Читать книгу Hay-Wire - B.M. Bower - Страница 5

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"LYNN!"

Lynn, walking fast down the path to the corral where he kept his saddle horses, neither answered nor looked back.

"Where you going, Brudder?" Rose waited, then set the string beans inside the screen door out of the way of an investigative old hen with a brood of half-feathered chicks, and went running down the trail after him.

"Lynn, you aren't going anywhere before supper, are you?"

"The sooner I get off the ranch the sooner there'll be peace in the family," Lynn said between shut teeth as he yanked his saddle off the fence and whistled for the black horse.

"But Lynn, you surely aren't going to blow up and leave just because Dad's on the rampage? My land, that's about all the fun he has! It isn't the first time—"

"No, but it's liable to be the last. I've heard that subject mauled in that room ever since I was a kid. Now he's taken a notion to make me a cussing post for everything that goes wrong. If I clear out, maybe the rest of you—"

"Oh, that's just because he wants his Purifier," laughed Rose, though she blinked back her tears. "I've got a dollar, and I'll donate that to the cause. If you feel you must ride or bust, chase yourself in after another bottle of soothing syrup, Brudder, and forget—"

"Forget! Yeah, that's dead easy for some." Lynn had bridled the black horse and now settled the saddle on its back, pulling the blanket straight underneath with practised fingers that received no thought whatever from his seething brain.

"It's all right for you, Rose," he said, between yanks on the latigo. "You aren't expected to keep things running smooth with both hands tied behind your back. What's the use of my trying to hold the damned ranch together? I can't make a turn but what he goes straight in the air and calls me everything he can lay his tongue to. I've got about as much authority here as old Heinie up the creek; not as much, because he does listen to Heinie, and I can't open my mouth about anything, but what he cusses me to a fare-ye-well. And yet I'm the one that has the work and the worry and the scheming to make ends meet." He dropped the stirrup from the saddle horn and turned upon her with a despairing look of utter defeat.

"Rose, it's enough to drive a man crazy! All this land, and no stock! Dad doesn't realize what it takes to pinch along and pay taxes out of the pasturage. Look at all that hayland, if I only had the machinery and could hire a crew to put up hay! Look at those corrals! Rotting, full of weeds—and we could have a bunch of cattle and be shipping beef every fall and have money to do things with, if he'd only let me go ahead. It takes money to make money—any fool knows that much. He roars at me because the ranch is going to the dogs, but don't he know I can't hold it up with my bare hands? Hay-wire! They're calling me Lynn Hay-wire now, Rose! They—"

"It's a pity," flashed Rose, "that you didn't have two bottles of Purifier to smash over that idiot's head! I'll bet he was drunk or he couldn't have had such a bright thought. You don't care what they say, do you, Brudder? Hayward or Hay-wire—what's the difference?"

"A damned lot of difference! You aren't a man; you don't know how a man feels about making good in the world. And I could make good—if I just had something to start on! That's what grinds me, Rose. Dad could give me a start if he wanted to. We don't need all this land; we can't eat it, and we can't wear it. And that bunch of horses—what good are they to us? We can't sell them—he won't stick to any deal he lets me make. We might eat them," he added darkly. "We might have to or starve, the way things are going."

Rose stood close beside him, one hand on Lynn's shoulder while with the other she stroked the satiny neck of the black horse. She would never dare put her sympathy and love into words, but she must have known it was some comfort for Lynn to open his heart to her. He never did to any one else.

"Don't you suppose you could—" Lynn's laugh stopped her.

"No. You can't suppose a thing that I haven't thought of a thousand times. But I'm hog-tied, I tell you. I can't make a move that Dad wouldn't balk me in. He acts as if he sits there just studying out ways to keep me from making a living for the bunch of us.

"No, Rose, there's no use talking—I've got to get out. I—I couldn't stand much more and keep my hands off him, even if he is a cripple and my own father! He's trying to edge me up to the point where he'll have an excuse for ordering me off the ranch, so I'll just beat him to it. I wouldn't give him that satisfaction to save his life. I'm no use here anyway, the way things stand."

"Well," said Rose with an artful alacrity, "I don't blame you one bit for leaving, if that's the way you feel. But I'd wait till after supper; there's an errand Mom wanted you to do. She baked to-day and she promised Heinie she'd send him up a loaf of bread when you got home. He's back from Cheyenne. Now there," she said, with a laugh that sounded almost natural, "is a shining example of how to be happy though poor! There's old Heinie with his eight dollars a month pension and the dollar he gets every day he washes gold—though he did say he made a little more the last three months—and he's happy as a king. He says he had a 'hell of a time' in Cheyenne this trip. He says he ate peanuts and drank lemonade till he was sick as a dog. You ought to hear him tell how riotously he squandered his gold dust! He says he'll have to go without sugar in his coffee for the next three months, but he saw the sights and lived like a king (on peanuts!) and he's satisfied." A side glance at Lynn's face told her that the small diversion was doing what she had hoped. His eyes had lost a little of their black rage. So she gave his shoulder a final pat of complete understanding and stood back so that he could mount if he chose.

"I know just exactly how you feel, Lynn, and I'd go too if it wasn't for leaving Mom in the lurch. I expect to marry the first man that asks me—and there are a few that are liable to!—just to get away from pop's eternal yowl about money and the roof over his head. But it would seem kind of low-down to sneak out on the old girl, so—" Another sly glance from under her thick curtain of brown lashes seemed to give her intense though secret satisfaction. Lynn was squirming mentally, just as she intended.

"You let me catch you marrying any of these boneheads around here! I'll shoot him, just as sure as God made little apples! There ain't a man in the country fit for you to wipe your shoes on, Rose, and you know it. You needn't—"

"Well, I haven't been asked, yet. You won't let any of them get close enough to see the whites of my eyes, so how do you expect—"

"That's only half of it," snorted Lynn, pulling Blackie's foretop straight;—to kill time, Rose knew well enough.

"Well, good-by and good luck, and I hope,—Oh, would you mind waiting long enough to chop us some wood? Mom used the last identical stick to finish her baking, and I've scraped the chip pile down to the bone. Would you do that for the onliest sister you've got, please? If it was the kind of wood I could chop—"

"You've no business chopping wood. Where's Sid and Joe? I thought that was their job."

"It is, and that's why they beat it the minute any one mentions the woodpile. Boys are awful when they get too big to spank. I asked them to water the garden; my flowers, anyway. My four o'clocks are just perishing for a drink, and it gives me a pain in the side to pump—"

"I've told you a thousand times to leave that old pump alone! Sid and Joe ought to do that much, anyway."

"Yes, but they've found a cave up under the cliffs somewhere, and they're too busy playing Injun. They dug up five hills of those best potatoes so they can camp out. Mom was mad enough to kill them both, but what's the use?" Rose sighed, keeping an eye on Lynn's revealing face. "The things they're supposed to do around the place would fill a book; but what they really do could be written on a postage stamp, and you wouldn't need a magnifying glass to read it, either!"

Lynn had tied Blackie to the fence, yielding that much to the girl's artful undermining of his determination to leave.

"All right, good nice Brudder, I'll hurry supper along, just as soon as there's wood to start a fire. You needn't cut much; just enough for supper and breakfast—maybe we can corral those darned kids by that time and get them to work. And you needn't bother about the garden, Lynn. If the boys are too lazy to pump, let the flowers die. You have enough on your shoulders without breaking your back over that pump."

Lynn stooped and picked up a dead twig from the cottonwood near by.

"Get into the house!" he ordered sternly. "You've done your Delilah—now git!"

But before she went the girl flung her arms around his neck and gave him a shy sisterly kiss on one tanned cheek. Then without a word she fled up the path, leaving Lynn to make his way to the shiftlessly bare woodpile where a jag of dead cottonwood limbs and a crooked, knotty log lay scattered beside the sawbuck. Uncomfortably the thought smote him that it didn't take money to haul in decent wood from the hills and keep a pile cut for the women so they would not be put to the sorry shift of counting sticks before they started to cook a meal. A little time, a little effort—but what was the use? All they could do was live from hand to mouth anyway, and the woodpile but matched the rest of the ranch. It was all hay-wire, the best you could say of it.

That thought extended to the primitive method of watering Rose's flower garden and the few vegetables that had been planted convenient to the house. To bring water down from the spring would take more pipe than lay loose around the place, and there was no money to buy new. More than that, it would take several days of hard digging, and no one took kindly to labor; not even Lynn, who was rider to the bone and felt lost and unhappy if he must get down on his own feet and do hard work. The two boys, Sid and Joe—but you know how much of pick and shovel work could be had from these two.

So the old well out beyond the corner of the house had to serve. The pump was an ancient wooden one with the green paint long weathered away, scale by scale. It gasped and sighed over the task of lifting water up from its cold mossy depths, but the stream came gushing spout full and crystal clear. It came spout full when a husky pair of shoulders bent over the handle; the women were content with a trickle into the bucket.

Lynn had dug ditches down the rows of the garden and had made a long slim trough that could be shifted from ditch to ditch, and the rest depended upon a strong back and a willing mind. The two leggy, irresponsible boys were sometimes caught napping and made to stand reluctant shifts at the pump, but they were growing wary of the house now that the hot drying winds had come and the ground drank thirstily the water they sent trickling along the ditches. Rose had told the plain truth, the garden really was suffering, and Lynn could not dismiss its need with a shrug, knowing Rose had resorted to it as a subterfuge for keeping him at work until his anger cooled. Instead of that, he pumped and irrigated the whole patch, and sat down at last to supper conscious only of stiff shoulders and a prodigious appetite.

Within the house the storm had blown over, as such storms always had. Mrs. Hayward ate as usual in a momentary expectation of a call from old Joel, who could bellow "Hat!" in a tone to make the whole family jump. Lynn and Rose ate in almost complete silence, chiefly because sharp ears in the living room could catch stray phrases and a sharp tongue twist the meaning with a venom scarcely to be borne. One kept one's thoughts hidden from old Joel's malicious prying mind. The boys, withstanding a terrible though imaginary siege from Indians at their cave, had not come home and probably would not until their horses had to be fed. And in his heart Lynn could not blame them much.

It was nearing dusk when Lynn rode off on Blackie, the two loaves of bread and a dozen cookies carefully wrapped in a clean flour sack and tied to the horn of the saddle. Six miles up the creek old Heinie had staked out a placer claim and built a rock cabin, when Lynn was still wearing pink dresses. Lynn could no more recall his first acquaintance with old Heinie than he could remember when he first became aware that the huge, dark, swearing man with the loud voice was his father.

Riding up to Heinie's with bread and cakes and mended clothes was the first errand he had ever been sent upon on a horse all by himself. His toes could not reach the stirrups then, and he had to be boosted to the saddle by his mother, and was warned of this and of that venturesome thing that he must not do. High adventure had lain along the trail in those days, and to be caught out after dark set him to gazing often over his shoulder in fearful expectation of bears and Indians—and as a matter of fact, the Indians were something of a risk, and Lynn was used to seeing the look of relief in his mother's face when he rode back into the yard.

But there was no thrill in making the ride to-night. Instead of Indians and bears that might be just behind him, lurking among the rocks and trees, black gloom rode with him; and a blacker future stretched before him in the dusky bends of the trail. He knew he must stay—he had known it all along—and watch the old ranch sink deeper and deeper into ruin. He had no hope that the two boys would ever lend a hand, or that the three of them working day and night could accomplish anything save a makeshift existence, where should have been a stabilized prosperity steadily growing toward wealth. With his father's warped mentality that would not consent to anything that even hinted at a business venture, what could he look forward to but the irksome futility of choring around among those empty buildings and corrals, or harvesting tiny crops of hay and grain? His father would not even let the hay be cut on shares by the neighbors. He would not tolerate the presence of any stranger on the ranch, now that he was chained to the house by his paralysis and could not watch what went on. If a neighbor rode up to make a call, Joel said he came to see how soon the old man might be expected to die and get out of the way. If strangers came, they were thieves and cut-throats who would steal everything they could carry off. The grazing land he would rent, and it was the money from this that fed his family and clothed them after a fashion—after the taxes had taken their lion's share. But no man nor woman might come to the house; Joel would order them off with curses ringing in their ears.

These things rode with Lynn, and the bitter acknowledgment that his brief revolt had been only a gesture, and that his sullen acceptance of conditions must continue so long as his father lived. Even the wind that had risen with the setting of the sun seemed to know his mood and to tune its soughing through the treetops to a dismal refrain for his gloomy thoughts. "No hope for Lynn," it seemed to sigh. All that land, all those buildings, all those horses—and yet no hope from a starvation poverty. Always the noxious atmosphere of bickerings, complainings, nagging in the house, always the desolation without its walls. So long as old Joel was alive there—

Lynn caught himself up sharply, afraid the thought would beget an ugly wish that his father might die. It had been growing, edging closer and closer to his foreconsciousness. He pulled himself away from the subject and turned his thoughts to old Heinie, who had just spent every dollar he owned and yet was proud and happy over his capacity for enjoyment. Heinie wouldn't whine and grumble and make every one miserable, if he were crippled and helpless; Heinie would have a joke for every ache and pain. Heinie was one of the world's rare optimists, with his lean little gold diggings and his lean little pension and his bare little cabin under the cliff. Lynn's mouth relaxed so that he was smiling to himself when he tied Blackie to a swaying sapling up on the bank and went down the steep trail to the cabin.

The old man was sitting beside the table under the window. Lynn could see the bald spot on his head glistening in the lamplight as it oscillated up and down with Heinie's chuckling laugh. Something tickled the old man hugely to-night; thoughts of his peanut-and-lemonade spree in Cheyenne, perhaps. He had not heard Lynn coming—the wind would account for that, of course. Lynn drew closer to the window. He would see what Heinie was up to, and then he would holler at him and give him a scare—the old coot, laughing at nothing!

Lynn looked in—his eyes focused upon the table in an incredulous stare.

Heinie's spread arms inclosed, almost with an embracing closeness, a neat square of small packages that held Lynn's breath sucked into his lungs while he gazed. Rubber-banded packages of bank notes—a stack of them as large almost as the old man could encircle! Heinie was chuckling over them, gloating over them with shining slits of eyes, nodding his bald head and laughing as a mother laughs and looks upon her baby in its bath.