Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11

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Dave had barely reached the house when he heard the beat of hoofs of horses. The three Reagans came swarming into the house in high feather.

“Trot out some chuck, Dave!” shouted Hank. “Whatcha been doin’ all the time? Why ain’t supper hot? Hurry it along, will ya?”

“I didn’t know when you’d be back,” apologized Dave, and rushed to build up the fire.

Pete came into the kitchen to overlook proceedings. He heard Hank say to his father, in the next room:

“You better go out and do it now. Get it over with.”

“We better put it off to tomorrow,” suggested Bush Reagan.

“Nope, you go on and do it now, pa. It’d come better from you. You better do it now, and get it over with.”

“Yeah, and maybe you’re right,” said Bush Reagan.

The screen door slammed, and Hank joined his brother in the kitchen where he leaned against the sink and also looked on at the work of warming up the already prepared supper. Neither he nor Pete knew what it was to work in the house. Their cousin was too ready a servant at hand.

“Where’s Bush gone?” asked Dave.

“Aw, he had something to look at in the barn,” said Hank. “Ain’t that coffee hot yet? Hurry it up, Dave.”

“That was a good sock that you hit Doc Weaver in the ribs,” said Pete. “You sunk your fist into him up to the wrist. That was a good hearty sock, all right. I bet that jarred him!”

“A pair of stuffed shirts is all they are,” declared Hank. “Look at the way they both dropped!”

“No wonder they dropped, the way Dave socked Doc!” said Pete. “Where’d you learn to punch like that, Dave?”

“Lawler teaches me a lot about boxing and wrestling, when there’s some spare time,” said Dave. “He knows a good deal beside blacksmithing.”

“Sure he does. Wasn’t he in the ring once?” asked Pete.

“I don’t know,” said Dave.

He did, in fact, know perfectly well, for many a time Lawler had told long stories of his conflicts—in those earlier days before every bone in his hands had been broken. But ordinarily Jud Lawler avoided speaking of those famous and strenuous times, and therefore Dave felt that he must not repeat what he had heard.

“Look at his hands, if you don’t know. Look at the ridges of the busted bones across the backs of his hands,” said Hank. “That’s enough to show you he’s been in the ring. The trouble with you, Dave, you dunno how to use your eyes. You take and use your eyes, and you’d learn something. You’d be different.”

Dave said nothing. Studiously he built up the fire, and put the food back in the oven to warm. The coffeepot began to steam.

“Look at Dave here,” said Pete to his brother. “He don’t tell us much about what he does. He don’t talk at all. All these years, he’s been tryin’ out with the gloves, down there at Lawler’s, and he don’t say a word about it at home. You put it over Lawler with the gloves, Dave?”

“He’s smaller than I am, and he’s older,” said Dave, frowning.

“Yeah, but he can fight still,” said Pete. “If his hands was good, I reckon that he’d still be in the ring!”

Dave looked up, with an embarrassed laugh. “When we first put on the gloves,” said he, “I could hardly touch him. He’s fast as lightning, and he knows all the tricks. I could hardly touch him.”

He laughed again, and shook his head.

“Can you touch him much, now?” asked Hank eagerly.

“Oh, yes,” said Dave. “Oh, yes. I can touch him now. But he’s quick. He’s like a cat, when it comes to wrestling.”

“I know what he done to big Steve Western,” said Pete. “He throwed Steve clean over the wheel and into his buckboard; and Steve didn’t try to climb down again. Look—can you throw Lawler?”

“Why, I’m younger than he is,” said Dave, frowning as he was pressed to admit his prowess.

“All I mean to say,” said Pete, “is this: Can you as much as get a grip on that slippery snake of a Lawler?”

“Oh, I can get a grip, all right,” said Dave thoughtfully.

He was remembering a time, only the week before, when the groaning voice of Lawler had made him break off the wrestling bout, and how he had lifted the blacksmith into a chair, and how Lawler, with a white face, and fallen head, had grunted out: “Don’t you ever put your strength out ag’in, kid. Not unless you wanta kill somebody!”

He had not put out his strength, as a matter of fact, even upon that occasion; it had seemed to him that he had hardly exerted that great engine of which he was aware, pulsing and throbbing and moving in him, ready for all demands that might be made upon him.

“I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody,” he had said to Lawler.

“Sure you wouldn’t,” said the blacksmith on that day. “You wouldn’t want to, only you can’t help yourself. That’s the truth of it. You dunno what you got under the skin. But one of these here days, I’m goin’ tell you what you got, and you ain’t got long to wait!”

“He can take and beat Lawler, and he can take and put Lawler down,” said Hank, gloating over the achievements of his cousin.

“I didn’t say that I could do those things,” protested Dave.

“Will you say that you can’t do it?” asked Hank.

Dave hesitated, looking for a way out of the difficulty, without stating facts that might seem like betraying a friend, and boasting over him.

“You know,” he explained, “Jud Lawler is always teaching me how to take care of myself. It’s not as though we boxed or wrestled to put the other fellow down.”

Pete laughed, in jeering triumph.

“Why,” he said, “I bet you could lick any man on the range, right this minute, once you got your hands on him. The way Doc Weaver dropped, I never seen anything like it. He lay there and kicked around. The whole Weaver tribe, they had enough.”

Hank laughed in turn, adding: “When they seen their two best men knocked out and throwed out of the saloon: ‘Hell,’ says the Weaver tribe, ‘if one Reagan can do this, what would four of ’em do to us?’ So they up and started home, is what they did. You’re a Reagan, Dave, is what you are!”

Dave smiled rather vaguely in appreciation of this compliment.

“I don’t like to think about what happened there in Pendleton’s saloon, this evening,” he said.

“Why not, old son?” asked Pete.

“Because it seemed to me that there was murder in the air.”

“Murder? Listen at him,” said Pete, sneering. “There was bullets coming, but every man you kill, that ain’t murder. That’s just self-defense.”

“You shouldn’t kill anybody—unless it’s a war, or something like that,” said Dave, bringing out the idea with care and some hesitation. “I felt that in Pendleton’s, tonight—that there was a death coming—more than one, maybe. They were all waiting for it. Everybody was standing around waiting for it.”

He made a gesture of revulsion.

“Was you scared, Dave?” asked Pete, with animal-like and greedy curiosity. “Say, did it scare you?”

“It made me sick—it made me sick!” murmured Dave, with the puzzled frown of distaste still on his forehead. “It seemed to me that you and Hank were standing there, waiting to be killed.”

“Don’t you be a fool,” said Pete. “We were goin’ to give ’em hell before they got us. It would take more than Weavers to get a coupla Reagans. They know that, now.”

“Yeah,” said Hank, a little more honest than his brother. “Maybe you were glad to have the fight ahead of you. But I wasn’t. And you looked kind of green around the gills, too, it seemed to me.”

“Things are about ready,” said Dave. “When will Cousin Bush be in?”

“Aw, he’ll be back in a minute,” said Hank, “and we might just as well start in eatin’, right now, because ....”

On the heels of this speech a wild cry came to them. The source was the direction of the corral, and the voice was human, with such a thrilling power of agony in it that it might have been welling up in the next room.

Bush Reagan, when he left the dining room to go to the corral, had taken from the wall his best rifle, because he felt that it was an occasion that was worthy of a shot from his best gun. He had shot grizzlies, in his time, but he never had brought home a prize worth twenty-five hundred dollars. To be sure, on this occasion the game was haltered and chained, and could not escape, but nevertheless there was a certain importance connected with the killing of Gray Cloud.

That sense of importance swelled Bush Reagan’s chest more than a little as he walked down the path, opened the corral gate, and allowed it to close softly from his hand. A faint tingle of guilty dread went up his spinal column when he thought of Dave, back there in the kitchen. Poor fool, he would be busily carrying on the kitchen work and never dreaming that his prize was about to be turned from a silver bolt of cunning murder into a limp fluff of fur and worthless flesh.

However, no one but a fool would be bothered by the possible reactions of a half-wit. He, Bush Reagan, was above that sort of nonsense.

He cleared his throat, frowned, drew himself up to his full inches, as though he were about to address an assembly, and then marched deliberately forward to the blacksmith shed.

He had brought a lantern with him, but he did not light it until he came to the door of the shack. Three times imperceptible puffs of wind made the flame of the matches dwindle to blue and then go out. The fourth time, cursing softly, he succeeded in igniting the wick. The chimney was drawn down, making a loud screech that grated on his nerves and caused him to glance apprehensively over his shoulder. For at that moment he had a picture of his young cousin turned into an insensate monster of rage, and rushing upon him through the darkness of the night. Far better to stand up before the charge of a grizzly bear—as he had done himself in the old days—than to face such an enemy as Dave.

He had taken the young fellow too lightly, all these years. There was something to be done with such a power as was in Dave Reagan. Slow-wit or not, no ordinary fellow catches Gray Cloud and on the same day, single-handed, routs the formidable faction of the Weavers!

No, there was something in Dave. And if he were roused?

Yes, that would be a picture worth seeing. He had not been roused this evening, for instance. There had not been a trace of ferocity in his face, for instance, after he received the blow from the hand of Doc Weaver. No exclamations had escaped from his throat. No fury had appeared in his eyes. He had simply leaned forward, as though Doc’s blow had been a hearty handshake—and then, with perfect calmness and good temper, he had struck hard enough to break bones!

Aye, if such a power as that in Dave was transformed by the battle fury, he might go far indeed! And if he, Bush Reagan, could learn how to direct it, he and his entire family could profit. He would bend his mind upon the problem and finally learn how Dave’s power could be used.

Perhaps—who could tell?—he might be able to make a fortune for his entire family!