Читать книгу The Treasure Trail - Frederick Niven - Страница 5

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THE bunch of returned horses was down in the home pasture. They were whinnying to their old fellows by the time Tremaine reached home. And by the time Piccolo got to the ranch-house Tremaine had let them all in.

It was good to be back, in Piccolo’s eyes, to see again the foot breadth of water running along in the irrigation ditch. Even the stovepipe sticking up out of the roof it was good to see again! When he had hung his saddle on its peg he went indoors to find his partner filling his tobacco pouch at the big tin.

“A smoke, Pic, my lad,” said Jack. “A smoke before anything. No more kinick-kinick muck.”

Piccolo flung off his heavy coat and went out for cordwood to start the stove, and Tremaine smoked meditatively. He had something on his mind, but it was not till after supper that he spoke it, pushing back his plate.

“That old man Angus MacPherson is sure all prospector,” said he.

“I guess he is. He’s not so very old, Jack.”

Puff-puff went Tremaine.

“You didn’t notice the way he looked at the bits of stone you threw out of your pocket, Pic?”

“Stone?”

“Yes. When you were dusting out your pocket like a kind of a shy school kid under the eyes of his daughter.”

“Oh, gwan!” said David Thomas.

“I guess there’s nothing in it,” said Tremaine, “and yet I don’t know. I’ll be turning into a writing sharp if I get imagining. But there seemed more than him just being bugs on looking at rocks. Got any more bits in your pocket?”

He stared at Piccolo. He frowned. He wondered what was the meaning of his partner’s expression. Really what Tremaine said had conjured back a picture into Piccolo’s mind, a picture hardly noted at the time. He remembered how Mark Bantling had watched him when he sat his horse before the Benwell House veranda answering the silly questions of that fellow What’s-his-name.

“It’s queer, you know, how mineral has been found in this Western country,” Tremaine remarked, persistent. “Most unexpected ways. Accidents! Devil’s own luck, as the saying goes.

“Guess I wouldn’t know paying mineral even if I saw it,” said Piccolo. “Copper in a stone don’t always look like copper in a penny piece. Silver in a stone don’t always look like half a dollar. Might be tin for all I’d know. Once I thought I’d got gold and a darned old prospector laughed himself red over me. Mica it was.”

“Well, man, tin’s valuable. Mica is valuable if you get the right kind and in the right quantity.”

“Oh shoot!” said Piccolo. “Above ground for me! No delving like a mole.”

But though the subject seemed to be thus dismissed it stuck in Tremaine’s mind, in Piccolo’s. He could not rest. Supper over that night, because of his thoughts set a-going by Jack’s remarks, he came to a decision regarding a course of action. But shy of telling what he was about he announced:

“Guess I’ll saddle up and go back to Colvalli. I want some cig papers.”

“Smoke a pipe, man,” said Tremaine.

“No. I want some papers.”

“There’s some there, then. On top of the grand piano.”

Grand Piano was their name for an old packing-case turned into a cupboard.

“Ah, but they’re white. I want wheat straw.”

“Gee, you are surely particular.”

Piccolo waited for no further repartee, strolled leisurely out. To ride five miles for (ostensibly) a packet of cigarette papers—brown, when white were procurable, as well as a pipe—was perhaps odd. To ease his conscience, rather than to have them to show to Jack, he certainly bought wheat papers in Colvalli before doing aught else. Shades of night were taking the gold light out of the rolling prairie. Distances were purple instead of green, sifted with blue. He left his horse hitched at Inman’s Store, and strolled along to the Benwell House. There were few men there, so he sat on the veranda edge, legs dangling over, and rolled a cigarette. Then he dropped his tobacco sack—and the papers. He had to light a match to find them. When he had found them his face, to the considering gaze of Movie Bill, sitting there again (reading no more, the dim light forbidding), had a worried look. An ingenuous sort of man, thought Movie.

“Looking for anything?” he asked.

“Me? Why no.”

“Oh!” said Movie Bill.

Piccolo eyed him sidewise in the dusk.

“I saw a man pick up something there just after you went today,” Movie added, “and I wondered.”

Piccolo thought he had better be clever before those deep-set meditative eyes.

“Guess it was nothing I dropped,” said he.

“All right,” replied Bill, laconically.

Whistling gently, hands in pockets, Piccolo strolling round the gable, lost in thought, came to his horse. There might be something in what Jack imagined, thought he. What should he do? So he wondered. The notion took him to ride back to Angus MacPherson’s and—he hesitated. What could he do there? They might not sit on the veranda so late. How, even if they did, would he see? He could not pretend to drop things there and light matches. He would be ashamed to seem clumsy, “all thumbs,” before Miss MacPherson. For a moment he thought of going up to the MacPherson house quietly and examining the ground stealthily before the veranda, for the dropped stones. Then he remembered the dog. It would, for sure, give tongue if he prowled about that way.

A gentle night breeze fanned down the straggling street, stirred the dust, was cool on his cheek. He felt himself a fool. Stupid notion, that of his partner’s! He wondered if he should go back and ask Jack’s advice; but to do so he would have to tell of dusting out his pocket before the Benwell House, and Jack somehow seemed always able to see inside him. Jack would say: “That was what you remembered when I was talking about you dropping the stones at MacPherson’s!” Piccolo had a sensitiveness in his make-up, his constitution, his harmless ego. He had always dreaded not being able to play the man in an emergency; and yet in all the emergencies he had met he had done so. Still, he had that sensitiveness. He would go home, he decided—and sleep on it.

“To sleep on it has helped many a man,” he mused.

If he had only known it Angus MacPherson was quoting the very same adage to himself scarcely a mile to north—and quoting it without avail.

Slowly homeward rode Piccolo through the dusk, the red glow of his cigarette rising and falling from his silhouetted head to his silhouetted saddle-horn as he took the twining road along the bench-tops.

And Angus, in his buckboard, saw that figure as he drove south also, on one of the backward loops of road.

“Eh man,” he murmured, “a wonderful land for what the painter bodies call ‘effects’. What a figure is yon against the last of the day! What would we call it? The Last of the Cowpunchers. Eh man, a caller air; a grand atmosphere!”

He flicked the whip and hummed a few bars of his favourite song:

“...my heart will ever be

At hame in dear auld Scotland, wi’ my ain folk!”

The last of the cowpunchers (that Angus, joggling along in the buckboard did not recognize as Piccolo in that light, or lack of light) drifted down beyond the roll of plain. A sickle of moon showed like a paring of silver in the deep blue sky. The Dipper was bright, with its pointers pointing to the North Star, and over against it belted Orion stood above the rolling world.

“It’s better to be quixotic than close,” thought Angus; and he arrived at the T.T. ranch so little in rear of Piccolo that the latter stood waiting to see who came, framed by the oblong of lit ranch door.

“Good-nicht,” said Angus.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Piccolo, and his voice at that moment was scarcely higher than a whisper.

“I beg your pardon?” said Angus.

“I said, ‘Oh, it’s you’!” repeated Piccolo.

“Ay, that’s right. Oh, it’s me, and no doubt—no doubt.” He sighed, as one sighing over his own folly. “Could I have a word wi’ ye, Pic?” he enquired.