Читать книгу Six-Gun Country - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 5

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Chisholm’s was a strictly summer camp. Half the year it was buried in frightful snowdrifts that sagged through the gulch to the north of his place. Six months of the year there were anywhere from five to fifty feet of snow rolled on top of the Chisholm shack. When the first white weather began, Danny Chisholm cached everything in wrappings of oilcloth, put some heavy props under the roofs of his sheds, prayed that they would hold the weight of the snows until the next thaw, and then trekked down for the lowlands.

So the camp slept under sheeted ice and snow during six months of the year, but the remaining six months it was a sort of open-air hotel. It was a queer sort of crossroads that he had chosen for his camp. There were no main trails that passed up and down or across the ridges at this point, but trappers, hunters, botanists, and the bolder spirits among the tourists who loved the high places crossed and recrossed the site of the Chisholm camp.

Besides, there were certain other enforced travelers—as one might call them—who dropped in at Chisholm’s. These were men who did not wish to give names, who did not wish to ask questions or answer them. Chisholm was famous for the absence of embarrassing conversation at his camp fire. Altogether, what with one class of traveler and another, Danny made a pretty penny during the warmer seasons of the year.

I came over the south shoulder of Mount Christmas and in the hollow beneath me was the glimmer of the Chisholm fire, made into a single thin ray of red light. I followed it like a star, until I was close to his clearing. Then, at a little distance, I put up Roanoke in an open space where he would find plenty of forage, and went on foot toward the fire. I had slung a pack across my back, so that I could fill the part of a foot traveler.

What I first saw from the shadows of the trees at the edge of the clearing was the active figure of Danny Chisholm. That little man never rested. He was forever cooking or cleaning up, or whirling about like a squirrel on a branch to ask one of his guests if they were comfortable.

Usually, as tonight, his guests slept in the open. In case of need, they could be lodged in very foul weather under one of his damp, tumbledown sheds. Now their blankets were spread in the outer rim of the firelight. In the air was the last tang of coffee which had been made for the latest comer. There was a rumbling of deep, contented voices; and when a puff of wind came, it never failed to raise a sharp tongue of flame that cast a bright wink of light over the clearing and made the nearest pine trees glisten.

I stood there for a moment, enjoying the scene, and the great upper peaks which walked up among the stars in the distance. I felt like a tiny Tom Thumb in the hollow hand of a giant.

Then I noticed the other guests. There were only three of them—one young, and two big-shouldered mountaineers with beards of uncertain date shrouding their faces. As for me, I remained where I was, in the shadow.

For there was never any trace of me, even in a place like Danny Chisholm’s, where ordinary strifes were forgotten. This was a court of last resource to which all men resorted when they were hard pressed by wind and weather. The lion and the lamb lay down together in actual fact, and if there were occasional quarrels here, they were the quarrels which originated in the camp itself, and which were not imported from the outside.

But even this atmosphere of truce I could not trust. No unwritten law was strong enough to protect a man with fifteen thousand dollars on his head! For a moment, a great bitterness went through me.

In the old days I was very often set up with a feeling of grandeur because of my very loneliness; but as time went on, that loneliness ate into my spirit, and often a convulsion of something like homesickness made me as weak as a child.

Danny Chisholm came to me at once. When he saw that I preferred the shadows, he did not urge me to come closer to the camp fire. I asked him if he had a cup of coffee left, and he went hastily for it and brought me back a great slab of pone, split open and layered with molasses inside. It tasted better than any cake I have ever touched, and the coffee of another man’s making was nectar to me.

I sat with my back to the tree behind me and drank and ate. Danny Chisholm stood near by and talked—about a tenderfoot who had come up to his camp bent on shooting a mountain sheep, about Dad Riley coming in with a load of moonshine, about a new rifle which he had bought, and about the Sanburn holdup.

He chatted on in an easy monotone, never waiting for a reply, only pausing to puff in leisurely fashion at his pipe. But he knew that I was hungry to hear him, as any man who lives like a hermit against his will begins to hunger for the sound of a human voice. To me, that foolish babble was sweeter than wine and honey. It relaxed me, body and soul, and it made me almost sleepy with content. It filled me with an immense good will to fellow men.

Then voices began to be heard beside the camp fire, and Danny hastened back to it.

He stood, ridiculously small in the flare of the fire, gesticulating with both hands. Those three big fellows, each was almost as tall, sitting, as was Danny on his feet.

“I got only one thing to say,” said Danny. “If you’ve come here for a fight, go off somewhere and fight where the loser’ll roll into the river where he drops. I disremember what year it was when the Slocum boys come up here and got into a scrap with a couple of old sourdoughs. Two of ’em was killed; two more was laid up. I had to bury them that died—right here in these rocks.

“It was like breaking ground in quartzite. Besides, I had to nurse them two that was down. What did I get out of it? Nothing at all! They was all broke. The pickings in their pockets wasn’t enough to feed a layin’ hen through the summer season! So I say: If you want to fight, go out where the mountains can see you. I’m too old to be interested in that sort of a show!”

Danny was really what one might call hard-boiled. He never pretended that he had any ultimate interest in his guests beyond getting their money. Everyone liked his frankness.

One of the bearded fellows took up the talk, and at the first word I pricked up my ears.

“Porfilo,” said he. “That was what we was talking about. This kid—”

“Porfilo,” put in Danny Chisholm, “is a poor thing to talk about day or night, in the valley or up here in the mountains. Because you never know what side folks is gunna take about him.”

“Look here,” said the bearded man, “there used to be two sides. The best side used to be the one that figgered he’d done nothin’ that wasn’t over-balanced by the good he’s done. I was one of them that stood on that side. But along comes this here stage holdup—and that’s different!”

“Why different?” put in the youth.

Now he sat up and squared his shoulders and turned his head a little. I saw that he was a whale of a man, boy, rather. For the firelight, streaking down his profile, showed me a fine-looking youngster of not more than eighteen, the sort of eighteen-year-old who has stepped into nearly his full strength.

I had been that sort of a boy. Three long years ago I had been as he was now. One sees such fellows fighting in the prize ring, from time to time, powerful as men but supple as children, recuperating swiftly after hard blows, full of zest and battle.

I, from the altitude of twenty-one, looked with an almost sad wisdom upon this boy. Not three years, but three decades stretched between us.

“There you are,” said Chisholm. “You see that you got an argument pronto. Ain’t I right about it?”

“This here—kid,” said the first speaker, making a little pause of contempt before he named the boy, “is arguin’ like a plumb fool. He don’t see no difference between what Porfilo has done before and what he’s done this time.”

“He busted into a house and slammed three men, all on one night,” said the boy.

“That was with his fists.”

“Well, is guns any worse?”

“Worse by just a mite. Just the mite of difference between livin’ and dyin’.”

“Who did he kill when he stuck up the stage?”

“By luck he didn’t kill none—but he shot three times to kill. One slug just missed the heart of one of the boys. Another plowed through the cheek and tore off the ear of another chap. Them bullets was aimed to kill, which is something that he never done before, except when his back was agin’ the wall!”

The boy jerked back his head. “His back was agin’ the wall when he held up the stage!”

“How come?”

“They stuck up their hands, and when he lowered his gun, one of ’em made a phony move and started shootin’. They deserved to die, all the three of ’em, for tryin’ a double cross!”

“Is that your way of lookin’ at it, kid?” said the burly fellow who carried on the brunt of the talk for the other side. “Well, then I got to say that you’re gunna make a fine sort of a citizen, one of these days.”

“I dunno that I like the way that you say that!” said the boy.

But the other two did not understand. What they heard in his voice was a tremor which was very pronounced and which was exactly like the tremor of fear. But I knew better.

Indeed, there was fear in that youngster, but it was the sort of fear which drives men into the deeds of most frantic heroism. It was the fear which a man feels when he is in doubt about himself. Fear that he will not do all that can be expected of a man.

The instant I heard that tremor in the throat of the boy, I gathered my feet under me and got ready to jump behind a tree out of the path of possible bullets, for I knew that trouble was coming.

Then the bearded rascal brought all to a climax by snorting:

“You don’t like it? Then what’ll you do about it?”