Читать книгу Hay-Wire - B.M. Bower - Страница 6

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HEINIE reached out with the leisurely, silky-steel motion of a cat reaching to stir up a half-dead mouse, and picked up one of the packages; licked his thumb and riffled the ends of the bill, counting just above a whisper.

"One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand—ten thousand dollars in you. I golly, you shore's good fer sore eyes!" He lifted other packages and set them beside the first, his fingers lingering over the feel of the money. "Eight bundles—'s eighty thousand dollars. I golly, that'd buy a carload of peanuts, I betcha! He-he-he—peanuts b' the carload if I wanted 'em. But I don't want 'em. Buy me a place in the old country some day, you will. Soon as I get a hundred thousand, poor ole Heinie'll go back to the old country and buy himself a home. Here's some more to go with yuh—kinda keep yuh from gittin' lonesome!"

While Lynn watched unbelievingly, the old man opened his coat, reached into and through the bottom of a pocket, squirmed and contorted his features for a minute and drew out four other bank notes of the same thousand-dollar denomination. Lynn had never in his life seen such a display. He had not known there were such things as thousand-dollar bills. Pulling the safety pin out of them Heinie held it between his white-bearded lips while he straightened the bank notes, placed the rubber band to his liking and laid them gently down upon the pile.

"Purty good clean-up—but I'll have to hunt me another town next time. Lar'mee, mebby—only that's a damn' nosey burg too. Ask any of them banks in there for thousand-dollar bills and the hull town 'd know it. Have t' make it Denver. Yep—buy m' peanuts in Denver next time. Cheyenne's gittin' too damn' nosey last time 'er two. Got t' cut it out.

"Now, you go t' bed. He-he-he! Pore ole Heinie, scratchin' around to make a livin'—" His speech trailed off into a meaningless muttering as he rolled the packs into a flour sack, made that into a compact bundle and went to his bunk. Leaning across it he laid the bundle on the bed, took a certain rock in the wall between his two hands and gave it a sharp twist to the left and pulled it out. A sizable hole, seemingly lined with tin, was revealed and into this Heinie crowded the bundle and replaced the rock at a certain angle, giving it another sharp twist, this time to the right.

Lynn's underlip came sharply between his teeth as he turned away and went blindly back up the steep bank to his horse, mounted and rode off up the creek through a thicket of willows that whipped his shoulders unheeded as he passed.

Eighty-four thousand dollars back there in old Heinie's cabin? Lynn could not seem to grasp the stupendous fact even yet. He would have been very much astonished to discover that Heinie had eighty-four dollars in his possession. He would have felt slightly resentful, because Heinie was always making it plain that he was broke most of the time; that he spent his pension and his quarterly clean-up of a little gold dust when he went in to Cheyenne to see the sights, and that, knowing he would come home without a dime in his pocket, he always bought his three months' supply of food before he bought his ticket, and he was wise enough to buy a round-trip ticket to insure his getting home. This was Heinle's stock joke which he would tell over and over with much chuckling and wagging of his bald head. Always broke between trips—but always happy as a king. That was Heinie, and he was proud of it.

In all his life Lynn had never once doubted the truth of anything Heinie told him. Good old fellow—give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it; always ready to cheer you up, always saying money isn't everything. Preaching the gospel of cheerfulness in the face of his poverty.

Lynn drew his fingers across his eyes, half tempted to believe he had been imagining things. Old Heinie with eighty-four thousand dollars, all in one-thousand-dollar bills! All wrapped up in a flour sack and stuffed into a hole in the wall over his bunk! Four thousand dollars he had had pinned in his coat with a safety pin, when he stopped at the house and hinted, maybe, for a loaf of bread! Lynn's fist came down on the horn of his saddle so suddenly that Blackie jumped.

"The damned old miser!" he grunted disgustedly, as the full import of the amazing discovery thrust home at last. "Putting up a poor mouth all these years, and him rolling in money! Let Rose and Mom drop everything to mend up his rags for him—let me pack stuff up for him to eat—oh, hell!

"Awful sorry we're playing such hard luck—to hear him tell it! Telling Dad, every time he sees him, what a darn shame it is he can't go East to some hospital where they can cure him! The dirty, lyin' hypocrite! He could of sent Dad—lent him the money to go when Dad was first taken down! He could stake me to a bunch of cattle on shares, and make more money for himself while he was helping me get a start. With eighty-four thousand dollars he could—why, hell! If I had that much money to work with I'd be a millionaire in ten years—yes, in five!"

The mystery of the money began to nibble at his attention. How had he got it? Found some rich pay dirt, of course; and yet that was as surprising as the money itself. Snow Creek had never shown gold in any quantity; a lean placer was all any one would expect to find along its bed. Heinie must have fooled them there. They had taken it for granted he could not wash out decent wages, and he had encouraged the idea. A dollar a day when he worked—that was what he averaged, according to his talk and the appearance of the claim. And yet, all these years he must have been taking out quantities of gold. His quarterly pension check had given him the excuse for going to town often enough to cash in his gold. Simple—so simple that no one would ever suspect the truth.

"I suppose that's the first time the old skunk ever forgot to hang a dish towel or something over the window while he goggled over that money," Lynn mused exasperatedly as he rode. "Damned lucky thing for him it wasn't some others I could name, that happened along just then. A thousand dollars in one bill, and a stack of 'em higher than that bald-headed old pelican could see over! My God, I didn't suppose there was that much money in the whole State of Wyoming!"

Memory of how the money had looked, all neatly stacked on the table, returned to thrill his imagination. The things a man could do with that much money! If it belonged to him, just for instance ...

Lynn began to dream a bit. He'd buy a nice little bunch of good-grade heifers and a couple of pure-bred Hereford bulls, to begin with. Not too many, because Dad would have to go East, and that cost like the devil; and he'd send Rose to college, and put Sid and Joe into some good military school where they'd have to buckle down and study or get the stuffin' lammed out of them. And he'd buy Mom a silk dress and a sealskin coat and let her go back to Indiana and see her folks, and hire a good cook—Chinks are all right, some of them—but maybe some broken-down old round-up cook that would be glad of a steady place. If he could get hold of old Tanglefoot, he'd be a dandy. And for himself—

"Betcha that little schoolma'am wouldn't look at me with that can't-see-yuh expression," he speculated further, and curled his lip in wistful mockery of the thought. "Betcha if I was to drive up to her boarding place some Sunday afternoon with the bay colts hitched to a shiny new top buggy and ask her if she'd like to go riding with me,—I betcha the ice would thaw out of her eyes in about two minutes! I'd take her up along Echo Gorge and show her the view from the cliff, and we'd walk over to Lover's Leap and I'd tell her about the Indian girl that jumped off there. Then I'd take her up the trail through those big trees, and we could eat our lunch up on Lookout while we waited for the moon to come up over the peaks—"

Lynn forgot old Heinie, forgot the money, even, while he dreamed of what he would say to the little schoolma'am on that Sunday afternoon, and what the little schoolma'am would say to him. If she liked to ride horseback he'd break that little gelding and give that to her, maybe, and they could take long rides every Sunday—

Blackie heard a rustling in the bushes and jumped sidewise, slamming Lynn's right stirrup against a rock. The jolt brought Lynn back with a jar to reality. He was not riding the sunlit high slopes with the little schoolma'am, whose name he did not know; he was jogging along up the creek, headed for no place in particular. It was dark down here among the rocks and willows, but overhead were the clear stars, and the tilt of the Big Dipper told him that the evening was edging into night that would slide over the hill to midnight before so very long. He must have killed a lot of time watching old Heinie—

The lying old whelp, no wonder he could make a joke of his pretended poverty! No wonder he laughed when he showed the holes in his coat and said he guessed he'd have to cut armholes in a gunny sack pretty soon and wear that. With a fortune cached away in the wall of his cabin, he could afford to laugh. Who couldn't? Instead of laughing because he was game over his loneliness and his hard lot in life, he had been laughing all these years at the joke he was playing on the Haywards and the rest of the world.

Lynn thought of the many, many times when Mom had told Heinie to take off his coat and she would sew up the rip in his sleeve. Heinie always laughed and pulled off the torn garment and went in to sit in his shirt sleeves and play cribbage with old Joel, while Mom strained her eyes by the window of the kitchen, threading her needle and sewing by the fading light. Heinie always came late in the day, Lynn now remembered; perhaps he chose late afternoon and wore his raggedest coat with deliberate cunning, because Mom usually had a little time to herself then and would offer to mend for him and would ask him to stay for supper.

Lynn's teeth came together with a click. Mom never would sew another patch on that stingy, lying old devil's clothes if he could help it. Nor would Heinie have the laugh on Lynn for carrying good bread and cookies up to his place. He could buy his own cookies, damn his stingy hide!

Right there Lynn stopped and untied the flour sack, set it open-mouthed in the saddle in front of him and ate cookies as he rode. Not that he was hungry; he was getting even with that bald-headed old reprobate down the creek. With a spiteful gusto he forced down the last crumb and tied the sack, regretting that he could not swallow the two loaves of bread as well.

"Sponged off us ever since I can remember," he harked back to the great imposition. "And he knows damn' well we can't feed ourselves, hardly, since Dad's crippled and half crazy. He knows we haven't got eighty-four dollars, even—let alone thousands. No, nor eight dollars and forty cents! Not unless Dad's a lying old miser too, and has got a bunch of money hid out on us." For another half mile that possibility was considered with gloomy suspicion and finally discarded. Dad might be capable of such perfidy, but Mom would know of anything like that. Mom was the kind of woman who always did know where every cent came from and where it went, just as she always managed to know everything else that concerned the family in any way. No, Lynn was absolutely certain that the Hayward family was just as hard up as they seemed to be. The thought carried a certain oblique sense of pride; at least, they weren't hypocrites. They might be dirt poor, but they didn't lie and they didn't whine for favors.

"The way he's let us fetch and carry for him,—why, his darn placer claim is on our land, by rights! And he's riding a horse we gave him, when he knows we're just about on the rocks! And him with money enough to buy every hoof we own, and the land thrown in!" Lynn drew a deep breath and let it out in a snort of contempt. "He's worse than those Jew pawnbrokers Mom reads about in the Bible. Jesus Christ took after them with a quirt and hazed them outa the church—I wonder what He'd do to a man that's been double-crossing his best friends all these years?"