Читать книгу Hay-Wire - B.M. Bower - Страница 4

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IN the range land, homes love to snuggle deep within the arms of some little valley facing the south or the east; never west or north if they can help it, because of the bitter sweep of the winds in winter. Groves are a godsend for the shelter they give in cold weather and for the shade they offer from the fierce heat of midsummer. So the Hayward homestead sat well back in a high-walled coulee facing Elk Basin to the southward, with a wooded creek running down to the lower prairies and tall cottonwoods throwing long leafy branches over the scattered buildings. The big corrals lay farther out in the open beyond the fence that guarded the grove from loose cattle and horses.

The ranch did not look "hay-wire" from a distance, Lynn thought, when he rode over the hill and pulled the roan to a walk down the steep road that led to the creek crossing. But his eyes were bitter as he gazed up the creek and saw the deceptive prosperity of those long, low stables, those great wide-winged corrals; at the big ranch house just beyond and the sprawling, homey house just visible within the depths of the grove. Lynn knew only too well what a closer view would reveal: stables, corrals, sheds, bunk house all empty and decaying with disuse. Chuck wagons—three of them—standing in a forlorn group, tires rusty and with long grass growing between the wheel spokes. Mowers, rakes, farm wagons, harness, fragments of chains broken and left lying where they were dropped. A ghost ranch, Jackson had tactlessly dubbed it. Well, it looked the part. All it lacked was the ghost—and that, he thought with a sardonic twist of humor, might be furnished later when his father finally fled his hulking, helpless body; if such things could be, which Lynn strongly doubted.

Sometimes he almost hated the place for its run-down look and the atmosphere of failure that seemed almost a visible miasma of discouragement and gloom, when one stopped to gaze with seeing eyes upon its slatternly disorder. And yet he loved it somehow, with a yearning love not to be put into words; perhaps he loved what it could be—what it once was and would still have been if disaster had not struck down the man who had built the ranch log by log, acre by acre—and refused to see how it had slipped into ruin. The hatred was dominant in Lynn's thoughts now; hatred and a great disgust with life as he had found it.

He unsaddled Loney and turned him into the horse corral where another black pony nickered greeting, and went on up to the house. His sister Rose, a slim young thing with fine hazel eyes and such lashes and mouth as the new school-teacher had envied Lynn, was sitting on the kitchen doorstep stringing green beans—she called it that—for supper. As Lynn approached she looked up studyingly, snapping a bean pod in two with her thumb and dropping the pieces negligently into a large yellow bowl while she watched him.

"What's the matter?" she demanded bluntly as he came up. "You're black as a thunder cloud, Lynn. And Pa's on the rampage because you're late—"

"If he wants me to fly, he'll have to furnish the wings," Lynn sullenly retorted, coming to a halt because Rose with her basin of beans and her yellow bowl and herself was using the full width of the step with no room to set his foot. "Move over, can't you?"

"What are you so cranky about? My goodness, this is a sweet family!" But she gathered up her bowl and let him up the steps. "Any mail, Brudder?"

"Not a thing," Lynn said in a gentler tone, perhaps because of the childish nickname she still used upon occasion; chiefly to express sympathy without going into details. "I ran my horse half the way home—I don't see why Dad thinks I'm late," he said by way of explanation.

"I know—but he hasn't had his Purifier to-day. He ought to buy it by the barrel so he wouldn't run out so often. It always makes him unlivable to be out of that stuff. Don't keep him waiting, Lynn."

Until that moment he had not thought much of the smashed bottle or the effect its loss would have at home, but her words sent him into the house with his underlip between his teeth. No dodging the interview; postponement would only make matters worse. His mother (Hat Hayward, the neighbors had called her for more years than Lynn was old) came into the kitchen when she heard his step, but his glance slid away from her expectant look.

"Your father's waiting for his medicine," she said briskly. "I wish you'd hurried a little more; he's been real bad all day."

"I did hurry."

"Well, I guess maybe you did. Where is it?"

"I haven't got it."

"Lynn!"

"What's that you say?" came booming through the living-room doorway. "You ain't got it?"

"No."

"Spent the money for whisky, I'll bet! And your father sufferin' the tortures of the damned at home—"

Lynn walked to the door and looked in, impelled by the injustice of the charge. What he saw was a big man sitting in a heavy chair before a little table, mechanically shuffling a deck of cards while his hard, bulging eyes glared at him in angry accusation.

"I didn't do anything of the kind. I broke the bottle on the way out of town."

"Broke it! Pity you didn't break your damn' fool neck!"

"Lynn!" cried his mother behind him. "That horse didn't buck you off, did he? Was you hurt?"

"Hurt!" put in the old man. "You couldn't hurt him with an ax! Didn't you know any better'n to come home without my blood purifier? Why didn't yuh go back and get another one? Want me to die, ay?" He flung down the cards like a pettish child. "I'd be a damn' sight better off dead and outa the way; that's what yuh want, all of yuh—"

"Why didn't yuh get another bottle, Lynn?" his mother hurried to divert the stream of invective.

"Dad knows darn well why I didn't; because I didn't have another dollar, that's why. He's too darn stingy to give me a dime more'n he has to—"

"Now, Lynn! Don't you speak of your father that way. How did it happen? Did your horse fall with you?"

Lynn suddenly flung off the restraint that had irked him from the moment he looked at the dour face of his father. He took a step farther into the room, trembling a little and with that white line around his mouth which meant that his temper was raging.

"I'll tell you how it happened—maybe it will take Dad's mind off that patent dope for a minute. I smashed the bottle over Hank Miller's head, because he called me Hay-wire! I'd do it again too. But he's right—we are a hay-wire outfit. Look at us! Ten thousand acres of deeded land, and not a hoof of cattle on it that belongs to us! Pasturing other men's stock for a living, and our own wagons rusting in the weeds.

"Look at us! Here I am with my hands tied—can't do a damn' thing to put the ranch on its feet again—can't even get out and work for wages—got to wear run-over boots and hand-me-downs for want of the price to buy clothes fit for a white man. There's Rose ought to be in school, and the boys growing up as worthless as two Injun kids, and I—here I am, able to take charge and make something of the outfit, tied hand and foot just because Dad won't trust me with a dollar—"

"Can't trust yuh with a dollar, that's why! Can't even trust yuh to ride in and buy me a bottle of medicine!" snarled the old man. "And that ain't all. I ain't goin' to trust yuh, neither; I don't trust nobody. You want me to plaster the ranch with a mortgage so's you can buy cattle. I know your argument. Cattle's up now, and so forth. They can go up and be damned to 'em—and you along with 'em! I ain't going to buy no more cattle for these damn' rustlers to steal. I've got the ranch—and they can't walk off with that! I've got the deeds on record, and there ain't an acre that ain't paid for or that I ain't holding according to law. And there ain't goin' to be; not while I'm alive."

"Other men borrow money to buy cattle," Lynn retorted. "They get rich at it. Or sheep. I could get a bunch of sheep on shares and not put out a cent—"

"Not by a damn' sight!" Joel Hayward almost lifted himself out of his chair so that he could thump the table harder. "There ain't ever been a sheep on Hayward land, and there ain't going to be! Not while I'm alive, there ain't. Mebby," he added with heavy irony, "you better kill me off so's you can run things to suit yourself. Put a bullet through me—anything, so's you can get things into your own hands. That's all yuh want, anyway."

"Now, Joel, that's not so and you know it!" his wife remonstrated sharply, sending a quick, somewhat apprehensive glance at her eldest son. "You say that just to be talking, and it ain't right or just. Lynn's going to do the best he can, and as you think best, Joel. He don't really mean to bring sheep on to the ranch; he hates 'em just as bad as you do. He just said it same as you say things you don't mean when you're mad." She drew a breath of relief when he grunted and picked up the cards again, tapping their edges on the table to even the deck for shuffling. Lynn had walked out of the room into the kitchen, and by these signs Mrs. Hayward knew that the worst of the storm was over.

"Why don't you give the boy a chance to do something for himself and us?" she pleaded, laying a hand on old Joel's shoulder "He's a man grown, and a good steady one with a level head like his father. All he needs is a little money to get a start, and he'll pull us all outa the hole in a few years."

"Money! What's went with all that pasture money?"

"You know well enough where it went, Joel! To pay taxes on all the land you've got, and to feed us. There ain't anything left to run the ranch on like it should be run. Lynn couldn't even buy enough seed to put in more'n ten acres of oats. We rake and scrape to keep clothes on our backs and food in our mouths. Lynn can't even put up any hay, except what him and the boys can do with that toggled up mower. If you'd let him buy a couple of new mowers and a stacker, we could have hay to sell and winter stock. But no, you won't give him an inch of leeway!

"There's the Dollar outfit, been after you to sell the upper ranch. They don't want to pay as much as it's worth, of course. Trust the Dollar outfit to scheme and connive to get something for nothing! But it'd put us on our feet once more, and you could go where you'd get help—"

"Help! Damned little help I'd get anywhere! Only thing that ever did help me I can't have, because that damned idiot of a half-witted pet son of yours had to bust the bottle—"

"What's one bottle of medicine when you've got it in your power to be cured, maybe? You could run the ranch to suit yourself then. You won't sell the horses, even after Lynn worked like a dog breaking a bunch you'd promised to let go. That boy rode himself ragged gentling the lot so they'd bring more money—and then you balked on signing the bill of sale! Seems like you want to see your family go hungry and naked, Joel—and keep yourself helpless the rest of your life. We could have things and be somebody if you'd just sell the upper ranch—"

"Sell! Sell! That's all I can hear, day or night. You'd sell the roof over my head if I'd let you. If it ain't horses it's land you harp on. All you want is money for that damned lazy hound to blow in. Always something you're whining to sell! There ain't goin' to be a hoof sold or a foot of land while I live, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. Sell! You and that damned—"

The screen door slammed as Lynn left the kitchen.