Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 5

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In one corner of the corral stood the little shed in which was housed the forge, and the anvil, with a few tools and hammers hanging from the walls or leaning against it. That shed was the only haven which the young man knew, except for the days when he was allowed to hunt on the range. Recently he had been given more and more of those days, for, as Cousin Bush Reagan was fond of saying: “The kid, he’s so dog-gone close to an animal, that he knows their ways. He’ll turn up a deer pretty near anywhere.” But aside from the hunting, the forge was the haven of the young man. It was the one place where he could shape things with his hands, make things out of his imagination. As a rule, there was simply sheer drudgery.

For he was the plowman, the reaper; and it was he who mowed the hay, cared for the driving stock, caught up horses which others would ride. His own riding was confined to the breaking of new colts from the pastures, or newly purchased wild mustangs. Otherwise he was never in the saddle. It was only three miles to town, and the half-wit could walk perfectly well. And as for the riding on the range, could that be trusted to him? No, only in the bitter winds of January and February. Then he might be given the worst horse for a day and sent out into the blizzard.

Only drudgery was given into his hands, and it was simply because the sharpening of plowshares, or the welding of a break, or the fashioning of ironwork of any sort was considered drudgery by his cousins, that he was allowed to do these things. In slack times he was allowed to go to the village and hang about the blacksmith shop to pick up what information he could. The time came when Bush Reagan could collect a dollar for every day that Dave worked in that shop, therefore the days increased in number, and the mist that hung over his brain in other things did not seem to interfere with his handicraft.

“That’s where he’s got all of his brains—in his hands, and in the broad of his back,” Bush Reagan used to say.

In the little blacksmith shop in the corral, now, the young man halted, laid the wolf on the floor, and spent half an hour turning an old section of a leather trace into a collar. To this he attached a chain, and the chain he fixed around one of the posts that upheld the roof of the shed. Even the teeth of a wolf could not crack that chain, so Dave went contentedly on toward the house.

He looked back, and saw that the dogs were gathering around the shed, sniffing, howling softly and plaintively. But he smiled at this, for he knew that it was not in their mongrel hearts to come to grips with that formidable stranger.

When he walked into the house he found Bush Reagan seated in the dining room, playing pedro with his two sons, Hank and Pete.

“Hey, back so soon? Get us a deer?” asked Bush Reagan.

His two sons looked with mingled contempt and expectation on this provider of meat for the family.

“I didn’t shoot a thing,” said the young man.

Bush Reagan stared through the window and saw the height of the sun above the horizon.

“Then,” he roared, “what you mean by comin’ back at this time of day? You dummy, what you thinkin’ of?”

A mild warmth of satisfaction spread around the heart of the young man. The bitterness of persecution now would make the sweetness of praise all the pleasanter later on.

“G’wan out and try again,” commanded Pete Reagan angrily, lolling in his chair and thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his vest. “I ain’t had a decent venison steak for a coon’s age. G’wan out and try again!”

“I brought back something else,” said Dave. And he smiled upon them diffidently.

“You didn’t shoot nothing, but you brung something back, eh?” snapped Hank Reagan. “Whatcha mean by that, eh?”

“You’d better come and see,” said the young man.

He stepped back and opened the door to the back porch for them, still smiling.

“What’s he think that he’s gone and done?” asked Bush Reagan, scowling. “What fool trick’s he up to now?”

“We can stretch a leg, anyway,” said Hank. “I’m tired of that game. I never see no cards!”

“You see plenty of cards, but you play ’em like a blockhead,” said his brother.

“Shut yer face, will you?” asked Hank. “Your brains is all in the end of your tongue. Talking don’t make no money for you, though.”

With this pleasant badinage they walked past their cousin onto the back veranda.

“Out in the blacksmith shop,” said he.

“What’s out in the blacksmith shop?” asked Bush Reagan.

“You’ll see!” he assured them.

He walked behind them down the path, two boards wide, toward the corral gate. He hoped to win from the moment to come more happiness than he ever had gained through his cousins in the other years he had spent with this family.

Even from the first he had been an outsider. It was not only that the mist was over his mind, but that from the beginning he had noticed vast differences. So long as his father and mother lived, they had been his universe. And when he came at the age of eight years to this rough tribe, his only kin in the world, he had been oppressed by the sense of change. No matter what happened, therefore, he clung to the past. The few books he had brought with him from his first home he had read over and over, not because they meant a great deal to him at first, but because they were of sacred origin, as it were. He had them still, thumb-worn, but matters of holy importance!

In his habit of speech, too, he harked back to the older days. It was one of the things that made him so silent—the fact that the language of his cousins was not that to which he had been accustomed in his real home. And when he did say anything, from the first the model that he used was the old one. He used to have to squint his eyes and look vainly, hopelessly, back down the years, trying to remember how his father or his mother would have expressed themselves on any subject. But he never picked up the oaths, the slovenliness of tongue that distorted the talk of the new household.

Perhaps that was the chiefest reason for his backwardness in mental development; that and a certain quality of deliberation, or fumbling toward a subject with instinctive rather than intellectual understanding that had been the greatest characteristic of his mother.

To Bush Reagan, Dave’s coming had been the most golden bit of luck that ever befell him. With an invalid wife, rapidly failing, two growing boys, and only a small patch of range, Bush had had to hire himself out as a day laborer and turn his hand to anything that would bring in a penny. After the coming of Dave this was changed, for Dave had a handsome patrimony in hard cash, a clean hundred thousand dollars, so left to him in the care of his guardian—Bush—that the latter could invest it as he pleased.

He pleased, so long as the invalid wife lived, to put something more than half of the fortune into land and cattle; after she died he took a trip East and came back with the remnant of cash spent—“on bad investments,” he used to tell his neighbors at home. There remained the ranch and the cattle, and the new buildings which he had erected. But the cattle did not prosper. Bush Reagan was always what he himself termed an “unlucky” man, though some of the hard-working and intelligent cattlemen of the district could easily have suggested other terms for him.

But that was not all.

As the number of his cattle diminished, Bush Reagan lost all concern for the rest of his property. He allowed the whole place to run down, and began to lead a rather wild and careless life, fishing and hunting for the meat they needed, and finding with increasing difficulty, means to get the money necessary to provide the other items for his family.

His two sons grew up like their father; rough, heedless, indifferent to the slovenliness of their life. All three understood the greatness of the wrong that had been done to Dave, their cousin. And therefore all three joined in hating him and despising him. The banker in town, who was the only soul able even to suspect the extent of the wrongs that had been done to the youth, was a very close-mouthed man, but yet he had dropped a few phrases here and there that were filled with meaning, and a vague rumor attached itself to the family. It was too vague to do more than win for slow-minded Dave Reagan a sort of nebulous pity. Men were apt to say: “There’s reasons for him being backward.”

One reason was that undoubtedly he was always the last in this family of the Reagans. He was the last to sit down at the table, because he was generally the one to serve the food. He was the last to turn in at night, because his duties included cleaning the dishes after supper, and last he was, now, in walking down the board path toward the corral.

Bush Reagan kicked the corral gate open, and it bumped from hand to hand until it crashed shut behind Dave, pulled by the weight that was attached to it.

“Hey, Dave, how many times I told you to ease that gate? Wanta have it battered to pieces?” demanded Bush Reagan.

“I’m sorry,” said Dave with honest regret.

“Yeah,” said his older cousin, “you’re always sorry, but you never do nothin’ about it, is what you don’t do!” He added: “That’s the trouble with you.”

“That’s only one of the troubles, though,” commented Hank.

And the three of them laughed.

They came to the blacksmith shop; they pulled the flimsy door open, and then there was an exclamation that turned into a shout from Pete.

“Look what he is! Look what he is!”

“Why it’s a dog-gone gray wolf!” said his father.

“Yeah, but what wolf? What wolf?” demanded Dave.

“What wolf is it?” asked Bush.

Hank Reagan found the answer, half by instinct, and half by knowledge.

“By the jumpin’ thunder,” he said, “it’s Gray Cloud!”