Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

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The daydreams of big Bush Reagan disappeared like so many bright and foolish bubbles. For a moment, he stood gazing after the messenger of ill tidings, feeling a vague but deep resentment. It seemed exactly the sort of news that Tom Williams would bring him—there was almost spite behind it, he thought!

Then he turned and hurried through the house to the kitchen.

Big Dave Reagan—how comfortable a thing it was to note his size—looked up from the opening of the oven door, while a cloud of steam and smoke rushed out around his shoulders and face.

“Pete and Hank are in trouble in town,” said Bush Reagan. “They’re in Pendleton’s saloon, and the whole Weaver tribe is goin’ to come down on ’em!”

“What did they do to the Weavers?” asked Dave.

“Nothin’!” exclaimed the anxious father. “No matter what they did, it ain’t a time for you to stand, you half-wit. Go out with me while we catch up a couple hosses and saddle ’em. We gotta ride hard to get to town!”

Pendleton’s saloon was not like other saloons in Rusty Creek. It was rather a town institution. It had rooms to accommodate guests, and Ray Pendleton always had a small but selected list of articles to sell in his store. The best rifles, revolvers, ammunition, knives, traps, and various other odds and ends, were always to be found in his storeroom. In addition, he was the one to buy an extra-fine pelt, any day; and out in his pasture there were nearly always half a dozen or more horses of a superior grade.

He would pay a fancy price for anything on four hoofs that pleased his fancy, and it took a still fancier price to get the prize away from him. But just as men came now and then to buy an extra-fine rifle, or an ornamented shotgun of the best make and the finest steel, or a richly decorated Mexican saddle, so they would come to buy a horse, too, now and then. When a man from Rusty Creek had made his strike, on returning home, he was sure to visit Ray Pendleton’s and carry away some expensive prize.

Pendleton himself was a tall, angular man of fifty, with a face so thin that the whole bony structure underlying it showed through. One could tell how his skull would look after death had worked its season on him.

The silence that now filled his bar-room was an appropriate atmosphere for him to move in, and thick was that silence, and made all the thicker by the occasional murmur that fell from the lips of one of the men. For there were at least forty people in the long, narrow room. The cause of the silence was not the presence of the young Reagans but what their presence was apt to cause in the future.

They stood about midway down the bar, half faced toward one another, and pretending to pay attention to their whiskies. But whisky was not their thought. It was not the thought of anyone else. What occupied all the attention was the coming of the Weavers.

It was some miles out to the Weaver place, and some miles back again, so that Sam Weaver, riding home for help, would have to use up time. But the longer the coming of the Weaver tribe was delayed, the more formidable would be their onset. For they were fierce men, and the two thirty-year-old twins, “Doc” and Jim, were men famous for their guns and their hands.

Thinking of them, the sons of Bush Reagan seemed particularly young and helpless. On the whole, they were winning admiration. If they had played the parts of bullies in jumping young Sam Weaver together, they were being more or less heroic in standing their ground now. They were very pale. Now and then one could see the bulge of the muscles at the base of the jaw, as they set their teeth harder, but they were enduring this silence of expectation in cold blood, and that endurance was worth admiration, and received it.

Now the swinging doors were pushed open and, most unexpectedly, old Silas Weaver came into the room. Old Si was of the true pioneer stock, the sort of man who may be bent, but never broken. Years were gradually doubling him over and fixing his eyes more and more firmly on the ground which must before long receive him. He had to cock back his head with a painful effort to look up into the face of a tall man. But at the same time, he had strength and activity remaining. He could still ride all day long, and he was not the least valued hand at a round-up.

He came stumping and scuffing into the room on old, heavy, cowhide boots whose discolored finger grips of canvas stuck out above the leather. The heels of those boots were worn down on the outside because the legs of Si were widely bowed out.

He came to a halt, just inside the door.

“Them Reagan kids in here?” he asked.

Pete Reagan kept facing the bar and the mirror behind it. But his brother, Hank, slowly turned.

He nodded. Then he found his voice.

“We’re here,” he said quietly.

The quietness with which he spoke was the final assurance to everybody in the room that blood would be spilled. Men who speak quietly in time of danger are apt to be men who fight to the death.

Old Si scuffed up to the young man who faced him and crooked his neck so that he looked up into the face of Hank.

“You aimin’ to wait for my folks to arrive?” he asked.

“That’s what we’re aimin’ to wait for,” said Hank.

Hoofbeats, at this point, were heard pouring down the upper end of the main street. Were those the Weavers coming in mass formation?

“Look at here,” said Si Weaver. “There ain’t any reason why this here saloon should be all messed up. I got my two boys, Jim and Doc, outside in the street. There’s some mighty fine starlight out there, and the moon’s beginnin’ to show. They’d be mighty pleased to see you there!”

There was a pause. The two Reagans looked at one another, paler than ever, and found no answer. They had been braced to wait for trouble. They were not eager to go searching for it.

Then said Ray Pendleton: “Shootin’ in the dark is murder, Weaver.”

The old man looked hastily around the room.

No one spoke to him, but all eyes were brightly upon him. It was wonderful to see his matter of fact manner in this crisis.

“Well,” said Si Weaver, “insults is insults, and has gotta be treated like such. And two on one ain’t a fair fight. Two on one never seen the day when it was a fair fight. I didn’t wanta get your place all messed up, Ray, was all.”

He went shuffling out of the saloon, and hardly had the swinging doors begun to batter back and forth after his departure than they were thrust open again and in came Bush Reagan, and behind him the six foot three of his young cousin, Dave.

A decided murmur of disapproval ran through the bar-room. A battle between pairs was still a duel. Four on a side made murder. The rule is rather vague, but it is felt all through the West. Clan wars are always frowned upon.

“What’s this goin’ to be?” demanded the clear, cold voice of Ray Pendleton. “A massacre, or something?”

Bush Reagan went up to his two sons. Their color had been restored by the sight of that familiar face. Even death would be easier to accept, somehow, now that he had come.

Dave Reagan remained in the background, his handsome face darkened, a frown puckering his rather fleshy brow.

He looked mildly around him, as if for an explanation. In the center of the room there was a stove around which clients used to sit in dense rows, when the cold of winter came. There was a table beside the stove, that was heaped with old newspapers from all sorts of places, even from abroad. Englishmen, even Frenchmen, could find familiar news familiarly written, in some of the journals upon this table.

To the edge of that table big Dave advanced, and stood there leaning against it.

His air was abstracted, as though his thoughts remained occupied elsewhere.

He heard Bush Reagan saying to Ray Pendleton: “This ain’t goin’ to be a massacre. But I heard from Tom Williams that the whole Weaver tribe was likely to come down on my boys, here. That’s why I rode in.”

“You goin’ to have him take a part in it?” asked Pendleton, in a significant voice.

The abstracted eye of Dave clearly saw a side wag of the head in his direction; but what the meaning was, he could not make out.

“He came in here with me, free and willin’,” said his older cousin. “Dave, didn’t you come in, free and willin’?”

Dave turned a baffled eye on the bartender; then he nodded.

“It’s an outrage!” exclaimed someone.

Dave looked to identify the speaker, but his mild eyes could not find the man.

He heard his cousin saying: “He’s a Reagan, ain’t he?”

Someone said clearly, but not too loudly, “The more’s the pity.”

Dave wondered, when he heard the remark. It seemed both crass and unnecessary.

But then there were many things that happened in the speech of other men which he could not understand. He was used to being mystified.

“He’s a Reagan,” said Ray Pendleton, “but we all know what else he is, poor feller.”

Dave flushed a little. He could understand that last stroke. He was not quite so clever as other men of his age. He was not so quick in the wits, so subtle. Humiliation overcame him. He wished, profoundly, that he could be back there in the little blacksmith shop, with the wolf.

He could be happier with the lobo than with the sharp tongues of other humans around him!

He heard Bush Reagan saying, excitedly: “I know what you mean, but you’re wrong. Dave can make up his mind same’s you and me. Dave found Gray Cloud, today, is what he found. And carried him all the way to the house, on his shoulders, with no muzzle on him. Dave tamed Gray Cloud in one day. What one of the rest of you could do as much?”