Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Bush Reagan was obeying that impulse that was drawing him outside the blacksmith shop for the good reason that he felt that the world had come to an end. Never before had Dave dared to stand up to him. He could not understand this occasion.

Pete followed them out, and Hank was saying, quietly, as he led his father away:

“Look here, pa, there ain’t any sense raisin’ too much trouble about it. He don’t want the wolf killed. But that’s all right. I’ll sneak out here tonight and put a slug through the head of the wolf. That’s all right. You gotta remember—when you get started on the rampage, you say a lot of things. You might be firin’ him, and then where would we be?”

“A sight better off than we are now,” blustered Bush Reagan. “Better than havin’ a half-wit around, disgracin’ us, wherever we go.”

“Wherever we go, we don’t take him,” said Hank. “All he does is to do the chores, the plowin’, the cookin’, and the range ridin’, when the weather’s too mean. He breaks the mean hosses, and he hunts the meat for us. There ain’t any three men on the range,” he added, with a sudden afterthought, “that could do as much as he does, and as well. He mends every saddle and bridle, and he fixes the wagons, don’t he? Why, if we was to turn him loose, somebody else would get him, and they wouldn’t know how we come to call him a dummy, hardly.”

His father roared out: “He ain’t got a brain in his head.”

And Pete broke in, “Well, he’s got enough brains to do everything that a cow-puncher needs to do on a range, or a blacksmith, or a hunter, or a trapper. Some folks might say that that’s enough brains for anybody to have.”

“Any fool could beat him at a swap. He ain’t got the brains to sell a dozen eggs, or a skunk skin,” exclaimed Bush Reagan.

“Yeah,” said Pete, “but we can do that for him, pretty good. I ain’t sayin’ that he’s got any brains, only he can do a lot of things. And he don’t cost nothin’. What does he cost?”

“Look at the years I been raisin’ him!” shouted the angry Bush Reagan.

“Yeah, but he worked his way from the start,” said Pete. “Didn’t he work his way from the start? When he was eight, he was as big and strong as twelve. When he was ten—you remember when he was ten, he rode that buckskin five-year-old, and broke it, and got throwed a dozen times in an hour, and kept on ridin’? Yeah, I guess that he’s worked his way right from the start, and he don’t cost nothin’,” he repeated.

His father started to make an answer, but Hank broke in:

“The way you was workin’ up yourself into a temper, you’d ’a’ been firin’ him, pretty quick. You wouldn’t wanta fire him,” he added his brother’s arguments, “he don’t cost nothin’. He shoots ten times more than even he can eat. He turns in enough pelts to buy twenty or a hundred times more clothes than we ever give him. Why, if he was a slave, he’d be worth a mint of money. Don’t you get too rash with him, pa!”

Said Bush Reagan, pulling at his mustaches: “You got something in what you say, but I tell you, I know how to handle him. When they begin to talk back, they gotta be handled mighty sharp and quick. The first thing you know, he’d be askin’ for right, around here, wouldn’t he? Yeah, that’s what he would. Look at him havin’ the nerve to stand up and say that he trapped that wolf and that wolf is his. He wouldn’t have it shot, he wouldn’t. Why, damn him, I’m going to teach him a lesson that’ll last him the rest of his life!”

“Yeah, you go on and teach him a lesson,” said Pete. “But take it easy, will you? It ain’t so bad to have somebody to cut the wood, and make the fire, and cook the breakfast, take on a frosty morning in the winter. That ain’t so bad is it? You go easy, pa! I’m goin’ to take a ride into town and tell ’em what we’re bringin’ in tomorrow. I guess there’ll be a lot of talk goin’ around when the boys hear what we’re to bring in to them!”

“I’ll go along with you,” said Hank.

“You two stay right here on the place,” said the father. “I’ll do my own talkin’....”

“It ain’t your talkin’,” said Pete. “I guess that Dave belongs to us as much as he does to you. And we get our split of the twenty-five hundred bucks, too, and don’t you forget it. I’m goin’ to buy that bay mare of the Shevlins, with part of my share, is what I’m goin’ to do!”

Angered to silence, but not really surprised by this outburst, the father stared at the pair of them as they started off to catch horses in the pasture beyond the barn, which had been built with a portion of the patrimony of Dave Reagan.

Bush, looking after them, realized that he might have acted in the same way, at that age, with his own father. He was angry, but also he respected his own blood, and his own ways of life. They would be hard on him, that pair, if he lived into the sere and yellow leaf—they would be hard on him, as he had been on his father, in the old days.

Yet, as he looked after them, his smile grew more, and his wrath grew less. It is only our own land that we can understand, or love, unless we are great of heart.

He went to the front veranda and sat half in sun and half in shadow throughout the rest of the afternoon, smoking his pipe, his legs crossed, and one foot swaying in a rapid rhythm up and down and up and down, while with dreaming brown eyes he looked into the future and figured out the ways in which the money could be spent.

It was not like the joyful time when he had taken some forty thousand dollars East with him and spent it in one long, riotous party. He never had regretted the spending of that money. It was to him a proof of the gentility of his blood. No man could so enjoy the better things of life unless there was blood of the right sort in him.

He, Bush Reagan, had the right sort of blood—forty thousand dollars’ worth, in three months. That was the sort of blood that he had!

He pulled his mustaches, and refilled his pipe with sweet plug tobacco, and tamped it well down, and drew the thick smoke into his lungs.

He had the blood in him!

As for the twenty-five hundred dollars, it was too bad that his sons would force him to cut it three ways. But, after all, it proved that they were coming to be men. And their maturity increased his pride. He was a man, was what he was!

After a time, as the dusk began, he heard the door of the barn slam.

That would be Dave, feeding the stock. Another comfort! After all, the boys had been right about the folly of discharging Dave. When one came right down to it, he was the major source of their income! The pelts from his traps supplied a great part of their handy ready cash; the meat he shot supplied the table; and the truck garden which he cultivated offered potatoes, and greens of various sorts, to say nothing of the berries in their season!

Yes, Dave was worth two men, if not three. From the time when he rose in the morning to the time when he went to bed, late at night, every step he took, every move of his mighty hands, was useful.

This thought had hardly died away in the mind of Bush Reagan, when he heard the ringing strokes of the ax behind the house. That would be Dave cutting the wood for the stove. And how he could swing an ax! He had hammered out for himself an ax of his own, with a longer handle than usual, and with at least three times as much weight, of the finest steel in the head of it. For an ordinary man, the weight of that steel would have been a crushing thing to wield for five minutes, but in the ample grip of Dave, it was a trifle. In long and slashing curves it revolved around his shoulders, their inexhaustible strength keeping the tremendous tool in play. And at every sure stroke, something was accomplished.

Yes, he would have been a fool to speak out all of his mind to the youth.

Besides—as Pete had said, or was it that clever Hank—they could pistol the wolf in the middle of the night, and there make an end!

He heard a rattling of the stove in the rear of the house. That would be Dave, again, building up the fire and preparing to cook supper. As a cook, he was the equal or the superior of anyone on the range. To be sure, they had put him through a severe schooling, and to this very day, hardly a meal passed without calling forth from one of them a few severe criticisms. He, Bush Reagan, had set them the example, in this, for he believed that no tool is so excellent that it may not be improved by constant sharpening!

He chuckled, as this thought recurred to him. No, he and his boys had certainly not spoiled Dave with too much commendation.

The aroma of cookery came floating out to him. Supper would be ready, before long, and it was time for the boys to come home. But, for that matter, he could hardly blame them if they did not come until late. They were young. Young blood runs high and fast. And did they not have more than eight hundred dollars apiece in prospect, for the morrow? Such a sum, in one lump, was not to be taken lightly!

He had reached this point in his reflections; he was wondering whether among the savors from the kitchen he had detected the sweet smell of baked cornbread—when a buckboard drew up at his gate, and the driver got down, fastened one of the leading ropes of his team, opened the gate, closed it gently behind him, and came striding down the dusky path.

It was Tom Williams who came up the front steps to the veranda. Mr. Reagan rose in some haste as he recognized his visitor. For Tom Williams, though a neighbor, was not a neighborly man. He was one of those strict, stern men who are valued to work on committees when the cattlemen are in trouble. He was one to make up a posse—and actually catch rustlers with it. He was, in short, the sort of a man whom everyone respected and would have voted for for sheriff, but who had few intimates.

He stood in the dusk of the day and said: “Hello, Bush.”

“Why, Tom Williams!” said the rancher.

“I dropped by to tell you that there’s trouble in town,” said Tom Williams. “There’s trouble in town for you! Sam Weaver was jumped by your two boys in Pendleton’s saloon. He’s gone home, and the whole Weaver tribe is going to come in, I guess. Your boys have too much whisky aboard, and they swear they won’t leave the saloon. If I were you, I’d do something about it. Good night!”

He turned, and strode off down the path.