Читать книгу Pillar Mountain - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11

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Young Philip, the drink raised in his hand, paused and looked at it—paused as on a mountaintop and looked at life and at himself. He did not need more experience of men and their ways to teach him that he would despise himself and be despised by others if he submitted to this bullying treatment; more particularly after Rivers had volunteered to at least step into the breach for a moment.

And what was he to Rivers?

He thought, on the other hand, of Pillar Mountain; and it chanced that looking through the dusty window he could see one lofty shoulder of it raised against the sky, so that Uncle Oliver Aytoun and his words came strongly home in his mind. He was to have no trouble with men with guns. And this was his very first day in the world as others lived in it!

Bert Chisholm was saying, with a sneer in his rumbling voice, “Now doggone me if it ain’t just like out of a bock. Here’s the tenderfoot at the bar, and here’s a couple of mean, rough cowpunchers invitin’ him to take his drink, and aimin’ to wring his neck if he don’t. Now, how does it usually end up in the storybooks, boys?”

“We get our jaws bashed in,” grinned the other brother, “or else the tenderfoot, he’s a killer in disguise, and he punctures the two of us without hardly looking—one in front and one behind him. That’s the way in the fool stories.”

“So it is,” assented Bert. “Now, kid, are you out o’ a book? Or are you off of Pillar Mountain?”

Philip looked about him. If there had been any help, he would have asked for it, shamelessly. But there was no help. The others in the room, as appeared by their disgusted faces, did not like this proceeding, but they were not prepared to stand up in behalf of a stranger. The only appeal could be to the two Chisholms themselves!

But when he looked at them a peculiar darkness lurched across the eyes of Philip, such as never had obscured his mind before, and with that darkness there was a burning of his blood and a fierce heat which, all in an instant, ran like quicksilver from his heart to his brain, and back again, and all his body began to tingle.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” said Philip, in a husky, almost breathless voice.

“He don’t want to make trouble!” mocked Bert. “You ain’t gunna make no trouble, kid. Don’t you go thinking that you will!”

“Bear up a little,” said Archie. “Look at him shake!”

“I suppose that I ought to fight,” suggested Philip, in the same voice, so unfamiliar to his own ears.

“I suppose that you had ought to,” answered the sneering Bert.

He waited another moment and then added.

“I’ll give you while I count ten—and I’ll count to myself!”

It had become impossible for Philip to think. He strove desperately, as though the ghost of Oliver Aytoun had been standing before him, but no words came to his lips. The odd dimness was gone and in its place he saw everything with a tremendous brightness, as though intolerable lights had been focused on every face. Thousands of details thrust into his mind quite against his volition. He observed senselessly that Bert wore a check shirt, and that it was rubbed and soiled with grease in the hollow of the right shoulder. There was a small wart in the cleft of Bert’s chin, and from the wart grew a long hair, which curled twice round. But Archie was different; he was a comparatively tidy fellow, and in this crisis, as though to defend the brutal attitude of his brother, in which he himself was supporting Bert, he blurted out: “You fix yourself up as one of Joe Dorman’s hired men, and what in hell d’you expect from us, kid?”

It seemed, to Philip that the count of ten had been vastly prolonged.

Then it was over; the eyebrows of Bert Chisholm rose and made his eyes like the little, red-stained, round, fierce eyes of a boar. At the same instant, accepting the signal, Archie Chisholm knocked Philip down.

There are men who say, and they are men wise in the West, that it was the manner of his fall that made the story of Philip’s other days worth writing about. If he had been hurled straight down to the floor, perhaps he would have lain there. Yonder was an example, for instance—Doc Rivers sitting bunched on his heels, but not quite daring to rise in face of the desperadoes. But it chanced that the mighty blow of Archie Chisholm launched the boy full into the chest of his brother.

With arms outflung to break his fall, Philip pitched forward, and as he struck Bert, he clasped him to his breast and turned, presenting the body of Bert to Archie’s gun.

That gun remained hovering in the air, like a bird, uncertain where it shall land upon the solid earth, and in the face of Archie was blank bewilderment. For he knew his brother as a twin should, and since his earliest days of memory he had regarded Bert more as an explosive than as a fighting man—more as a rending, roaring, irresistible charge of powder than as so much mere human bone and muscle—but now he saw Bert’s arms crushed helplessly against his sides. The back of his neck in that instant had turned fiery red and begun to bulge, and his head toppled back with the long, horrible gasp of a breathless man.

“You—” said Philip “—I beg you to leave this room, or I’ll kill you. I want to kill you. I’ll give you till I count ten to leave this room—and I’ll count to myself!”

With his left hand he took Bert Chisholm by the throat and held up those two hundred pounds with that one hand as a shield, and Bert hung limp, motionless, with his dreadful face hanging back and to one side. With his right hand, Philip drew Bert’s nearest revolver and held it at his hip. It had a familiar feel. There was neither trigger nor sight, and the hammer worked softly under the pressure of his thumb.

Archie hesitated. All the days of his life Bert had done his thinking for him. Bert was an invincible and terrible God. But the God was now a helpless, hanging weight, senseless, speechless, with horrible sounds gurgling in his throat.

“I dunno what—” began Archie.

Then, having hesitated, he was lost. He began to back up towards the door. He flashed a glance towards the others in the room, and if he had read in one eye contempt or disgust he would have fought the thing out to the death, then and there, even if he had to drive his bullets first through the body of his brother. But not a glance met his. On the contrary, there was only one point of interest, and agape, with bulging eyes, the bartender and the rest of his patrons stared at it.

So Archie, lacking the necessary spur which would have kept him from shame forever, took another stride back and was through the swinging door. Then Philip cast his throttled man upon the floor. Heavily fell Bert Chisholm, as weighty as some Homeric hero in armor of bronze, and the boards crashed beneath him and a cloud of dust went up like a great puff of smoke from the lips of a smoker.

The intolerable brightness left the brain of Philip and in place of the fire that was in him cool streams of weakness trickled back through brain and body.

“I didn’t want to,” said Philip aloud. “I didn’t want to—and—and I didn’t use a gun—”

He hurled the weapon which he had taken from Bert Chisholm through the window, smashing the glass to a thousand bits, and letting the picture of Pillar Mountain stand undimmed before his eyes. Then he dropped his elbows on the bar and his face in his hands.

People were murmuring and whispering, like voices in a sickroom, and at last a bubbling, gasping cry broke on the ears of Philip. A hand struck his shoulder; the voice of Doc Rivers said harshly: “Get out of this with me!”

And he followed his companion through the swinging doors.

There stood Archie Chisholm, his face still blank, the revolver hanging from his hand, exactly as he had stood there from the moment that he left the barroom. He did not appear to see them as they went past, but he lurched forward through the doors.

“Run for it!” cried Rivers softly, and throwing himself into the saddle, he offered a stirrup leather to Philip.

“I don’t think I’ll run,” answered Philip.

He walked quietly down the middle of the road. Twice he turned and looked back.

And twice his throat seemed drier than the dust of the street with a thirst that could be satisfied yonder in the saloon where there were many men, and two, at least, men ready for a fight.

Yet each time he forced himself to swing away, for the doors of the saloon did not yawn open, and there was no spectacle of men mounting swiftly for pursuit.

Rivers kept at his side, twitching and turning nervously, apparently very eager to be gone at a full gallop, but the same sense of loyalty which had bound him to Philip in the barroom bound him still and kept him back with the boy.

Now the road turned, and when the rest of the town was shut behind an elbow curve, and when the evergreens threw the sweetness of their breath in his face, Philip was able to breathe more easily. When he came under the shadow of the first grove, he asked permission to rest a while, and Rivers without a word drew rein.

There, elbow on knee, knuckles grinding into his chin, Philip tried to work out this thing which had happened to him, but made little headway. The more he tried to clear the matter up, the more cloudy it became and he was only sure of one thing—that when the crisis came yonder in the barroom his own soul had made way in his body for the spirit of another. That had been his first instant of life; before that he was a dim, unborn thing—no light ever had entered his eyes until the white-hot flood had poured out from him upon the world. There had been no joy for him, either. To follow a trail to an ending, to look at the stern beauty of the mountains in winter or the gold of the autumn, to listen to the gentle voice of Oliver Aytoun, to fall into happy dreams—nothing was more than a phantasm compared to that blinding ecstacy which had fallen upon him.

He told himself that he thanked God his hand had been held, but no matter what words and judgments he thrust into his mind, he knew that his heart was wild with a new hunger which had not been satisfied that day and which never would leave him until it had been fed!