Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 10

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Dave Reagan did not drink with the others. In the first place, he never had formed a taste for whisky—largely because such an expensive drink was never offered to him at the house. Now he took advantage of the confusion to slip out through the swinging doors, as the others poured up to the bar.

Standing in the starlight, and in the dim moonshine that filled the street, he could see a number of riders mounting horses. Those would be the Weavers, of course, he thought.

One man was being helped up to the saddle.

He ran hastily toward them and stood in front of the leader of the party, old Si Weaver, bent almost double in the saddle. Angry voices muttered, and the mutter threatened to grow into a roar.

Young Dave Reagan held up his hand.

“I wanted to tell you fellows,” he said. “I wanted to say that there’s no hard feeling, far as I go. I hope that there’ll be no hard feeling with you either. I wouldn’t want the Weavers to feel hard toward the Reagans on account of anything that I did.”

A snarling voice broke from the throat of Si Weaver.

“Get out of my way, or I’ll ride over you.”

Actually, he spurred his big horse straight ahead. The shoulder of the lurching beast struck Dave and hurled him back against the wall of a building. As his eyes cleared after the shock, he saw the cavalcade rushing past him down the street.

And yet he was bewildered, and could not quite understand why seven mounted men should have acted in this manner!

He was still staring after them, when three blanketed Indians stepped from somewhere out of a shadow and walked down the street.

As one man they raised their hands. As one man they uttered the greeting: “How!” and passed on, while he was barely able to make the response.

He could still remember how the three pairs of eyes had gleamed at him, as they went by with their salutation. But it meant little to him. There might have been recognition, hostility, anything in those glances.

He returned to the hitch rack before Pendleton’s place, and untethering his mustang, he jogged it back toward the house.

Perhaps it would be some time before his cousins returned to the place.

In the meantime, it came over him, with an overwhelming wave of remorse, that he had not offered Gray Cloud a single morsel of food!

He kicked the mustang to a canter, the horse grunting a little at every stride, because of the weight of its rider, but though Dave was generally the height of tenderness with the horses on the ranch, tonight he felt that the roan mustang could suffer a little, in order to bring help more quickly to the wolf.

There was an odd mixture of emotions in him—regret for the fighting that had taken place; the usual bewilderment that came to him after all his contacts with his fellow man, and above all a sense of joy that, like a voice about to sing, swelled his throat.

He could not understand his happiness. He would have been astonished to have been told that it was the aftermath of the fight itself. And, looking up to the sky, where the bright moon was putting out the stars in myriads, he told himself that the beauty of the night was working in him.

A lonely beauty it was, for him. The desire, that often swept over him for some close human companionship, now almost mastered Dave Reagan. But he felt that that was an impossible desire. His mind was slow, very slow. He was handicapped in the presence of others. At the house he had been called, familiarly, “fool,” and “half-wit,” and “dummy,” ten thousand times. But on this night he had heard the same words used by people who were strangers to him.

It was plain that he was far beneath the glorious intellectual heights on which the other men of Rusty Creek lived. And the surety of this conclusion made him sigh deeply. He was not bitter about it. It was a thing that he had long half known. Now he accepted the grim fact. He was a useless thing, a mere machine that could walk and labor and hunt game. There his significance ended!

He was still under the cloud of this sorrow when he reached the ranch house. He put up the roan, fed it, and hurried to the blacksmith shop in the corner of the corral.

When he opened the door, a frightful growl rose out of the blackness and seemed to spring at him, so loud it was.

He walked boldly in, but slowly, speaking as he went, and putting tenderness into his voice. He leaned. His hand touched fur, and a strong, edged vise gripped his arm and threatened to bruise the flesh to the bone. But the snap of the wolf was not driven home.

Triumph went rioting through his heart. Among men he was a fool, but the beasts knew him. Perhaps that was because he was little better than a beast, poor half-wit that he was!

And yet the grief was less in him as he strode back to the house. He had made pets of horses, calves, dogs, before this, only to see them sold from under his hands when he had trained them, or raised them to maturity. But this was different. The wolf was a companion of a different nature.

Who would take Gray Cloud from him?

Then Dave remembered, when he was in the meat house, cutting from the venison in the cooler a large slab of meat that weighed several pounds. He remembered that there was a high price upon the head of Gray Cloud. Twenty-five hundred dollars! Why, that was enough to buy a plow team, and a pair of plows, and the harness for the outfit, and a couple of wagons, and a buggy, and a span of fast trotters to pull it—it was enough quite to change the face of the ranch, as a matter of fact.

He trembled for Gray Cloud, as he thought of this.

One thing he would have to do—to beg, to pray that they would not sell the wolf for the sake of the reward. Perhaps they would be kinder, considering that he had been of some service to them, that evening.

That thought released him from some of the strain of anxiety.

He lighted a lantern, and with it carried the meat to the blacksmith shed. He had put in a tin of water earlier in the day, and now he squatted near the great gray-furred beast, and offered the meat.

Gray Cloud extended his nose, shuddered with the strength of famine and desire as he sniffed the meat, found it reeking with the scent of man, and reared his head again to the dignity and indifference of his former attitude.

Dave frowned. He pulled up a box, sat on it cross-legged close to the head of Gray Cloud, and offered the meat again.

Again Gray Cloud sniffed it; again he reared his head with cold indifference.

“He smells man on it,” said Dave to himself. “That’s a taint that he can’t stand.”

Suddenly his thought went dashing on, at lightning speed, toward new regions.

It was the taint of man that made life a weary thing for him, also. At his work, in the fields or in the truck garden, he could be happy—so happy that oftentimes great, wordless music burst out from his throat. But it was the necessary return to man that blighted every day.

And so it was with the wolf.

Dave tore a fragment from the rest of the meat and offered it a third time.

Curiously, with eyes squinted almost shut, as though in order to throw more responsibility upon the powers of the unaided sense of smell, Gray Cloud sniffed at the morsel. His long red tongue issued, and licked it. Then he jerked back, shuddering.

But nothing had happened to him. Nothing evil seemed to be taking place in his belly after the taste of the meat. And as for the scent that overlaid it, to be sure it was the scent of man, but of this man, only—this man, who was not as the others of his kind!

Hunger helped. With a desperate snatch, Gray Cloud took the chance, and bolted the fragment.

The taste of it let loose the devils of desire and greed. In an instant, he had bolted down the rest of the lump of venison and lay licking his lips, with fear and contentment mingled in his soul.

The man remained close to him, speaking gently, running his fingers through the dense mane.

The pangs of hunger were subsiding, were vanishing, as his stomach contracted on this meal and set to work upon it. A cloud of contentment increased in Gray Cloud’s mind. He lowered his head upon his paws, and the hand of the man continued to pass down his neck, and the voice of the man continued to make, in his ears, the strange, new music that spoke to something in the soul of Gray Cloud that never had been touched before. The message was very new. It was telling him, in vague hints, that in this savage world of eye for eye and tooth for tooth, there nevertheless is mercy to be found, and gentleness, and unearned kindness that may be loosed in a flood.

Thinking of these matters Gray Cloud closed his eyes. None of his thoughts were as clear as human words; but perhaps every emotion in a beast is more profound than the emotions of man, for the very reason that they are not bounded and limited by expression in sound. And the roots of a new instinct began to thrust down into the nature of Gray Cloud. That instinct embraced a single object for affection—this man, separated from the rest of his species; this man who had in the course of one portion of one day given life, water, food.

For a long time, Dave sat there. Finally, by his breathing, he knew that Gray Cloud had fallen asleep.

Dave rose carefully. Gray Cloud did not stir. His eyes remained closed.

Stealthily Dave Reagan went from the shed back toward the house, and as he went, he smiled, like a mother that has seen its child asleep.

Men, as he knew them, were brutal creatures. It seemed to Dave that he had just crossed a vast horizon and had a glimpse of another world in which no word is spoken, but there may be happiness beyond all words.