Читать книгу Points West - B.M. Bower - Страница 8

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TWENTY-ONE more or less care-free years leave a good deal of boy in a man, and the boyish quality of youth is resilient beyond belief. After more than two weeks of moody isolation and a bitterness greater even than that despair which had driven his father to suicide, Cole was due for a reaction of some sort.

A weaker nature might have slipped over the edge of normalcy and gone bad, turning another twisted mentality loose upon the world to wreak what havoc it would until the law stepped in with the strong hand of restraint; or, on the other hand, he might have given up the fight as his father had done.

But there was in Cole Lawson a good deal of his mother, and she was brave enough to laugh down the heartaches that came her way and to find a whimsical angle to any problem life gave her to solve. Cole Lawson, Senior, would hide his troubles from the world, but he would not laugh at them; instead he brooded in secret—and ended with a bullet crashing through his tired brain. Cole's mother had gone out smiling, racked with pain and game to the last breath. Something of each had gone to the making of Cole's nature, and it was his father's side that had sent him away, hating the world that had dealt him hard blows without explaining why. Perhaps he would have gone on hating the world and his fellow men, and turned out altogether spoiled and useless to life and himself, if the Mutt had not chosen to make friends that morning.

The Mutt was lonesome too, and life had dealt him some bitter blows which he did not in the least deserve and which he never would understand, being a dog with a vague past and no talent for introspection. Tragedy had stalked the Mutt's trail and kept him busy dodging, but it had not quenched the indomitable optimism within him which rose valiantly with a quizzical lift of one eyebrow and a hopeful tilt of the head in the very face of disaster.

That optimism held him all aquiver this morning, and the reason for it was a boy with a bandaged wrist lying asleep in the dooryard that had been a dismal, empty place for so long that all the man tracks were faint and had no smell; and all the tin cans were red with rust and had only shreds of faded labels to say what had once been their contents; and a pair of old, cast-off shoes lying beside the wind-swept woodpile were curled like dried potato parings, with all the nails pulled loose from the soles and showing like small teeth. It spoke well for the fidelity of the Mutt that he still slept under the corner of the cabin next the doorstep where his vanished master had thrown down two old sacks for a bed when the Mutt was a yapping puppy.

How long the little rusty red waif had carried on alone he could not remember; long enough to have almost forgotten the taste and smell of bacon and to learn a good many of the coyote's tricks in hunting; long enough to become very self-assured and capable, but not long enough to lose the lonesome look in his eyes or the hunger for human companionship.

The Mutt had been off hunting rabbits and he had not come home until dawn. His first yelp of surprise at finding visitors there having produced no definite effect, he had circled and barked for a while, sniffing investigatively between spasms. But the horses continued their feeding and gave him scant attention; and the young man lying covered with a blanket to his boots, which thrust boldly out into the soft glow of sunrise, might have been dead for all the movement he made. The Mutt's barking diminished and finally ceased. Full fed, occasionally licking the chops that were whiskered like a little old Irishman, he sat down to consider these unexpected arrivals. Especially did the long figure covered with the gray blanket interest him. Curiosity pulled him nearer; he sniffed the tanned young face with its scowl of pain and loneliness and bewildered sorrow, he sniffed the blood-stiffened bandage on the wrist.

Cole's well arm thrashed out, fell upon the blanket, lay there slack. The Mutt stood looking it over, smelt the friendly man smell which he had missed out of his life, edged forward, and began licking the fingers with growing affection and enthusiasm. The hand drew away, lifted to the boy's face, fell across the closed lids, lifted again and dropped to the blankets, tensing to support the weight of arm and shoulder as Cole raised himself up and stared blinking all around him. His eyes turned toward the dog, sitting very straight upon a stub of tail that vainly tried to wag. He stared uncomprehendingly into wistful brown eyes that held the light of expectancy emphasized by the sidewise tilt of the dog's head, the quizzical arch of one eyebrow with a black spot the size of a dime.

"Hello, you Mutt!" said Cole, and grinned for the first time in two weeks.

"Woo-oh!" answered Mutt, and rose straight up on his stubby tail, his capable paws folded across his brindle belly like a ground squirrel.

The two sat looking at each other measuringly. Cole snapped thumb and finger, and the dog exploded into wriggling, fawning ecstasy. Forequarters laid to the ground, he yelped and sprang. He was in Cole's arms, licking, whimpering inarticulate endearments, smelling rapturously.

"You Mutt, you!" Cole struggled up, holding his face away from that whipping, eager pink tongue. "Quit slobbering, darn yuh! Say, where'd you come from, I'd like to know?"

This was the first time the rusty red, small dog of no particular breed had ever been addressed as Mutt, but he seemed to like the name better than he had liked anything in a long while, even jack rabbit carried straight home and eaten warm under the cabin, or devoured on the spot where he made the kill, if he were hungry as he had been to-night; he had taken his rabbits as he found them, thankfully but without fuss; certainly not with the joyful contortions, the yelps, the frenzied lickings with which he attested his joy over this new adventure.

Cole got up and stood looking about him. What he had thought were huge square bowlders, such as abounded in that valley, were in reality a cabin and a ramshackle shed with a rusty barbed-wire fence straggling around it. Half the posts were down or leaning crazily to the pull of the sagged wires and the shed roof seemed about to fall in at one corner. A deserted place, by every sordid sign save the dog.

Watchful, Cole walked over to the cabin and looked in through the open doorway. Many whooping gales such as this last one had been must have swung the door off its hinges, for it lay tilted against the table. In the corner at the back a pole bunk held a rat's nest, little sticks piled up in a rounded heap. Two rats scurried out, jumped to the dirt floor and dodged out past Cole as he leaned, looking in.

"Sic' 'em, Mutt! Go git 'em—atta boy!"

With all the zest of youth, Cole watched the brief, zigzag race, slapped his thigh in approval when the Mutt darted in ahead and caught the hindmost rat, shaking it viciously before he let it drop limp.

"Atta boy—nabbed 'im, didn't yuh? Some dog, ain't yuh?"

But catching rats could not divert him long from the business in hand, which was to find water and give Eagle's wound such dressing as was possible. He thought there must be a spring somewhere near, or the creek within easy distance, and presently he discovered an old trail worn into the gravel with weeds growing up in it wherever the soil offered any sustenance for vegetation. As he started along it, the Mutt slipped past him and trotted sophisticatedly ahead, lifting his knees high like a spirited horse.

Cole laughed at the impudence of the gait, and that in itself was sufficient justification for the Mutt's existence. Cole had needed something to make him laugh as a boy would laugh.

Mutt and the dim old pathway led him to a choked spring where the water lay yellow in a grassy bowl, slim-bodied insects darting across its surface. No stock, Cole decided, ever watered there; which argued that the creek was not far off and that this dilapidated camp was probably never visited by any one. Certainly the place bore no sign of having been disturbed for months. The stagnant water did not appeal to Cole, but the trickle from a finger-wide crack in the rock above was clear and cold to his lips. Cole held his throbbing, bandaged wrist under the thin stream until the cloth was soaked, and returned to Eagle.

Mutt, with that same brisk, high-stepping gait, trotted before him, frisking as he had almost forgotten to frisk—one needed human friends for audience when one did that—and deporting himself generally after the manner of a nondescript, rusty red dog with an enormous capacity for affection that has been starved and thwarted until all at once it finds expression in strange and pestiferous ways. All the while Cole was ministering to the wounded horse, the Mutt—or plain Mutt he had become—barked and played and cavorted madly among the bushes. He jumped clear off the ground, tongue out for a passing lick at Cole's face. He pounced and gnawed and worried Cole's boots, flying back to growling attack when Cole pushed him off. Tiring of that, he went off and barked at Johnnie and his mates, busily grazing around the roots of the bushes for the tender grass roots which grew there. He was all dog, obtrusive, irrepressible, forcing attention; a Mutt, a mental tonic for Cole who, having laughed at him once, laughed often that day.

That evening, having pitched his tepee tent beyond the cabin near the spring, where it would not easily be seen by any chance rider who came that way, Cole sat on his bed roll with the dog in the crook of his arms and carried on quite a conversation. His horses grazed near by, the wind was down and the sky a gemmed glory of stars. Eagle stood beside the spring where he could drink without having to stir from his tracks, and leisurely munched dry grass which Cole had patiently gathered, squaw-fashion, in an old burlap sack. Up on the ridge behind him an owl hooted in measured accents to his mate, and on the high slope of the little butte a coyote yammered at the world.

For the first time since he rode away from the C Bar L, Cole's eyes were unshadowed, the deep crease was smoothed from between his eyebrows. He could look about him with a sigh almost of content; for scant comforts it is true and for small mercies perhaps, but content nevertheless. He had needed a friend and he had found one that did not know his tragic secret, that would not question him about his past, that would never care who or what he had been before to-day. For Mutt it was enough to snuggle there in Cole's arms, full fed with man-cooked food, no longer forlorn.

"You're a great old Mutt, ain't yuh?" Cole whispered, bending low to speak into one lifted ear. "Guess he was lonesome here all by himself; guess it's pretty lucky I happened along—hunh?"

And Mutt, whimpering endearments, reached up and licked the boy adoringly on the neck in eloquent response.