Читать книгу A Tenderfoot Bride: Tales from an Old Ranch - Clarice E. Richards - Страница 6

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“East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The phrase kept haunting me all through these first days when everything was so new and strange. I almost felt as though I had passed into a new phase of existence.

Except for Owen, there was no point of contact between the world of cities and people I had just left and this land of cattle and cow-punchers, bounded by the sky-rimmed hills. In Owen, however, the East and the West did meet. He understood and belonged to both and adapted himself as easily to the one as to the other. Wearing his derby, he belonged to the life of the East; in his broad-brimmed Stetson, he was a living part of the West.

The compelling reality of this new life affected me deeply. Non-essentials counted for nothing. There were no artificial problems or values.

No one in the country cared who you might have been or who you were. The Mayflower and Plymouth Rock meant nothing here. It would be thought you were speaking of some garden flowers or some breed of chickens.

The one thing of vital importance was what you were—how you adjusted yourself to meet conditions as you found them, and how nearly you reached, or how far you fell below their measure of man or woman.

I felt as though up to this time I had been in life’s kindergarten, but that I had now entered into its school, and I realized that only as I passed the given tests should I succeed.

I learned much from the rough, untutored men with whom I was in daily association. They were men whose rules of conduct were governed by individual choice, unhampered by conventions. They were so direct and honest, so unfailingly kind and gentle toward any weaker thing, and so simple and responsive, that I liked and trusted them from the first. All but old Bohm, the man from whom we were buying. He was such a totally different type that he seemed a man apart. The son of a German father and an Irish mother, he had inherited a nature too complex and contradictory to be easily fathomed.

Mrs. Bohm, with her white, calm face and gentle voice, attracted me, but her husband aroused in both Owen and me an instinctive distrust. He was good nature personified, a most companionable person, with his easy, contagious laugh, his amusing stories, quick wit, and breezy air of good fellowship. He could quote Burns, Scott, and other poets by the hour, and fiddle away on his violin, until we were nearly moved to tears. He was almost too good-natured; he didn’t quite ring true. I noticed that while he always referred or spoke to his wife affectionately, as “my old mammy,” her attitude toward him was rather impersonal. She called him “James” with quiet dignity, but seldom talked with him, and appeared to take very little interest.

On the side of a hill, some distance from the house, was an old root cellar, used, according to Bohm, for storing potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables for winter. It was most inconveniently located; there were hillsides much nearer, and considering that the cellar under the house was always used for such purposes, it seemed strange that another should be needed so far away. I was possessed with a desire to explore it. It suggested hidden treasures and Indian relics, which I was collecting. One day I was poised on the top of the cellar step, about to descend into its mysterious depths.

Old Bohm appeared. “Was you lookin’ for something’?” he asked, somewhat out of breath.

“Oh, no,” I replied, going down a few steps. “I was just exploring, and thought I would investigate this old root cellar.”

“I thought that was what you was goin’ to do, and I hurried up to tell you to be awful careful of rattlesnakes; there’s a pile of ’em ’round these here old cellars.” Bohm spoke with apparent solicitude.

“Heavens! I wouldn’t go down there for anything!” I exclaimed,—and I got out of the cellarway as quickly as possible.

Old Bohm looked down the steps at the strong, closed door of heavy boards.

“Oh, maybe it would be all right. You could listen for ’em and jump, if you heard ’em rattle,” he remarked, casually.

I shook my head. “Not much; I don’t want to hear them rattle,” and I started toward the house.

Bohm went up toward the wind-mill. As I turned away I caught a curious expression on his face—a faint gleam of something.

As I came through the meadow gate, Owen was getting into the buggy.

“Hello,” he called, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I have to drive over to Three Bar. Do you want to go?”

I was always ready to go anywhere, so while Owen was driving the horses about, I ran in to get my hat.

Not one of our horses was thoroughly broken, so we always had to follow the same method of procedure before starting anywhere. After the horses were hitched up, Charley, to whom fell odd jobs of every sort, stood at their heads until Owen was fairly seated and had the lines firmly in his hands. Then, after a few ineffectual attempts to kick or run down Charley before he could get out of the way, off dashed the horses around and around the open space between the house and the pond, until a little of the edge had been taken off their spirits. Then Owen stopped them for one moment, I made a quick jump into the buggy, and away we went at top speed toward the gate that Charley had run to open. We usually missed the post by a quarter of an inch, and at that juncture I invariably shut my eyes and held my breath.

The road to Three Bar Ranch led to the North and wound up a very long hill, then across a rolling mesa. The prairie was covered with short grama grass, just turning a faint brown, the yellow sunflowers and great clumps of rattleweed, with its spikes of lovely purple, giving a touch of color to the scene before us. The Spanish bayonet dotted the hillsides, and over all hung the summer sky like burnished copper. The only sound, aside from that of the horses’ hoofs and the crunch of the wheels on the soft prairie road, was the occasional song of the meadow lark, all the joy of the summer day sounding in its one short thrilling note. In the gulches, where the grass grew deep and rank, the wind tossed it softly, and it rippled and sparkled in the shifting light, as water gleams in the sun. Everything was so still that animation seemed for the time suspended, as we drove along silenced by the spell of the prairies.

Three Bar, one of the oldest ranches in the country, stood against the side of a hill. It was a long, low structure of logs built in the prevailing fashion of the early ranch houses, room after room opening into one another, usually with an outside door to each.

The ranch was owned by the Mortons, English people, who were among the earliest settlers in the country. They greeted us most cordially, and as Owen went out to the corral with Mr. Morton to look at some horses, Mrs. Morton took me into the house.

The room we entered had very little furniture, but was redeemed from bareness by a wonderful old stone fireplace at one end.

Mrs. Morton was short and heavy set. “Spotless” was the only word her appearance suggested when I first saw her. Her skin was as fair as a child’s, while her hair was as white as the apron she wore.

Her flow of conversation was unceasing, and I was reminded of a remark that Charley made to me when the telephone was first put in over the fence lines.

“Old lady Morton talked so fast that she ripped all the barbs off the wire.” Before I had time to reply to one question, she had asked another, and was off on an entirely different subject. I suppose the accumulated conversation of months was vented on my innocent head, for she told me, poor thing, that she hadn’t seen another woman since Christmas.

“Us”—she never said we—“us never visits the neighbors, but was coming up to see you, Mrs. Brook, for us heard you and Mr. Brook was different. Us lives out here on a ranch, but us knows when people are the right kind.”

I didn’t know whether to be considered “different” was desirable, or not, and I was dying to ask her what constituted “the right kind,” but had no time before she suddenly asked:

“Have the Bohms gone? Us was waiting till they went.”

I explained that they were still on the ranch, as Mr. Bohm had to gather and counterbrand all the stock before turning it over to Owen, and that he had been delayed.

Mrs. Morton gave a little grunt of contempt. “Old Bohm won’t hurry any while he’s getting free board. He may be with you all winter. Us hopes Mr. Brook won’t be imposed on. He’s a smart man, old Jim Bohm is, but he’s a bad one.”

“Bad one?” I repeated, inwardly praying that the Bohms would not be permanent guests.

“Old Jim Bohm is a bad man,” Mrs. Morton said again, rocking violently back and forth. “I was here when they came. She’s all right, but there is nothing he won’t do. Why”—her voice sank to a whisper—“sixteen men have been traced as far as that ranch and never been heard of again, and Jim Bohm’s been getting richer all along.”

Mrs. Morton scarcely paused for breath, so I couldn’t have said anything. But I was speechless, anyhow.

“Not one of them, not one,” she declared, “was ever heard of again, and if you were to examine that old root cellar on the hill, you’d find out what I say is true.”

The incident of the morning flashed across my mind, and I felt as though a piece of ice were being drawn slowly along my spine.

“How perfectly horrible!” I managed to gasp, “but it can’t be true.”