Читать книгу Rodeo - B.M. Bower - Страница 7

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THE KID awoke at daylight under the canopied, soft tints of summer sunrise, and lay for a time looking up at the changing hues of the clouds, basking wordlessly in the glory of life. Some of the artist's love of beauty must have come to the Kid from his father, though he had never taken to pencil or brush but contented himself so far with the secret glow of appreciation when sheer perfection such as this morning lay all about him. But his mind gradually returned to the thoughts of last night and revolved about the deplorable change he saw in the four members of the Happy Family who had come so far and so fast to spend the Fourth at the old ranch, and who had left so much in the past that they couldn't quite focus their eyes upon the present.

The Kid, stretching his long limbs luxuriously under the two blankets that covered him, thought what a pity it was that the boys couldn't face life as he faced it. No wonder they resented the years that had taken the horses they loved—he supposed they loved the horses they talked about, just as he loved Stardust and Blazes and Sunup. It must be pretty tough, all right, to feel yourself growing old, no longer toughened to the trails, having to leave all the good times behind you for the young fellows to enjoy.

In that mood of sincere sympathy the Kid began this day by determining to do all in his power to show the boys a nice time while they were here. He decided that it was all wrong to think of having a little exhibition of roping and riding. He had expected that the boys would fall in with the idea and take part in the fun, and perhaps give him some good pointers—they who were such experts. But now he saw that it would prove a one-man show, and that they would merely sit back and tolerate him and think he was showing off; and they would tell how they used to do it, and probably they would make him feel like a fool. So he cancelled his little Wild West program and set himself the task of finding out what they really would enjoy the most.

By noon he thought he knew. What they enjoyed most, it seemed to him, was sitting around on the porch talking about horses and round-ups and fights and men, with Chip and the Old Man. Even the women were absorbed in their own interests. Rosemary fussed with her two little tads, as she called them—pretty little things they were, questing like young quail and needing a watchful eye upon them—and talking with the Little Doctor, also about old times.

Nobody needed the Kid, and nobody paid any attention to him. Though he remembered a good many incidents they recalled, they did not seem to include him in any of their reminiscences or to care what he remembered, any more than if he were ten years old instead of twenty past. In the two hours and more after breakfast that he lingered on the porch, waiting for a chance to show his affectionate understanding and his friendly intentions toward them, not a dozen words were spoken to him directly. Once, Weary asked for a match and turned away when the Kid told him he didn't smoke; and once Rosemary, coming out to get Junior, paused and fixed her pretty brown eyes upon him and asked how he liked college. Not a head turned his way when the Kid said, "All right." Rosemary smiled and plucked her young child by the back of his rompers and scooted him into the house, and that was the end of the Kid's conversation with the company that morning. They were all too busy. Memory had carried them back into a time that shut him out as with a high wall.

The Kid enjoyed hearing them talk, but the inaction palled upon him and it looked as though this sort of thing would last all day. He did not know, you see, that they were consciously drawing the Old Man out of his brooding silence, trying to lure him back to an interest in life. At any rate, he grew tired of sitting still and letting his long legs dangle off the porch, so he got to his feet and started unobtrusively for the corral where he had left Stardust saddled when he rode up from his camp in the lower pasture. Chip, brought back to the present by the movement, called after him to leave those young bulls alone or he'd break a leg; meaning, of course, a bull's leg. But no one asked where he was going or suggested that he come back and stay with the bunch; which was not like the Happy Family, as any one who knows them will observe.

The Kid understood, or thought he did. They were sore because he had told them the truth last night. Probably he had made a fool of himself—he should have known they didn't want to be disturbed in their delusions. But he was hurt and disappointed nevertheless and he felt considerably let down after his careful diagnosis of their case and his good resolutions and all.

So he packed an emergency ration of one package of raisins and a few hardtack which he kept in camp for his long rides, changed his saddle to Blazes, who needed exercise that day, and rode off into the hills toward the river. Not that he wanted to go off and sulk, but because he was pursuing a somewhat rigid training for himself and his horses, and several hours in the saddle each day, riding through rough country, was a part of his program to toughen his mounts and himself.

He liked the solitude of those long, twisty canyons and the high, windy ridges between. He liked to follow them at random, losing himself in the labyrinth of little gulches for awhile, just for the pleasure of working his way out; not always an easy thing to do, though his sense of location was splendidly developed. It was wilderness unspoiled, in spite of the occasional little ranches nested in deep, shut-in valleys. Sometimes he liked to ride through the small pastures and imagine himself a hermit living there away from the world, but mostly he avoided them and tried to ignore the fact that they were near.

To-day, with the talk of the Happy Family fresh in his mind and with their attitude toward him rankling in his heart, he turned aside from his usual route and burrowed deeper and deeper into the wild, scarcely conscious of the way he took but wanting only to ride and ride and turn back only when he must. So eventually he awoke to the fact that the day was far spent and he had not the faintest notion of the way he had come, nor the way he should go. It had been hunger that gnawed its way to his attention, so now he ate a little, drank from a spring that, unlike many other springs in the Bad Lands, happened to be good water, and gave himself to the problem of finding the way home.

Before, when he had lost himself purposely, it had been sheer pretense and he had always kept a fair record in his mind of the general course he had taken. To-day he had been glooming along thinking of other things and had lost himself with a vengeance. It was late when he started back, and it was dark before he had found a way out of that canyon.

It was late the next afternoon when he arrived at a ranch and found the place deserted, every one having gone out somewhere to celebrate the Fourth, no doubt. Too bad. The folks were having a picnic party for all the old-timers in the country, and it might be that these ranchers were old acquaintances of Weary and the others. The Kid went in and borrowed some bread, gathered half a hatful of eggs at the stable, milked a tame cow in the little pasture and feasted beside a camp fire down by the creek. It was not the way he had expected to spend this Fourth of July, and the folks were probably worrying about him, but that did not impair his appetite for bread and milk and hard-boiled eggs.

Blazes, too, was hungry. The Kid decided to let him graze for an hour before he started home, and in the meantime he lay back in the shade of the willows and took a nap, his big hat tilted down over his face. It was dark when he awoke—indeed, by the stars it was close to midnight. The Kid got up, caught his horse and saddled in haste and started homeward along the rough ranch road that crawled crookedly through the canyons to where it finally debouched into a river trail which the Kid recognized. Even then he was miles from the Flying U and the dawn wind was creeping over the hills.

The night was graying to that ghostly translucence that precedes daybreak when the Kid unsaddled Blazes at his own camp and sent him off nickering to join his companions in the meadow. It was hours too early for breakfast. He crawled into his bed, tired and sleepy and considerably crestfallen over his mischance, and immediately he fell into deep, dreamless slumber.

The midday meal was over when the Kid, whistling a meaningless jazz tune, came sauntering up the path with his hands in his pockets and his big Stetson tilted at a rakish angle over one eyebrow just to show he didn't care. But he did care. In back of that nonchalant pose he was squirming with apprehension over the reception he would receive. Were they mad, and would they give him the devil? Had they worried, thinking something had happened to him? Parents did worry upon the slightest provocation. The Kid would almost rather they got up on their ear about it.

There they all were, sitting around on the porch talking and looking almost as if they had not moved from the spot since he left. The Kid's saunter grew a shade more arrogant, trying to hide his dread of the battery of glances that turned upon him in varying degrees of disapproval. But after all he passed the ordeal very well, it seemed to him, though he grew hot inside at the transparent effort to accept his return as a matter of course; something of no moment because he had not been missed. But his lips did not lose their pucker and his tune did not miss a note until his foot was upon the lowest step of the porch, Pink moving aside to make room for him. He nodded a negligent greeting that included them all, flung a careless sentence after it for good measure and went into the house.

"Claude Bennett, where have you been since day before yesterday?" the Little Doctor demanded with hard, bright eyes.

"Oh, riding around," the Kid told her smilingly, though a premonitory tightening of his throat shortened the sentence perforce.

"Riding around! You're getting more impossible every day of your life! You—"

"I'll have a talk with this young hound, Dell," Chip's voice behind the Kid interrupted her. "Nothing you can say would hit the spot. If he hasn't any more decency than to pull a stunt like this, he's got to be taught a few things. No boy of mine can insult the best friends I've got on earth—"

"How?" the Kid turned to face the storm he felt was coming. But his mother stepped between the two and with a hand on Chip's shoulder shook her head in a gesture of complete understanding.

"Not now, honey. I want to talk to Claude myself. I've got to. And I don't want you present, my dear. Go back to the boys until I've finished, and then if you have anything you feel you must say, I'll turn Claude over to you; and I won't," she promised him hastily when she saw rebellion in his face, "I won't interfere. But he's my son too, you know. If we've spoiled him, I'm as much to blame as you and I must have my chance. Go on, before J. G. gets all upset!"

The Kid, thus warned, turned and set his hat upon a chair, smoothed back his heavy brown mane that had one deep wave across the top, and folded his arms.

"Who's going to administer the anæsthetic?" he inquired lightly, as the door closed behind his dad.

It needed just that note of levity, perhaps, to stiffen the Little Doctor's determination and furnish the cue she needed for the most unpleasant speech of her life. And the Kid stood and took the lash of her eloquence, immobile as a figure in bronze; arms folded, head bent a little so that he looked down into her blazing eyes. But as she talked she saw the soul of him withdraw itself farther and farther from her, until his eyes were as cold as ice; which was a strange way the Kid had brought up with him from babyhood. It frightened her a little now; made her feel as if she were upbraiding a man stone deaf.

"Courtesy and consideration, Claude, are indispensable to a doctor, whose whole life is given to serving humanity," she finished a bit desperately. "You can't go on like this, ignoring the common courtesies of life—"

"Just a minute, Mother. It might simplify matters for you a little to know that I have no intention of being a doctor."

She drew a long breath, staring up at him blankly for an appreciable moment.

"I know you've been taking that for granted, and I hated to disappoint you, so I didn't say anything about it. But seeing I'm the weeds anyway in your estimation and Dad's, I may as well give you the complete list of my crimes."

"If you're not going to be a doctor," she managed to say, "why have you gone on for two whole years studying—"

"Knowledge is power," the Kid told her unemotionally. "Nowadays a fellow needs the background of some good school; if he can get it, he's that much to the good, no matter what he does later on."

"Well, if background is all you're getting out of it," the Little Doctor said indignantly, "I'll agree with your dad that it's time we took you out of school and put you to work at something. Background is all very well, but it's the foreground that interests us just now, young man."

"Looks to you pretty much of a smear, I suppose," the Kid suggested.

"Very much a smear!"

"All right, if that's the way you feel. I suppose I'm free to think what I please of the foreground. Is that all, Mother? Dad's waiting to unburden himself on the subject, you know." The Kid turned and picked up his hat, holding it so that his mother could not see how his hands were shaking.

"Claude Bennett, what in heaven's name has come over you in the last year or two? Aren't you even sorry you've acted like an insufferable cad?"

The Kid stiffened, his mouth pressed shut in the stubborn look his mother knew of old.

"Can't you say you're sorry? Answer me, Claude!"

"Yes," said the Kid, giving her a sudden stern look, "I am sorry. I'm sorry my mother can condemn me unheard and take it for granted I'm an insufferable cad."

"Unheard? What possible excuse—"

"Oh, it doesn't matter—now." The Kid turned, found the door knob with a blind, groping movement of his hand and went out. As he left the house his father joined him and the two walked together down the path, shoulders almost touching as they went, but worlds apart in spirit.

What passed between them when they reached the privacy of the big barn no one knew, except that Slim, coming from one of the corrals, overheard and reported the end of the conversation. The Kid was speaking rapidly, not very loud but with every word as clear-cut and distinct as hammer blows upon an anvil.

"I won't apologize to the boys, and I won't apologize to you or Mother. You didn't wait to hear why I stayed away, but formed your own opinion before I showed up. And that's okay with me—but I won't apologize."

"You will, if you expect to stay on this ranch," blazed Chip, his face hard as granite. "It's come to a point where I'm going to find out who's boss, you or me. I've paid out good money sending you to school—and all it's done so far is to give you the idea you're cock of the walk. Talk about college education! It's knocked all the sense out of you you ever did have. There won't be any more of it, I can tell you that. You march back to the house and tell your mother you're ashamed of yourself and you'll try to be half human from now on!"

"I will not! I'm not ashamed of myself, and I'm not going to lie about it."

"Then pack your belongings and drift," snapped Chip. "When you're ready to haul in your horns, you can come back; not before."

"Say!" The Kid's face matched Chip's for hardness. "Do you think you could tie me and keep me here, after this? You and Mother treat me as if I were about six years old. You fail to realize that I'm grown up!"

"Well," said Chip with much sarcasm, "if the rest of you ever grows to match the size of your head, you can hang your hat on a telephone pole!"

"And yet," retorted the Kid in a tone that stung, "you rave because a head like that wants to do its own thinking!" He turned away to his horse, mounted and stared down at his father who stared back. For a moment he seemed on the verge of speech; then, with a touch of his spurs, he wheeled the bay horse and went galloping furiously down the pasture trail, weaving in and out among the willow clumps and never once looking back.