Читать книгу The Blue Jay - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 9

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That was in the days before every hired man had a Ford. Automobiles was something to dream about, but not to see. When I got to the brick hotel back in the white-man’s part of Sour City, with Pepillo and my luggage in the wagon, there was Randal setting up on the seat of a buckboard reining in a pair of fine hosses and gentling them down a little with his voice, because they was the kind that needed gentling.

You could tell by one look at them hosses why it was that Randal wasn’t apt to make any howling success as an economical rancher, because that span was a pair of high-steppers that would of been more useful on a race track than in toting hired men and their blanket rolls back and forth to the ranch-house, and bringing in empty boxes and bringing out groceries and meat.

I threw in my luggage and climbed into the place beside Randal, which was a pretty hard job, because those hosses were all the time starting and backing and starting up again and half-rearing, and prancing and dancing and foaming and looking mighty pretty and useless, you can bet. But when I was settled, the kid jumped into the back of the buckboard as slick as you please.

“What’s this?” says Randal.

“That’s my mozo,” says I.

He give me a quick side-glance.

“Whole hog, eh?” says he.

“Or none,” says I.

“All right,” says Randal. “I wish you luck, but I don’t think that you’ll ever get by with the boys if you have a servant like this. They ain’t the kind that like servants.”

“They’ll like Pepillo,” says I. “They’ll like him, or be damned, and I don’t think that I care much which.”

You see, I was happy about that boy. He had a way with him that meant a good deal to me. He was sassy and he was a crook, but so was I. And I figgered that I could do a whole lot of good for him, and that he could do a whole lot of good for me, which is the best way to have any deal arranged—something on both sides, you know! But still, it rather tickled me to think that here was I, a jail-bird, aiming to take care of the raising of a kid like Pepillo that might of bothered a whole chapter of father confessors to look after him and his sins.

The road that we followed pitched up a pretty steep grade from Sour City and pretty soon we come to a height on a place where the road dropped over the top of a hill, and there Randal pulled up the hosses and nodded to me. I knew what he meant, and so I took a look, because I figured that this must be the ranch.

Starting from the outside, I circled my eye around on tall mountains, west and south and east, and where we was, towards the north, there was rolling hills, with a cut through them where Sour Creek rolled through on its way down the bigger valley outside. But inside those mountains and those hills there was as neat a valley as I ever hope to see, all checked about and crossed over with the little streams that run down to the Sour Creek. The sides of them streams was lined with trees. Also, there was groves dotted around casual, here and there, where the cows could lie down for shade in the middle of the day or get shelter in a storm, and where your eye could rest pretty pleasant.

I never seen a range where a gent could ride over with more pleasure than that Sour Creek valley. Right about in the middle, with the road pointing a straight white finger at it, there was the roof of a house, just about covered up with trees, at that distance, and I didn’t have to ask that that was the ranch-house.

All I could do was to say: “Is the whole thing one ranch?”

Randal, he grinned sideways at me, that way that he had, and he nodded.

“The fences for the boundaries,” says he, “run all around this here valley on the water divides. Uncle Stephen picked out this place at a time when he could of fenced in the entire lower valley as well as this place, but he decided that this was enough for any one man to give his attention to work properly. So he settled down here. The old fool! He might have had ten millions in land if he’d spread himself a little more!”

I looked around and I didn’t say nothing, but I’ll tell you that I agreed with old Stephen and not with his nephew. Because that big oblong valley was a whopping piece of land. It would make your head ache if you was to close your eyes of a night and try to think of all the nooks and the corners on it and all of the landmarks. It just filled a man’s eye, and it would certainly fill his hands, too. I didn’t wonder that Uncle Stephen had been able to make fifty thousand dollars a year out of that land. I only wondered that he hadn’t been able to make two hundred thousand out of it; or even more!

But that was before I had a chance to look close at the southern mountains. When I saw them close up, then I understood. Off at a little distance, they looked perfectly natural and nice and harmless, with some white streaks down the sides of them, but when you come closer, you could see that those streaks developed into a regular network across the faces of the mountains, and when you come closer still, you could see that every cord and crevice of that network was made by the work of the water that was flowing along through limestone formations and that had been working a few billions of years chawing out the stone and making itself white-walled cañons.

You talk about a labyrinth—that was it! I didn’t have a chance to look at it close, of course, but before we got to the ranch-house, I could see there was about a thousand blind alleys among those mountains, and besides them, there was about a thousand alleys that wasn’t blind. And maybe there was ways of making blind alleys into alleys that had a let-out in them. Take it by and large, a gent could walk every day of his life in those limestone alleys and try to get the plan of them into his head, but he never would of succeeded. Not a chance! What they needed was a gent with a brain that would understand everything that it seen at a glance and keep it printed solid in his head. You understand?

Randal, he got sort of nervous as we pulled along towards the ranch.

“You don’t seem none too cheerful!” says he.

“Well,” says I, “I’ve heard folks talk about a thieves’ paradise, but till I seen those cañons, I didn’t know what they meant, you see? Now I understand. Will you tell me, in the first place, just what sort of a gent that Uncle Stephen of yours was?”

“I’ll show you pretty soon,” says Randal.

We drove along about another mile up the valley and pretty soon he pulled up the hosses and pointed to a fence where the three lines of barbed wire lay hangin’ on the ground and rusting themselves to death.

“About two days before Uncle Stephen died,” says Randal, “he was riding along this way, and he wanted to see how his shooting eye was. And so he outs with his Colt and he blazes away with it in rapid succession three times, and when he got done with his shooting, there were the three wires hanging limp on the ground. The boys that were along with him thought so much of that bit of shooting that when Uncle Stephen died, a couple of days later, they swore that that fence should never be repaired, and they keep to their oath. Because of it, I have to let a fifty-acre field lie idle, as you see. But tradition is a great thing on this ranch, and I can’t break the traditions. That broken fence stands for the ghost of Uncle Stephen, as you might say, and the boys won’t have it fixed. But I wanted to show it to you to let you understand the sort of stuff that he was made of!”

It was enough. I looked at those three clipped wires and I understood!

You’ve heard what I think of revolvers for accuracy; and I don’t stand alone. If you doubt me, you meet up with the head of the police department in a big town, and you talk to him. Maybe he’s got under him a thousand men that are paid to carry revolvers and to practice with them. They get extra pay and prizes and a lot of glory for being able to shoot straight. They get ammunition furnished to them free for practice, and besides all that, they all know that it’s in their own interest to know how to shoot straighter than the crooks. But you ask the chief if he’s got three real revolver shots in his thousand men, and if he’s an honest chief, he’ll lose no time, but tell you that he ain’t.

Well, when I seen the three clipped wires of that fence, I can’t tell you how my arm ached and how my trigger finger went numb to think of all the hours and hours that Stephen Randal must of practiced to be able to shoot like that! It takes a gent that’s a hero to have as much patience as that. And while he kept up his shooting, he ran a big ranch and chased thieves and kept his accounts, and made fifty thousand dollars a year, clear cash profit!

I didn’t need no oil painting of Stephen Randal after that. I seen him just as clear as though I had had his cold eyes looking at me down the barrel of a gun. I seen him just as clear as though I had hit him with all my might and just busted my hand all to pieces on the edge of his jaw.

Says I to Randal: “All I got to do is to follow the example of a gent like that uncle of yours. All that I got to do is to step right inside of his boots, eh?”

Randal nodded. “It’s about the only way that you could manage it, I guess,” says he. “Uncle Stephen was a sort of a hero, around here. They all still talk about him. They take off their hats to him, and they take them off to nothing else in the world.”

It looked pretty clear to me, and so I says: “Well, Randal, I’ll tell you right now that this job is a bad one and there’s about one chance in a hundred that it won’t lick me. But I’ll try my best. And here’s where I start right in studying Uncle Stephen!”