Читать книгу Pillar Mountain - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 4

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Old Oliver Aytoun came home to the shack after dark and found the hut filled with the steam and fragrance of frying venison. Through the smoke of cookery the boy smiled at him, and he smiled in return.

“Have you had a good day, Philip?”

“A very good day, Uncle Oliver.”

They said no more. Oliver Aytoun washed his hands and face in a basin of warm water which Philip prepared for him; by the time he had dried himself supper was laid out on the table. It was a good meal of the venison, in place of honor, excellent corn bread, boiled greens, coffee, and plum jam, made from small blue plums which grew wild on the mountain, unmatchable for perfume and flavor.

They talked very little. Oliver Aytoun had been delayed because he had walked over a tentative new line for their traps and it had taken him almost to Ransome Peak. Then Philip told how he had spent the morning hauling down saplings by hand from beyond the clearing and piling them behind the house, to make ready for the building of the lean-to.

“This afternoon?”

“I did only one thing,” said Philip. “It’s a surprise for you.”

They smiled at one another again; between them was a beautiful and perfect understanding.

Yet they appeared totally dissimilar, for Oliver Aytoun was a lean man of more than sixty; mountain labor and mountain weather made him appear ten years older in the face and ten years younger in the body. Philip was a mere youth of twenty or so with a great leonine head and a massive throat and shoulders to support it, so that looked at from behind he seemed a formidable man, but viewed in full face his eyes were so large and so blue, his mouth so femininely tender and smiling that he looked less man than child, and rather a simple child, at that.

After the meal, Aytoun sat in the open doorway and watched the shaggy mountain rising up against the stars; Philip washed the tin dishes and the pans, rinsed the dishrag, and hung it on a peg behind the stove to dry. In all that time he only said: “Can you see the lights, Uncle Oliver?”

“I can see them,” said Aytoun.

When the work was ended by the sweeping of the floor, Philip sat on the threshold beside the older man and for a long time the silence went on between them, for they were watching the lights. If there was the least water vapor in the air, or a trace of dust, the great valley to the southwest was a dark, deep ocean, but on dry, clear nights such as this, in the great bottom of the bowl they could see the lights of a town glimmering and twinkling busily—like stars, but more yellow, and more alive. To Philip that meant the world of man.

Even on the brightest, clearest day he could not see a trace of the town, though from year to year he had watched the area of the ploughed lands growing in a darker stain each autumn, a larger patch of green each spring. Once the fall ploughing had made only a handful of shadow near the silver streak of the river, but now it extended from foothills to foothills. However, that was a mere spot upon the map, a faint indication, whereas this starry twinkling in the hollow hand of the night stirred the boy with a sense of the flaming souls of men.

He knew nothing but the hut and the mountains. Their only contacts with the world were made by the old man, who twice a year piled their crop of pelts on the backs of the two mules they kept and went down to some crossroads village of which he never had told Philip so much as the name.

Of course he asked many questions, and Oliver Aytoun liked nothing so well as to talk about the great world beyond the mountains and the cities and the ways of men. He was willing, once in a long time, to tell of his own early life. For nearly forty years he had lived here on Pillar Mountain, but before that he had come out of the East full of curiosity and love of adventure. But the strong taste of Western life had been too much for him. He had turned as wild as an Indian and on one unlucky day in a barroom at a mining camp he had killed his man. There was no law, really, to hound him, but Oliver Aytoun did not know that. He fled away into the mountains and reached this spot, and here he had remained.

At first he thought, as he struggled like a new Robinson Crusoe with the wilderness, that as soon as the memory of his crime had died out among men, he would go down among them again. But time made him love the mountains; he felt, too, like a poor flagellant, that there was some divine purpose, some divine punishment in this lonely life in which he found himself. He accepted the emptiness and the pain of it and hoped that he was being purged of sin. And every day, he told Philip, a remorseful time came to him during which he saw his victim lying with his head and shoulders hunched against the wall, young, and strong, and dead.

“I’ve got to be going,” said Philip.

At this, the other turned his head, but did not actually ask a question.

“Down, I mean,” said the boy, and pointed towards the lights in the valley.

There was such a quality in his voice that Loafer got up and came to look in his master’s face. However, the old man answered: “You’d better wait till you can lift the rock, my lad!” He added: “Or until you can budge it, at least; your father picked it out of the mouth of the spring, you know!”

Then he looked out not on the valley or the stars but on his own thoughts, seeing again the picture of the strong man. He had not spoken six times of Philip’s father, but every mention of him was lodged in the boy’s mind. First of all he had described how the man came, riding on a great black horse, with a two-year-old boy in the hollow of his arm. This big man wore a beard and mustaches and his hair was prematurely gray; his age might have been anything between twenty-five and thirty-five. He was handsome, he had the true eagle eye, and his ways were quick, his manner a little imperious.

He spent that night at the shack, and the next morning, while they were eating breakfast, the child went outdoors and presently they heard its choked cry. When they ran out, they found that it had fallen down into the spring; they could see it far beneath arm’s reach with face strangely not convulsed, looking up at them with great blue eyes.

The stranger seized the black rock which covered the spring and tore it up, then leaped into the bubbling well of water and brought up the child.

The water was as cold as ice; the little boy was weak with the shock and the fright of it; it was patent that he could not be carried forward that day, or perhaps the next. However, his father could not tarry, and promising to be back in the course of a week, he galloped away on his powerful black horse. Other men followed during several days, all asking if the rider of the black horse had gone that way, and all cursing and rushing away towards the valley trail when they heard the answer. It was plain that Philip’s father was no law-abiding citizen, and Oliver Aytoun’s opinion was that he had not returned for his child because of those same angry pursuers, who must have overtaken him and beaten him down by numbers, in spite of his gigantic strength. There was no way of learning the truth, because Aytoun never had learned the name of his guest; he had given his own family name to Philip.

On those few occasions when Aytoun spoke of the boy’s father, he did not try to make him out an ideal figure but frankly admitted that he seemed a rude, uneducated man; nevertheless the unknown had loomed gigantically in the mind of Philip Aytoun, and the great black rock which lay beside the bubbling of the spring had become a sacred symbol.

Once Aytoun had said, pointing to it: “You ought to be a good man, Philip. Your father paid down a heavy price for you!”

And if all the pounds of that mighty stone had been bright gold its value would not have been so great as it was now in the mind of the boy.

Always he had felt that he would need to be multiplied many, many times in order to make such a piece of a man as his father had been before him; and still beyond the words of Aytoun, he had the spectacle of the great black rock before him from day to day giving the giant of his imagination actual hands, at the least. Now with his own hands he had raised that stone, no doubt with more pain than yonder rider of the black horse, no doubt with a greater weakness thereafter, but the miracle had been accomplished. If he had been a trifle more religious, he would have felt that God was in his act.

“D’you think,” said Philip, “that a man who can handle the rock is strong enough to get along in the world?”

“I think so,” said Aytoun.

“I picked up the rock today,” said Philip.

Aytoun hurried to the spring. There was just enough starlight for Philip to mark the manner in which the old man remained half bent and still beside the squat shadow of the rock; just beyond him the spring was bubbling, so that old Aytoun seemed to be standing in the rising and falling glimmer of the water.

He came back after a time.

“I hope you will be a good man in the world,” said Aytoun.

Philip stood up beside the door.

“I am going to work very hard,” said he. “As soon as I have made some money, I’ll come back here for you, Uncle Oliver.”

To this the old man did not make a reply. Philip waited a long moment, the brightness of joy fading from his face by degrees, for he felt that already something had stepped between them after these many years.

Loafer suddenly began to whine. Because Philip felt great pain in his own heart, he leaned and patted the great head of the dog and spoke very gently to it. He no longer looked down at the lights, but he wished that the morning would come quickly and that he were away, with the sense of guilt left behind him.

He went to bed, and lay with closed eyes, breathing deeply and regularly as though in sleep; for he was afraid that Uncle Oliver might begin to talk to him.