Читать книгу Rodeo - B.M. Bower - Страница 5

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DOWN in the lower pasture on a level stretch above the corral that stood against the creek bank, the Kid wheeled his clean-limbed sorrel, backed him over a line gouged in the meadow sod, shook out his loop, hung a small rope between his teeth and glanced toward the corral. A boy of twelve had just turned out a Hereford bull calf and was fastening the gate against others. As he swung his horse to chase the animal down past the waiting rider he pulled a watch from his pocket, squinted at it, looked at the calf, picked a white flag from beneath his thigh, held it aloft for a second, dipped it suddenly and shouted:

"Go!"

The sorrel leaped forward, the rope circling over the rider's head. A quick drumming of hoofbeats as they surged up alongside the running calf, and the loop shot out and over the animal's head as the Kid jumped off and ran forward. The sorrel settled back, holding the rope taut, and the Kid seized the fighting victim, flipped it dexterously on its side, grabbed and bound together a hind foot and the forefeet with the rope he jerked from between his teeth, gave a twist and a yank and rose, flinging up both hands in signal that he had finished. Whereupon the boy on the little bay cow-pony dropped the flag which he had been holding aloft, stared fixedly at the watch in his left hand and shouted in a high, clear treble that carried across to the Happy Family concealed in the willows along the creek:

"Kid Ben-nett! Ti-ime, for-tee sev'n an' one-fifth seck-unds!"

"Aw, you're all wet, Boy!" the roper disgustedly protested, looking up from freeing the young bull. "Where do you get that stuff? If I didn't make it in thirty flat, I'm a dry-farmer! You had your darned flag nailed to the mast after I signalled. Forty-seven my eye! And what's the idea of whittling it down to fifths? Go get an alarm clock, Boy. It'd beat that Sears-Roebuck stop watch, anyhow."

"Say, who's doin' this judgin', anyhow?" Boy demanded hotly. "You're penalized ten seconds, Kid Bennett, for gettin' over the foul line before the critter crossed the dead line!"

"Oh, go soak! I was a good six inches back of the line!" Kid suddenly laughed and flung out both arms, shooing the bull off down the flat. "I told you to hold me strictly down to the rules, Boy, but that don't mean you've got to disqualify me every time we come out here. And you needn't call time on me from the minute I saddle up, either! I made that in thirty flat, and I know it."

"Well, s'posin' you did? You want me to go swellin' your head every time you make a good throw? You got to get used to strict judgin'. I betcha Weary or Pink or any of the boys that's comin' can beat your time so far, Kid. You're good, but you ain't good enough yet. You just think you are."

"Well, give a fellow some show, anyway. Thirty flat is pretty good—especially when you ran in a bigger calf on me this time and never said a word. That baby weighs close to four hundred, and I'd bet money on it. He's one of the new bunch Dad just got. You can't fool me, Boy. He was a son-of-a-gun to lay down!"

"Well, for the crying-out-loud!" Boy leaned and spat into the grass, man-fashion. "What'd yuh want? One that'll lay down and stick his feet together and beller for you to come an' tie 'im? All them others is got so they'll do it, almost, you've throwed an' tied 'em so much. You want 'em big an' tough, Kid. You said the only way to get good is to throw big ones, so contest calves will feel like throwin' a tame cat!"

"Well, that's all right too," the Kid began temporizingly, when voices from the willows halted him. He swung that way, his face a mask of guarded resentment. An observant person would have seen the sensitive hurt in his eyes when laughter mingled with the words that came to him in fragments of sentences.

"—five hundred dollars for that calf," Chip was saying. "—break a leg—darned kids haven't got any sense—"

"—comes natural—" another voice broke in. And then, distinct, unforgivable, patronizing it seemed to the Kid, came that platitude, "Boys will be boys."

The Kid's lips set in a straight line. He sent a glance toward Boy, who was hastily untying his handkerchief flag from the stick. Boy looked scared, as if he had been caught in mischief. The Kid thrust a toe in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. He was riding away straight-backed and angry when Chip's voice stopped him.

"Hey, wait a minute! The boys are here and they want to say hello."

Kid gave the reins a twitch and the sorrel swung in toward the willows, from which the Happy Family came walking with eager steps. The Kid stared frankly, forgetting his resentment in the shock of this meeting.

Well as he remembered those idols of his childhood, Pink and Weary, Andy Green and the Native Son, he scarcely recognized them now. Like centaurs of the range they had ridden through his worshipful memory; the best riders in the world, he loyally believed; the best ropers, the best shots, the finest friends. Heroes all, drifting out of his life before he had learned that after all they were human, and being human they were subject to changes if they were to adapt themselves to new environments.

The Kid remembered them Stetsoned, booted and spurred, riding recklessly across the prairies, their careless laughter keeping time with the quick staccato of hoofbeats. While he had not taken the trouble to apply a bit of logic to the matter, it seemed reasonable to suppose that they would return very much as he had last seen them. They did not. The Native Son wore gray plaid knickers, woolly golf stockings, and low tan shoes. His coat was a soft gray and his modish cap was gray. Any country club would recognize him as one of their own kind, but to the Kid he was as alien as a Hindu in that meadow. Andy Green and Pink and Weary wore gray whipcord breeches, leather puttees and Panamas. Even their faces were unfamiliar, though Pink's dimples woke memories of bunk-house laughter long ago. Which one of the four, he wondered, had suggested that boys would be boys? Did they think he was merely playing, down there in the heat of afternoon? They and their Hollywood get-up!

"Say, you'll be a fair-sized man when you grow up," Weary greeted him facetiously as he reached up a hand to the Kid sitting there immobile on Stardust, looking down at them with a baffling reserve in his smoky gray eyes.

"Yes, I suppose I shall," the Kid agreed unsmilingly, as he shook hands. His old idol, Weary, wearing putts!

"Trying to be a re'l ol' cow-puncher, still," Andy Green observed lightly, hiding a great tenderness that welled up in his heart as he took the gloved hand of the Kid who had snuggled against him in the saddle, many's the time, and lisped grave prophecies of the wonderful things he would do when he was a man.

"Oh, no—just exercising the horse a little, is all. Real cow-punchers are a thing of the past. It's all out of date to talk of punching cows, Andy."

"It sure is with this registered stock," Chip grimly agreed. "Pretty expensive stuff to bust on a rope, Kid. You'll have to find something cheaper than these bulls to practise on."

"Where?" The Kid gave his dad a slow, level look, and leaned to shake hands with Pink and the Native Son. "I'm certainly glad to see you all," he said. But he did not look glad, and what he felt would never be put into words; the heartachy disappointment, the sense of loss and of bafflement. It was with a distinct feeling of relief that he saw them turn toward Boy, hovering near with the reins tight on his little bay cow-pony as if he were all ready to wheel and make a dash across the meadow.

"This is Cal's boy," Chip announced in the casual tone one usually adopts in introducing children to their grown-ups. "They've got a ranch up above Meeker's. Say, you wouldn't know old Cal! He's as big one way as he is the other—weighs over two hundred. But he's got a nice wife and bunch of kids. Boy's the oldest. Cal and his wife couldn't agree on a name for him, so they call him Boy."

"My name's Calvin Claude," Boy announced with bashful abruptness, and immediately his ears turned a deep red framed with his tow-colored hair.

"That's not according to your mother," Chip said teasingly. "You've heard a lot about Weary and Pink and Andy and Mig. Your dad used to punch cows with them before he got too fat to ride. If you're going home pretty soon, Boy, tell your dad the boys are here—got here sooner than we expected them. He may want to drive down after supper."

"All right. I'm goin' now." His round eyes still staring frankly at the four, Boy reined his horse away, hammered him on the ribs with his run-down heels and rode off.

"I think I'll ride over with him," the Kid announced suddenly, breaking a somewhat awkward pause. "I have an errand over that way. If I'm not back by supper time, Dad, tell Mother not to wait. I'll see you later, all of you. I'm surely glad to have met you again." Two fingers went up and tilted his gray Stetson half an inch downward as he wheeled and galloped after Boy, while the five stood there watching him go.

"Oughta have a camera on that," Andy muttered mechanically, though that is probably not what he was thinking.

"Say, if I could high-hat 'em like that, I could pull down ten thousand a week!" the Native Son murmured enviously.

Further than that they made no comment as they turned to walk back up the creek to the house. But Chip was chewing a corner of his lip in the way he did when he was bottling his fury, and the faces of the four looked as they did when they stood contemplating a blow-out ten miles from the nearest service station.

"The Kid's been off to college, you say?" Andy ventured, after a silent five minutes.

"One year is all. We wanted to put him in Berkeley or Stanford, but he balked and wouldn't go anywhere but Laramie. He's something of a problem," Chip confessed. "Dell wants him to be an M.D.—I don't know how that's going to pan out, though. Fact is, we can't seem to get a line on him, what he thinks or wants. Except that he's crazy about horses and guns, we don't know much about him."

"He's a dead ringer for you, Chip, when I first saw you," Weary said bluntly. "Taller, maybe, and his eyes are different. Better looking by a whole lot, but shut up inside of himself, the way you used to be. Seems to me you ought to get together somehow. You've got things in common; horses and saddles and ropes and spurs—lots of things."

"Theoretically, yes. But when a kid goes off to school you seem to lose all track of him. I didn't even know he could throw and tie a critter, till he did it just now. He never let on to me that he ever wanted to try." Chip stopped to roll a cigarette. "Acted sore because we caught him at it. He's a queer make-up, somehow."

"Wish we'd got there half a minute sooner," Weary observed. "I guess they were just playing contest, but still he musta made his catch, all right. That critter sure picked himself up like he'd been tied down and didn't like it. Looks to me, Chip, like he's got the earmarks, all right. Why don't yuh feel him out, kinda? The Old Man may be right. In fact, I think he is. The Kid has got the look—"

"What good would it do if he had?" Chip cut in sharply. "If it was twenty years ago—but it's now, remember. I don't want the Kid to have the old fever in his blood; not when there's nothing to work it out on. If we had open range and were running ten or twenty thousand head of cattle like we used to do—sure, I'd make a real hand of the Kid. Good as any of us, Weary. The Kid's got the stuff in him, but the less it's cultivated the better off he is. I don't know whether he realizes it or not. I hope not. He hates the ranch as it is, so I hope he takes the notion to be a doctor, as Dell wants him to be."

"It's a damn shame," sighed Weary. "We oughta be in off round-up now, for the Fourth; with the wagons camped on Birch Creek or maybe here at the ranch; and a bunch of broncs in the corral and a dance on in Dry Lake schoolhouse—"

"Say, I wish you'd shut up," Pink entreated almost tearfully. "I had a hunch this visit back here was going to call up old times till I'll be a year getting over it. Say, I'd give five years of my life to be back on round-up with the same old string of horses—Casey and Frog and old Fritz—"

"Who's callin' up things now?" Andy shut him off. "Can't yuh let well enough alone? I been trying all day to forget how it'd feel to be ridin' into camp in a high lope, hungry as a wolf, and smellin' those blueberry pies old Patsy used to make."

"Say, I'd give all I've got to be standing night guard again, with a cool breeze whisperin' through the grass and the stars all sprinkled over the sky—say what you will, there's nothing to compare with it!" The Native Son flicked ash from his cigarette and stared wistfully at the familiar line of hills.

"It sure is a crime the way the country has settled up," Andy lamented. "I never realized that the old range is a thing of the past, till I got to driving up this way. It ain't the same country to me."

"You're dead right, it's changed," Chip gloomily agreed. "But while I think of it, boys, don't talk about it before the Old Man if you can help it. He gets all stirred up over it, and he can't stand it. We try to keep his mind as quiet as we can—though he does sometimes forget times are changed and talks as if he could run cattle like he used to. I don't know what he thinks of your city clothes—I saw him eyeing you kinda funny. But I suppose there's too many movie cowboys as it is."

"That's right," Pink attested somewhat sourly. "Fellows that never saw a round-up in their lives—aw, hell! We've got so we class ridin' boots and Stetsons with grease paint; we keep 'em for the camera. The world has changed a lot, Chip, and it ain't changed for the better, either. An old cowhand has got no show at all to be himself, these days. He's either got to crawl off and die somewhere, or join the parade and get as close to the band wagon as he can, and look as if he liked it!"

"And that explains the red barn you fellows objected to." Chip turned aside from the trail and led them toward its wide-spreading doors. "Come on inside and I'll show you some real aristocrats among cows. Not much like the hard-boiled old range cows we used to tail up at the water holes, with the snow drifted on their backs even with their hip bones! But I'm making money, and that's what keeps you fellows in the movies."

So they drifted away from the Kid and the polite snub he had given them. They did not refer to him again that afternoon, though they had spoken of him a good deal on the way from California and had talked over every cute little baby way and every boyish prank he had perpetrated while they were still at the Flying U. How he had nearly drowned Silver, and how he had ridden off with a bag of doughnuts and jelly and prunes and lost himself in the Bad Lands trying to find the round-up and help the boys. How he had been kidnaped and had escaped and let Silver carry him home—things which the Kid had forgotten long ago, very likely. But they remembered, and they had felt the old proprietary affection for him welling up in their hearts as they recalled the things he had done, the things he had said, the way he had looked when he was six and wore chaps, boots, spurs and cowboy hat which Chip had had made to order.

And the Kid had been polite and impersonal and aloof. He had tilted his hat and said he was glad to have met them again, and had ridden away on a trumped-up errand, never once looking back or giving them a human, warm smile of greeting for sake of old times. They did not say anything, but the hurt went deep and rankled for all that.