Читать книгу Pillar Mountain - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 9

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“You gotta take time,” said Rivers. “You can’t learn in a minute! That was a fine swat that Lew got in on her, wasn’t it?”

His eyes shone with pleasure and admiration, but Philip looked on his companion as on a madman.

“A little nearer to the point,” argued Doc Rivers, “and he’d have put her down; and a happy day for poor Lew if he’d done it. She’s a tiger. Doggone me if she ain’t a tiger! I says, the day that Lew married her: ‘There goes a hero!’ says I. She heard me say it, too, and I get a cold sweat when I think of what she’ll do to me some day. I’d rather play with a forest fire than fool with her. Say, where did you learn to box?”

“Box?” said Philip gently.

“Yes, box,” replied the admiring Doc. “We used to think that Thompson could fight a little until a wild Canuck came down here like a twelve-mule team and ran over him. But that wasn’t nothing like this. Spaff! I never seen such a punch! A left shift to the wind, it looked like to me. Lew will have to wear a mustard plaster for a month to draw his insides back to their right locations. He’ll need to get all resurveyed. I thought I seen your fist come out through his back. How much do you weigh, kid?”

“I don’t know,” said Philip, who understood only one word in every three from this speech. “I never was weighed.”

“You never was what? Well, you got the makings of something. I ain’t gunna take you to the jail. I’m gunna set you up and manage you. A good heavyweight gets something for his trouble.”

Philip paused as they reached the main trail; and Loafer, who had reached his side, paused also, and looked up into his master’s face.

“I wasn’t dreaming it?” suggested Philip rather wistfully. “He actually struck her?”

“He actually didn’t do nothin’ but,” chuckled Rivers. “It was his good ol’ right, too! You know women?”

“I?” murmured Philip.

He closed his eyes for an instant, and far away he saw a bright procession of fairy forms, and gentle ladies on milk-white palfreys, and lovely Una with her hand upon the lion’s head.

“No,” said Philip, “I don’t suppose I do—actually—”

“They take practice,” declared Doc Rivers, “but always you gotta come over them with a high hand. My old man was always in hell. Outside, he was as tough as they come. He had hide as tough as the skin of a rhinoceros. You could of busted a Bowie knife on my old man’s hide. But when he come home, he wanted to rest and take it easy. He was always talkin’ about his aches and pains and waitin’ for some sympathy. Well, I seen him wait for twenty-five years, and he never got none. I never seen him get but one smile out of the old woman, and that was when he was stretched out inside of boards. Then she sat down and folded her hands: ‘He’s been a hard job, but he’s finished at last,’ says she. That’s woman, kid!”

“I don’t understand,” said Philip.

“Ain’t I talkin’ the language?”

“Have you been talking about your own father—and—your own mother?”

Doc Rivers turned a little in the saddle and looked down on the boy.

“I sort of get your drift,” he said. “You’re kind of Sunday School. That’s the spoilin’ of you! Women,” said Doc Rivers, “is lightning on skates. Women is steel cases with a lead core. Women is a long trail with a blizzard blowin’.”

He fell into gloomy thought which continued for a long time. “Back East they got a new invention,” said Rivers at last. “It would be a help to you.”

“Yes?” queried the boy politely.

“They got wagons with gas engines in ’em that run without hosses. Automobiles they call ’em. You could use one; otherwise, you’re gunna be walkin’ through a pile of mud before you’re much older!”

The road was so dry that the dust was blowing, and therefore Philip saw no meaning whatever in this remark, and a moment later he had another thing to take his attention, for the trail, which recently had grown deeper and more worn, now joined another road which had still more the aspect of a main thoroughfare and where the two intersected there was a shambling, sunburned group of buildings. A long watertrough in four big sections, green-dripping along the sides, the surface of the water freckled with dust, stood before the largest of the structures.

“There’s Miller’s place,” said Rivers. “I guess we can afford to pull up and likker there, kid. What you think?”

They dismounted in front of Miller’s, therefore. Certainly it did not resemble a palace out of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, but it was far the most imposing work of man that the boy had as yet seen, and he paused a moment in the white-hot dust of the street to regard the shambling façade with reverence, thinking how many backs must have been bent to raise this monster, how many handstrokes must have been used to fasten the timbers. No wonder the paint was burned and peeled from most of it. A veritable ocean of color and oil would have been needed to re-do the surface.

“Come along, kid,” said his companion. “I’m getting so dry that I’m kind of blind. You might have to lead me by the hand, unless I can smell my way to the booze!”

The floor of the veranda creaked loudly beneath their boots. Then they pushed through a swinging door and Philip found himself in a long, low, narrow room where already half a dozen men were leaning at a high wooden counter, turning glasses between thumbs and forefingers.

It would have been possible, indeed, to locate that room because of its fragrance, which was partly that of many fuming Bull Durham cigarettes and a sharp, sour scent of beer, and a pungency of stronger liquors though none of those perfumes could have been identified by Philip. However, he liked the dim coolness, and the strands of wet sawdust sprinkled on the floor, and the comfortable chairs that lined the wall. Outside the sun was raging; the burn was still between his shoulder blades. But this was a moist, misty Paradise of coolness.

Truly, wonderful were the ways of man, and good and beautiful was this shining world of man’s devices!

The six dusty forms before the bar turned slowly towards them with a general, throaty: “How-d’ye.” Behind the wooden counter a tall, sad-faced man leaned towards them, notable for a jacket which once had been white but now was streaked with stains of varying shades of amber and of brown, sometimes edged with black dust.

“Well, boys?” said he in a mournful voice.

“Red-eye—and a double one,” said the eager Rivers. “What you drinking, kid?”

“Milk, if you please,” said Philip.

Then he was aware of a dreadful silence which walked through the room, casting cold on either hand.