Читать книгу Lucky Larribee - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Larribee was plain no good. Larribee was low. The Dents did not have to do much thinking. The fact was clear after a single half day of their cousin’s company.

His father’s letter had pointed out that he sent the young man into the Far West—meaning, in those days, anything west of the Mississippi—in the hope that he might find himself. He said that he had given Alfred every opening and encouragement that he could, but the boy was averse to labour. He hoped that Wilbur Dent would be able to make a man of him; “But,” said the letter, “you’ll find Alfred very odd.”

Wilbur Dent had lifted eight hundred pounds of wheat off a scale in a single clean effort. Now he set his jaw and said to his wife: “I’ll make a man of him!”

She smiled a little and then forced herself to swallow the smile.

“You mustn’t be too hard on the poor boy,” said she.

As a matter of fact, she hoped that her dear husband would flay the youth alive, if by so doing he was able to accomplish the will of the boy’s father. For the elder Larribee was rich. He was wilfully, almost sinfully rich, and if all went well, if they reformed young Larribee, might not a grateful father then open a door to culture and prosperity for one or more of her own darling sons?

They expected a high strung spendthrift, a youth with vices, but also a youth with fire. They were wrong. He had all the vices, but he had none of the fire.

He drank to excess, gambled to the value of his last shirt, loved cards and dice and was oddly proficient in their management, never raised his hand to do a stroke of work of any sort, and contributed nothing to the family or to the well-being of his host except a continual flow of lazy, good-natured conversation.

There were two hundred pounds of him, rising to a height of six feet. He looked like a seal. His neck was thick, with the same softly flowing lines over shoulders and chest. He had, above all, the same air of sleekness, and a slightly oily duskiness of voice completed the resemblance.

“We’ll soon get his weight down,” said the elder Dent.

So he introduced Alfred Larribee to the woodpile. He gave him the introduction in the morning; an hour later the blows of the axe ceased ringing; Larribee had disappeared. He turned up at midnight, singing in a somewhat wavering voice as he came down the front path. Dent was waiting for him, but when he saw the unsteady figure, clad in torn and ragged clothes, he shrugged his shoulders and let the boy go to sleep unreproved.

He said to Mrs. Dent: “After all, he’s only twenty-one. Lots of boys are lazy at that age. Lots of boys drink a bit, also.”

Then, the next morning, they got full reports of what had happened to Larribee the night before. Fort Ransome was a thriving little town which had a lot of loose cash generally afloat in it, owning to the sale of outfits to trappers and the shipping of their furs up the river to St. Louis, or down the river to New Orleans. The core of the population of Fort Ransome consisted of the sturdy farmers, like Dent, who kept on clearing land and increasing the acreage of their crops, as well as raising cattle and horses; but the life of Fort Ransome apparently settled around the traders’ stores during the day and the gambling houses during the night, with a good deal of activity in the saloons during all of the twenty-four hours.

It was in the Potswood gambling house that young Larribee had been the day before, inveigled into a game of poker. It lasted until midnight, at which time Larribee had accumulated all the stakes on the table.

Then five angry men glared at one another, swore that so much luck could not be honest, and laid their hands not only on young Larribee, but on the money as well. Larribee managed to escape by diving through a window, but his money remained behind him.

“He ran away,” said Fort Ransome. “He’s a coward!”

But Wilbur Dent led the youth back to the woodpile, patiently, the next morning. In half an hour he was gone again!

Where did he get the money to commence the game, having left his winnings behind the night before?

At any rate, that night he won fifteen hundred dollars at dice before the following morning dawned. When he left the gaming house he was stuck up by a pair of footpads and robbed of every penny. Once more Wilbur Dent was waiting up for him when he returned home; he allowed Larribee to enter his room, and then turned the key in the door.

“You stay in there,” he said, “until you’ve decided to settle down to honest work!”

Later Dent showed how an axe should be properly swung, and how its flashing blade should be fleshed to the handle in the wood. So young Larribee took his stance, swung, and at the third stroke broke the axe-handle neatly in twain.

A flaw in the wood, declared Dent. And he furnished another axe, with the handle of truest, toughest hickory.

Alas, it endured only six strokes, and then that noble hickory stick was ignobly shattered in the hands of the boy.

Wilbur Dent had lifted eight hundred pounds of wheat, but he had never seen such a thing as this happen. Even granting that the boy, from sheer malice and laziness, might have struck a little slantwise with the axe, still, hickory is hickory to every Yankee—a wood, and almost more than a wood; a sort of moral thing, undefeatable except by time.

So Dent laid his hand upon the shoulder of Larribee. It was soft and sleek. He could poke his forefinger, he felt, almost to the shoulder bone; but when he grasped that handful of flesh hard, he felt that it was filled with ten thousand small fibres. He felt it, and he was thoroughly amazed for he well knew the difference between fat and muscle.

An axe was too fine an instrument for such horse-power, evidently. So Dent took him to the field where two of his sons were wielding a great crosscut saw on several oak trees. He ordered Douglas to the barn; he commanded Larribee to sit down with Derry and take the opposite end of the crosscut. Dent stood by to watch.

It was a good thing to see the bright blade of the saw flashing back and forth, spouting a white gush of wood fibres and dust at every stroke. Wilbur Dent looked with pride on Derry, his oldest son, his favourite of the three, seeing the sway of his strong back and his resolute shoulders. For the oak was tough, the inner grain was hard as iron, and the saw-teeth screamed against it.

On the other side of the tree Dent saw Larribee with only one hand upon the saw, and his rage burst out.

“Two hands, you lazy loafer!” he shouted. “You’ll do your share of this work or I’ll have the hide off you!”

Larribee looked at him with a sigh, a melancholy look, and laying both hands upon the long grip, he thrust forward.

Dent saw the thing that happened; but afterwards he could hardly believe that it had not been a dream. It was a new saw, freshly sharpened. Perhaps that was the trouble, for the keen teeth bit too deeply into the metallic hardness of the oak’s heart and lodged there. But that saw-blade of bright new steel, supple as a sword, and mighty, gave with a ripple and a bulge before the thrust of Larribee. There was a clang like a rifle shot; and the blade snapped six inches from the trunk of the tree.

“That’s a pity,” said Larribee, standing up with the mutilated stump of the saw in his hand.

“You blasted vandal,” exclaimed Dent. “The price of this comes out of your own pocket. I’ll find work for you!”

He paused to think. What work, after all? A spade has a wooden handle; he could not set this monster to digging. A pitchfork has a slender handle of wood also, and it would snap at the first mighty heave of those shoulders.

Dent stared at Larribee with actual hatred.

“Horses!” he said to himself.

He had a dozen freshly bought plains mustangs of Indian stock, wilder than eagles, wilier than snakes. He took Larribee to the corral, where they were now being given a three-day course of starvation before experts attempted to manage them.

“You ride every one of that lot before night!” said he. “And if you quit, I’ll give you a ticket back to your father and let him handle you. A precious lot you’re worth to a ranch!”