Читать книгу Slow Joe - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

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The old Gresham place laid out to be something. Sam Gresham made a slough of money in cattle and he socked a big slice of it into the house he built. He planted a fir hedge around it, and set it a good bit back from the street, so’s he could make a driveway and have longer to go home. He put out a garden, too, with pampas grass in it, and a lot of foreign trees. He had an orchard on one side of his house, and he had a vegetable garden behind it. He used to keep two outside men working, all year round, and two women fiddling about the house. It was the biggest outfit inside of Kearneyville, while it lasted. Then it flattened out, and got dusty. It was vacant so long that it got most of its windows busted, and a ghost in the observation tower over the center of the house.

The gate to the driveway was open and hadn’t been closed for a long time. It sagged from one hinge and swayed east a bit. So I rode right in. Nobody had done a lick on the garden for fifteen years, so it looked pretty good. It was just a brush tangle, with paths worn through, here and there, and funny looking trees sticking their heads up. The orchard had grown old, and twisted, and thick in the skin. I guessed it gave as much as a barrel of wormy apples every year. But it made a good shade.

In the old days, you hitched behind the house, but now there was a rack in front of the place. I threw the reins over a post, and Brindle was asleep on three legs before I got to the front door.

I knocked, and heard the echo go walking down the hall and washing through the old rooms. I could peer through the screen doors and see that the hall was as hollow as the shell of a bad walnut. All the big mahogany fixings were gone. It was clear that the Edgars were not putting on dog like the Gresham outfit had done. They’d filled in the window glass and let it go at that.

There was no answer to my first knock. I thought nobody was at home, and that relieved me, for the golden spurs inside my pocket were no heavier than my heart when I thought of the interview that I had ahead of me. She was crazy about him. He’d died naming her. For three whole days I had been making up my speeches.

I knocked again. This time I raised a quick step down the hall, and the bang of a door.

It might be the girl. No, there was a shuffle of dragging heels, and a bent, gray woman came and looked at me through the screen. She was drying her big red hands on her apron.

“Well? Well?” she asked me.

I got off my hat and said I wanted to see Miss Edgar. Miss Ruth Edgar.

“Land sakes, how’m I to know where she is?” says the lady. “She might be upstairs. Give her a holler. Or she might be around in the orchard. I can’t do your lookin’ for you.”

So she turned around and went hurrying back to her kitchen.

I walked down the front steps feeling worse than ever. You know, when a girl has that sort of an atmosphere at home, it’s likely that when she gives her heart to a man, she gives her soul, too, and begins to sew on baby fixings the day after she’s said “Yes.”

I wanted to take brindle and slide downtown and get myself a drink, but I figured that I’d sleep a lot better that night if I got the thing over.

I looked up at the second-story windows. They seemed blank, glittering in the sun. It was sort of a fool play to holler to a girl you’d never seen, and when she shoved up the window to introduce yourself with: “Sorry to bother you, but your man is dead.”

So I walked around the corner of the house into the orchard and saw her. She was lying in a hammock with her arms folded under her head, looking up at the sky through the apple leaves, I suppose. And she had on a little smile, like she was thinking of how she had won the blue ribbon at something, or how good her organdy party dress would look, or how she would furnish her parlor, or nobody’s business. She was mighty pretty, blonde; and, even with her elbows sticking out like that, they didn’t have a sharp point. Her hair was a fluff; one ray of sun fell on it, and went into the shining mist of it.

She wasn’t smiling at the sky through the leaves, either. It was a man-smile that she was wearing. You know when you tell a girl how much she means to you and somehow she is all by herself, to you, and all at once you notice that she’s looking off at the horizon, with a little smile breaking the corners of her mouth? Then you know, for the first time, that she’s really listening.

Ruth Edgar was listening, all right. There was a big cowpoke sitting in a chair beside the hammock. He was a whale. He had a seventeen inch neck, red mahogany. He was sweating so he shone, but he didn’t mind that. In fact, he was smiling, too, and leaning like a runner near the finish.

I rolled a cigarette and lighted it. I felt the golden spurs above my heart, but they didn’t weigh so much, just then. When I looked up from the scratching of my match, I saw the pair of them staring at me. The girl was on her elbow. The puncher spoke to her. Then he got up and ambled over to me.

He looked me up and down, real mean.

“Want anything?” he asked.

“Room,” said I, and looked back.

He was big enough. He was game enough. But all at once he saw I meant business. And what was the use for him, after all? You know, you can tell iron that’s been through the fire, and my mug must have looked that way to him. In those days, sixshooters made for a lot of thoughtful consideration between men. When he got through considering, he calls over his shoulder:

“This fellow wants to see you private, Ruthie.”

Then he ambled on around the corner of the house. It wasn’t a very good exit speech. It didn’t warm up that audience, at least. By the time I got to her, “Ruthie” was sitting up in the hammock, cold as a stone.

“Well?” says she.

And I saw that she was related to the old lady of the house. I pulled it on her fast, to see if she would blink. I said:

“I’ve just come from San Whiskey where I saw Lew Ellis die.”

She stood up. But she didn’t blink. I saw she was the real gunmetal, and no fooling.

“As he died,” I went on, “he asked me to take you his love and kiss you good-by for him.”

“Is that all he asked you to take me?” said she, narrowing her eyes at me.

“That and a lot of best regards,” said I.

I picked up her hand and kissed the tips of the fingers. It’s the only time in my life that I’ve kissed a hand; though a lot of fists have kissed me. But I felt that one part of Lew’s dying request had to be fulfilled.

“How did it happen?” says she, looking down at her hand.

“Through an open window,” I told her. “Marshal Werner’s men.”

“The dirty pigs!” said she. “Look—what’s your name?”

“Joe Hyde,” said I.

“Yeah. I’ve heard of Slow Joe, too,” said she. “The kid used to yarn about you to me.”

“You mean you used to call Lew the ‘kid’?” said I.

“Is that all wrong?” says she.

“Not between friends,” I answered her.

“Look, Slow Joe,” says she, “when Lew was dying, or before, did he say anything else to you about me?”

“Yeah. He talked about a little house and a little cattle, and a little wife. All that old guff. Why?”

Still she didn’t blink. I almost began to respect her.

“He didn’t say anything else—about the start he was making, I mean?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said I.

She seemed to think that I was lying. But why should I give away what I knew—to her?

“You don’t know what I mean. Oh, I see,” says the girl. “I’d like to know one thing, though.”

“It’s a pleasant place for talk,” says I, looking at the empty chair.

That seemed to rile her. She stuck out her jaw. Then she thought better of it.

“Where’d you get that nickname of ‘Slow’?”

“Because thinking is so hard for me,” said I.

“Yeah?” says the girl. “Thinking is hard for you, eh? Lemme tell you something, Slow Joe, you’ve thought too fast, this time.”

“You tell me where I’ve slipped,” said I.

“You’re holding out on me.”

“Holding what out?”

“I don’t know how much. You think because a girl just sits in the broad daylight and does a little harmless flirting that she’s—”

She stopped, because my grin was so wide.

“I hope you choke on it,” says she, stamping.

I didn’t know what I was hoped to choke on—my grin or what I was holding out.

I held out my hand.

“It’s been a real pleasure to meet you, Ruthie,” says I.

She swung back her hand. I saw what was coming but I didn’t dodge. She laid the flat of that hand right into my cheek, and jarred my silver fillings together.

“You—!” says she.

“I guess you feel better,” says I. “So do I. Good-by, ma’am. Shall I call back your boy friend as I go out? Or is there somebody else in line?”

I wasn’t in any hurry. It was a good thing, it was a comfort to me to see the way her breast was heaving. She looked as though she had run a mile; she sounded that way, too.

“I’ll tell you, Joe,” says she, at last, pulling herself together. “You’re making a grand mistake. I’m going to prove it to you, one of these days. You’re going to wish that you’d come clean. You’re going to wish to the sky that you’d come clean with me.”

“Thanks,” said I. “When I wish that, I’ll come and try to sit in that chair. So long, Ruthie.”

I went back to the mustang. The big boy was sitting on the front steps. He didn’t meet my eye in an embarrassed way. Instead, he looked me over like something he wanted to know by heart. In fact, when I got into the saddle and jogged down the driveway through that wrecked garden, I had a tickle in the small of my back, as though a gun were lining up on me. And I was rather glad to turn into the dust and sunshine of the street again.

Something about Ruthie stuck in my mind like a thorn. And I was to find out later on that premonitions can be full of good sense.

Then I lined out to find the minister.