Читать книгу Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge - Edward G. Cheyney - Страница 3

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The ticking of the old grandfather clock in the neat little New England house was the only sound to break the stillness. So still it was that any one approaching the house could have heard the clock distinctly and would certainly have overlooked the silent figure in the old rocking-chair. But a man was sitting there, nevertheless, completely absorbed in his own thoughts.

An old gentleman appeared in the doorway and stood there for an instant before he saw him. Then his face lighted up.

“Hello, Scott! I thought you had gone out and I wanted to talk to you about your new assignment. Mother tells me that you have your sailing orders now.”

The son looked at him with a smile, but his face still wore a puzzled frown.

“Yes,” he said, “I have my sailing orders, but—”

“Good or bad?” his father interrupted anxiously. “You don’t look overjoyed with them.” The old man was really worried.

“I don’t know just what to think of them,” Scott frowned once more and opened the letter for the hundredth time. “They have assigned me to a timber sales job in the North Carolina mountains.”

“Well, that sounds good enough. They say that is a beautiful country and it is a place I have always wanted to see.”

“Oh, the country is all right,” Scott said brightening, “and I am crazy to go there, only I had my mind set on going back to my old place in the southwest.” And again he frowned. “It is not the country but the job that I am afraid of. Sometimes I am almost sorry that I caught those range thieves out there in Arizona.”

“Why, Scottie boy! If it had not been for that you would never be where you are in the Service to-day,” his father remonstrated proudly.

“Oh, I know that it made me solid with the Forest Service and gave me a chance at a supervisor’s job years before I would ordinarily have had one, but they have been using me as a sort of detective ever since. I was lucky enough to catch those timber thieves in Florida, but I am no sleuth and I’ll fall down on that job sooner or later.”

“But, Scott, I don’t believe this is detective work. I expect they have heard what a tremendous success you made of your own logging job last winter and want you to look after the logging work down there.”

“Yes,” Scott admitted, “I think you are partly right. But why transfer me down there when there are local men who understand those methods? Logging in New Hampshire and logging in North Carolina are very different propositions.”

“Maybe the local men cannot handle it and they know you can,” his father suggested proudly.

“Of course that’s what you think, dad,” Scott said affectionately, “and it may be what they think, but I am afraid that there is something else wrong.”

This rather gloomy conversation was broken up by Mrs. Burton, who had come to the doorway unnoticed. “Well, well, why worry over something you don’t either of you know anything about? Maybe we do not know what you are going to do in North Carolina, but we do know that you have to leave us in the morning and we don’t want to waste what time we have left worrying. Come on in to supper.”

Scott laughed. “All right, mother, you always say the sensible thing. I’ll bet there is nothing wrong with the supper no matter what may be the matter with the new job.”

So they went in to supper cheerfully enough and all three spent the evening poring very busily over the atlas, and trying to see what they could find out about the new country. Caspar, the little town where the headquarters were located, was not shown on the old map, but they found out a great deal about the country in general, and it was bedtime before they knew it.

“There,” Mrs. Burton exclaimed cheerfully as they said good night, “I am satisfied. I’d be willing to go to that country on any old kind of a job.”

Scott was not ordinarily given to worrying much and by the time his train pulled out of the quiet little Massachusetts village the next morning he was looking forward eagerly to seeing this new country and had forgotten all the imaginary troubles which the new work might bring.

His orders were to report direct to Caspar, but he had half a day between trains in Washington and took the opportunity to visit the Forest Service offices. He met a few friends and became personally acquainted with a number of men who had before that been to him only a name attached to the end of an official letter, but he learned nothing definite in regard to his new work. The chief of the particular branch in which Scott was employed was out of the office and the inspector who was to meet him in Caspar had already gone to North Carolina. That looked as though there must be something unusual there, but Scott resolutely refused to worry about it any more and settled down in the car seat to enjoy the scenery of Virginia, which was altogether new to him.

The little shanties scattered all through the country and the grinning black faces which crowded one end of the platform at every station reminded him of Florida, but the country itself was very different. Instead of the flat sand-plains covered with dense stands of yellow pine the train wound through rolling clay hills and hardwood forests until it lost itself in the foothills of the mountains just as the sun went down. Scott peered eagerly out of the car window until he could no longer see even the telegraph poles beside the track.

Morning found him at a junction point in the heart of the mountains. These mountains were not like the Rocky Mountains as he had known them in the southwest. There was none of that stark grandeur of the bare rocky slopes and flat-top mesas, but there was a peaceful beauty about them which reminded him more of the overgrown Massachusetts hills; soft green slopes towering above the valley to a surprising height, considering the low absolute altitude of the range. There was as much difference between the valley and the mountain peak as there usually was in the Rockies, but Scott remembered that the valleys in the Rockies were as high as many of these peaks.

A little branch line carried him down a narrow valley between what appeared to be flat-topped, unbroken ridges clothed in every kind of hardwood tree that Scott had ever heard of, and capped with a rim of dark green spruce which fitted over it like a black cape. Here and there a peak rose conspicuously above the level ridge.

“It must be great in those forests,” Scott thought, “and the views from those peaks ought to be worth seeing. I tell you there has got to be a lot of trouble in this job if I can’t enjoy myself in this country.”

He was trying to catch a glimpse of a particularly high peak which showed itself every now and then above the dark spruce ridge when the conductor called, “Caspar,” and Scott had to hurry to get his pack sack and suit case off the train at his headquarters.