrangement, Jess thought it. He remembered thinking it was queer when he heard it read just after his grandfather's funeral. He was only ten and his father had ordered him from the room. But an old man who held the paper—the lawyer, he later understood—had looked over his glasses and said, "If that is the boy named Jesse, he has a right to be present. The will concerns him intimately."

So Jess had stayed and had listened with the big ears commonly supposed to belong to little pitchers like himself. He heard that Grampaw had given him the JR ranch and stock, only his father would be boss just the same for years and years. His father had the ranch over on Birch Creek, and all the Lightning cattle, and some mortgages and things. He knew that his father was terribly angry at Grampaw. He didn't have to say so, his looks showed that. He hoped that anger would not include himself, because he wasn't to blame if Grampaw wanted to give him the ranch. He guessed Grampaw had a right to do what he pleased with his own things.

Even at ten Jess had understood perfectly why his father led him into the big empty barn that afternoon and whipped him until his shirt stuck to his back. It wasn't because he had been caught in the act of feeding his colt a handful of oats; it was because Grampaw had given him the JR ranch.

Later on, his understanding grew to a broader comprehension of the situation. His grandfather had meant to demonstrate his faith in the boy who had not been wanted. He wished to encourage Jess to grow up with an ambition in life, to be an honest, industrious young man altogether worthy of the gift that waited for him. As it worked out, Jess was rated a black sheep without having earned the title. And he was stubborn—that much at least he had inherited from his father. He knew that his faults were magnified to others, that even the JR riders thought and spoke of him slightingly because his father set them the example. He knew that his father treated him as if he were a born fool; that he was called lazy, shiftless, stubborn as a mule.

But he also knew what he wanted, what he meant to accomplish, and that without forfeiting his right to his inheritance when the time came. Let them talk, let them think what they pleased. The hard years had taught him self-control, patience. Behind his barrier of reserve he stood invulnerable, biding his time. Lizbeth stood by him, and his mother as much as she dared. Little Joe, his younger brother, was a weather vane, turning whichever way the wind blew. Joe was just a kid, anyway, and didn't count much. Sixteen and aspiring to be a champ rider. But Lizbeth—for a girl she certainly showed good stuff. Brains, grit—she seemed to be wise to everything and everybody.

It was Lizbeth whom Jess particularly wanted to see. He could tell her about Parsons and see what she thought about it. And he wanted to show her that picture he made last night and see what she thought about putting that wolf back in again. Lizbeth was keen. She seemed to get right to the heart of a thing.

But there was no reason why he should ride over home now when the storm was over, and he would have to get up early and cut poles. Jess picked up the ax and went to work chopping alder branches and trunks too heavy for poles. The task appealed to him, gave him a satisfaction difficult to express in words.

He liked the quick deep bites of the sharp blade into the gray-barked sticks. The clean woodsy smell of the fresh cuts, their creamy shade against the gray struck a pleasant note in the dreary mood that had held him through the day. He admired the smooth glitter of his ax when he lifted it up into a slanting bar of sunshine. His father would have snorted and called him a half-wit when he raised the ax and held it poised in mid-air while he studied it, tilting his head this way and that and squinting along its dazzling surface.

Even Chuck would have chortled when he described that performance to the other boys as proof that Jess was not all there mentally. But Jess had long ago learned discretion. He did not hold an ax up in the air and turn it this way and that to catch the light when he was likely to be observed.

Alone, he was likely to behave strangely. Just now he took the trouble to toss the chopped sticks over against a dwarfed juniper bush growing out from under a huge brown boulder, because it had suddenly occurred to him what an effective color combination that would make. At least, he wanted to try it out and see just how it would look—and he thought how Lizbeth would be the only one in the family he would want to know of the experiment.

He chopped with intermittent zeal, building a shapely gray cone with touches of old ivory against the green and brown. Now and then he would stop and stand for some minutes motionless, staring steadfastly at the heap. Though he would presently tear it down and carry it inside, it seemed to be vitally important just now to shape the pile just so; important enough to send him over there twice to turn certain sticks so that the split sides were uppermost.

Working so, Jess chopped wood enough to keep the fireplace going for three full evenings. It took that much wood to build the pile as high as he must have it, in order to balance the other objects in his simple still-life composition.

He believed he had struck an unusual note there, particularly in the effect of the orange-tinted sunlight on rock and bush and the gray-and-old-ivory woodpile. The color contrast in that scraggly bush growing out from under the rock fascinated him. The gray of the wood was just the right tone, only he didn't want a woodpile—

A gray wolf. That was it. Or wolf pups sunning themselves just about where the woodpile stood now. Three or four of them, with perhaps one sitting up against the juniper, looking out across the prairie, watching for their mother. He'd put the den just down there where that low branch lay along the ground; paint out the branch altogether and show an edge of gravel bank and the hole, the kind of place a wolf would choose for her den. That creamy tint of the inside wood—he would need a touch of that in the foreground. Not wood, of course. You wouldn't be likely to find any sticks of freshly split wood beside a wolf den—

Bones! Of course, he thought with a sigh of relief. Ivory white joints of a calf's leg, fresh and smooth—those little devils of pups would have polished and gnawed till the shanks were clean as a whistle. That's why they'd be watching for the old lady to come bringing more meat.

He sent a questioning stare into the sun. Old lady wolves, he remembered, would not be coming in at sundown. Not likely, anyway. They did their hunting at night. If she ranged out a long way from home—and she'd be pretty apt to—she might be getting back a little after sunrise. This yellow light on rock and bush—well, if the den faced west instead of east, the early morning sun would look like that. Just about as soft a yellow, almost orange.

Jess sighed without knowing it. That picture should be done in oil. That's what Russell would use as a matter of course. But what was a fellow going to do when he had no easel, no canvas, no paint—worse still, when he had no place where he could work on a picture and be safe from prying eyes and the jeering comments of a fellow like Chuck, who was always trying to be funny at some one's expense? Crayon it would have to be. He could work faster with the pastels, of course, but they would not bear much handling afterward except when framed under glass, and that was quite as impracticable as paint. It seemed as though he must struggle along handicapped at every turn, with some of his best work smudged and spoiled because he must slip around and do it on the sly and carry it hidden like bootleg liquor. There were moments when Jess boiled up almost to the point of exploding into rebellion, yet somehow he never did explode.

An indefinable scuffing noise up near the top of the hundred-foot slope pulled his thoughts away from the problem. He turned and looked up that way, but the sun dazzled him and he could see nothing. The noise stopped. A rabbit, probably, rattling the brush. He brought his gaze back to the juniper bush, the boulder and the stack of wood, but the picture he had visioned was gone, elusive as the wolf pups he had almost seen sitting there, watching for the old she-wolf to come trotting up with her kill.

For another full minute he stood trying to recapture his artist's mood, but to no avail. The spirit, the atmosphere of the picture was gone. He could no longer imagine a group of perky-eared pups sitting there on their haunches, licking hungry chops, the tooth-polished bones of earlier feastings scattered at their feet. He could see no half-concealed den mouth showing at the top of a gravelly bank; nothing except a pile of wood that must be carried inside for his supper fire.

Up among the rocks the rabbit, if rabbit it was, scuffed again with a stealthy sound and a handful or so of fine gravel came sliding down, but Jess did not look that way again. His picture mood was gone, he was back to the unpleasant facts of his surroundings. He walked over to the juniper bush, knelt on one knee with his back to the bluff and began piling sticks across his left arm.

He was just tensing his leg muscles to rise with a full armload when something struck his hat down over his eyes with a vicious blow that knocked him forward. It seemed as though the whole hill came down on top of him. He was dimly aware of the noise of rocks, wet earth and snapping brush rushing over and around him, then he sank into a velvet blackness where even dreams could not follow.