Читать книгу Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge - Edward G. Cheyney - Страница 4

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When the dinky little train pulled out and left Scott standing on the platform, he realized why he had not seen the town of Caspar from the car window. It consisted of a railroad station, two stores, four dwelling houses and another large, decrepit-looking building which could not easily be classified, and they were all on the other side of the railroad track from Scott’s position in the car. From that side of the train no one would have suspected the presence of a town anywhere in that vicinity. The mountain slope came down almost to the railroad track and the forest on that side was almost unbroken.

The station agent seemed quite interested at the sight of a stranger. He watched Scott for a minute and seemed to be studying him in his own slow way. Finally he seemed to decide that it would be safe to speak.

“Howdy! Stranger in these parts, be ye?” he drawled.

“Yes,” Scott said, “is there a hotel here or any place where a man can stay?”

“Reckon you can stay at the hotel. Ain’t no place else you could stay in this town and live.”

Scott thought at the time that that was a rather peculiar remark for any one to make, but when he found that the station agent also ran the hotel he charged it up to professional pride. When he saw the hotel he wondered how any one could have any professional pride in it.

The hotel turned out to be the nondescript building which stood, or rather sat, apart from the others at the end of the street. It was a large, rambling, barn-like structure a story and a half high. Half a dozen gables stuck up from the side of the roof. It looked very old and its first coat of paint had never been renewed. The ground around it was as bare as the weathered clapboarding. There was no sign of any attempt at beautifying either grounds or building. A rough picket fence separated it from the rest of the village, but just why no one could tell, for the ground inside the fence was, if anything, more barren than that outside. Altogether it was a forlorn-looking place.

The proprietor led Scott upstairs into a room large enough for a banquet hall. It looked even more desolate, if possible, than the outside of the house. It contained a bed covered with an old patch-work quilt and two boxes—one to serve as a chair and the other as a washstand (you could tell which was the washstand by the old tin basin half full of dirty water).

Scott looked around the room in dismay, but he had made up his mind that he would have to put up with it when he caught a sickening odor, as of a dead mouse, that apparently came from the closet. That he could not stand. He had heard of the touchiness of these people, and he did not want to offend them, especially as he would probably have to make the place his headquarters for some time. But he had to get out of there by some means.

“You haven’t any bedroom on the first floor, have you?” he asked, trying to conceal the disgust he actually felt. “I may be here a long time, and there may be a great many people coming to see me, and a ground-floor room would be much more convenient.”

“Shore, I reckon we can accommodate you,” the man said, and he led the way apathetically downstairs again.

He opened a door off the long back porch and stepped back to let Scott enter. It was a palace compared with the upstairs room. The furniture was old, but everything was there down to a rag carpet on the floor, and, moreover, everything looked clean.

“This will be fine,” Scott said as he glanced quickly about. “What time do you have dinner?”

“Twelve o’clock, most times, but there ain’t anything certain about it.” He paused at the door on his way out. “It ain’t none of my business, but you ain’t a U. S. marshal, be you?”

“No,” Scott laughed, “nothing like that. Why, are there many moonshiners around here?”

“I ain’t saying anything about moonshiners,” the man replied in the same dull tone. “I was just going to tell you that this was a mighty unhealthy country around here for the U. S. marshal.”

Scott did not know whether this was meant as a friendly warning or as a threat, and before he could ask anything more about it the man was gone. As he was not in any way connected with the United States marshal, he thought no more about it.

Left to himself, he began to examine the room more closely. It was clean all right, but the general effect of it was most grotesque. The high, carved head-board of the old walnut bed might have had a place in a medieval museum, but here in this room it looked out of place like everything else in it. When Scott’s eyes fell on the wall paper, he stood aghast. He counted thirty-seven different patterns, each a small square evidently taken from a country storekeeper’s sample book, and only a third of the wall was covered. The east window was heavily curtained with portières, lace curtains and a shade. Scott peeped out. It opened almost into the mountainside and no human habitation was in sight. The glass door opening on to the back porch—which was by far the most frequented part of the house—was not curtained at all. It was a queer place, but Scott had been in worse, and he decided that it would have to do.

He had been so interested in finding a place to stay that he had forgotten all about the man from the Washington office who was to meet him here. He went out to inquire for him. The dining room opened on to the porch next to his room and the kitchen was next to that.

The man was nowhere to be seen, but there were three women in the kitchen and they were feverishly discussing Scott’s probable business. Complete silence fell on them all when he appeared in the doorway.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Do you know whether Mr. Reynolds of the Forest Service has been here?”

The women looked at each other as though an important problem had been solved before any one answered.

Then one of the women answered with a question: “Are you Mr. Burton?”

“Yes,” Scott said.

“Mr. Reynolds left here this morning. He said that if Mr. Burton, the new supervisor, came to tell him he would be back to-night or to-morrow morning. I was looking for a much older man,” she added looking at him curiously.

“Well,” Scott laughed, “time will correct that.”

Scott noticed that these women were all sizing him up just as the station agent had done a little while before. He went back to his room, and looked in the glass to see what could be wrong. He could see nothing to attract attention. He tried to forget the occurrence and went out to see the town and surrounding country.

He wandered down the street, if the road between the two stores could be called a street, and wondered why there should be two stores in such a place. Judging from the unbroken forests on the mountain slopes he did not see where enough people could possibly come from to support any store at all.

On the porch of each store there was a small group of idlers holding down the dry-goods boxes, and Scott saw that they were sizing him up just as the women had done. Moreover, the stare of these men seemed to be distinctly unfriendly. It made him feel uneasy. He was glad when he had run the gauntlet of unfriendly stares, and was out in the open road with only the railroad station and the mountains before him. But he had one more examination to stand. The station agent was watching him from the corner of the platform. In fact, Scott caught him squatting down to get a better view of him even before he came out in the open. He resented this officious spying on his movements and turned aside into a mountain road which wound its way up a timber-covered slope.

“Heh!” Scott turned to see the man coming towards him at what was an unusual gait for him. “Didn’t buy anything at the store, did you?”

Scott looked at him indignantly for an instant, but he remembered again that he had to live with these people, probably for a long time, and did not want to offend them. “No,” he replied as pleasantly as he could. “Why?”

“I just wanted to know,” the man replied frankly. “But if you haven’t done it, don’t.” The man had evidently noticed that Scott had resented his interference and he walked away with considerable dignity without making any further explanation.

Scott started to call him back but changed his mind and continued his walk up the road. He wanted to get away from these inquisitive people for a while, and try to think things over. Fate, however, seemed to have decided otherwise. He had gone a little more than a quarter of a mile up the winding road through the heavy hardwood timber when he came to a little cabin set back only a few feet from the road behind the inevitable picket fence. An old man was sitting on the porch, and he sized Scott up with the same all-consuming curiosity, but his gaze seemed to be wholly friendly. There was none of that furtive animosity he had felt rather than seen in the groups down at the store.

“Howdy, stranger?” the old man greeted him pleasantly. “Be you the new supervisor?”

The old man’s manner was so evidently friendly, and his curiosity so frank that Scott warmed up to him at once.

“Yes,” he admitted cheerfully, “I’m the new supervisor.”

“Haven’t bought anything at the store yet, have you?” the old man continued in his friendly way.

There was that same question about the store and Scott stiffened for an instant, but he thought better of it. Maybe he could learn something from this old man.

“No,” Scott said, “I have not bought anything from the store. Tell me, why does everybody ask me that? I have not been in this town much more than half an hour and two people have already asked me if I have bought anything at the store. What is the meaning of it?”

The old man looked at him thoughtfully for a minute as though hesitating to answer the question. Then he answered slowly as though pronouncing final judgment:

“Because when you do buy anything from one of those stores, you might as well leave the town for all the good you’ll ever be able to do in this country,” and he turned as though to enter the house.