Читать книгу Twenty Notches - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11

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Never did the Sleeper live up to his name as upon this night. The enormous fatigue which had been accumulated during the time when he worked at the woodpile of Trot Enderby now took control of him and drugged him with a black weight. He hardly could touch his supper, but then had to stagger to his bed, and he fell upon the bed without undressing.

When he wakened he found that he had slept all through the night to the rose of the morning, and still he could have slept, except that a jackass in the hotel corral was braying louder than the conch shells of twenty Solomon Islanders.

When he got up, he found that his refitted trousers were waiting for him, laid upon a chair. The bearer must have knocked and failed to waken him.

He undressed, took a cold bath, and dressing once more, he found himself wonderfully refreshed. He could gaze about him with open eyes now, and look forward to breakfast.

What a breakfast it was! Great salty slices of ham, and fried eggs from the hotel henyard, and piles of sour-milk biscuits with a crust like golden honey, and afterward, a stack of buckwheat flapjacks drenched with a flood of maple sirup. Three great cups of black coffee washed down this meal, and then the Sleeper attacked his first cigarette and felt equal to anything in the world.

A mild happiness flowed through him; he sat in the slant, early sunrise and stared at the morning blue of the mountains, with no desire to stir. There Steve, the hotel man, found him, and took him to see the town celebrity, old Joe Morice. They went out to the edge of Alcalde, with Steve talking all the way.

“When this here Morice showed up in Alcalde twenty year back, I remember it like yesterday. Came in driving a buckboard pulled by a runty, pot-bellied mare. He had a year-old baby. His wife was dead and left him the girl, which her name was Evelyn. You’ll be seeing her, too.”

Steve smiled a little and nodded as though he agreed with himself that this was something of an importance which only he could understand.

“He was a regular hard-handed puncher, this Morice, but he couldn’t go out to work on the range because there was nobody to look after the kid. He used to work in town. He would do anything. Dig up a vegetable garden for you, wash windows, take a hand house cleaning. Got a patch of land and raised what he could. Managed somehow to get along, but that pot-bellied gray mare was where he lived.

“I says to him: ‘Morice, how come that runty little mare could get you over the road all the way between San Pedro and here?’

“He gives me a crooked look.

“ ‘Stranger,’ says he. ‘This here is Iron Lady, by Martyr, out of Adamant!’

“Well, I doubted that that meant anything, but after talkin’ around a while, seein’ that I wasn’t hankerin’ for the fight which he was pretty anxious to give me, he pulls out a wallet, and in the wallet there was a couple of small bills, and then a folded official-looking paper, signed and everything, saying that the gray mare, Iron Lady, was foaled by Adamant, and that the sire was Martyr. Then he got out a small-sized stud book and started in readin’ to me about their ancestors.

“Well, I’m a democrat. I says: ‘All these here hosses, they all come out of one Adam-hoss, I reckon.’

“He gives me another mean look. He says: ‘Hosses, stranger, is a dang sight longer in their line and better bred than humans, not leavin’ out the King of England, or the first gentleman of France!’

“I didn’t argue none. Argument ain’t my line. I humored him. It’s the best way with a crank, which I reckoned that he was. I says just nothin’ and I leave him be.

“Well, he works six months, and lives on nothin’, except what he feeds his kid, and then he leaves her with a neighbor’s wife and starts off with the mare, and when he comes back, he’s spent all the money that he could beg or borrow or save. Poker? No, sir. He says that’s the stud fee of Christian, which was a fine and fancy stallion back in Kentucky. Which he’d gone and got a reduced rate, at that! He says that Christian is about the finest thing on four legs, and wants to talk breeding lines to everybody in Alcalde to prove that the foal would have to be the finest hoss ever born.

“Well, it wasn’t.

“It was a runty little mare no better’n her ma. She never amounted to anything, but old Morice, he works along and saves all his money, and pretty soon off he goes with the foal, which he called her Rod-of-Iron. She was a growed-up mare, and dog-gone me if he don’t spend all his savings for those years to pay her fee and shipping costs, and he breeds her to a stallion called Lucky Word, which he says it’s a new strain and a lot more likely to do good with the Iron line. He could read you books to prove that, too.

“And yet the foal of Rod-of-Iron was no good, neither. It was another filly. Runty like the rest. Couldn’t raise a gallop. An Injun pony could beat her.

“ ‘Endurance—that’s the quality in the Iron strain,’ says Morice.

“You couldn’t discourage him, though. He called this one Iron Will, which was a good name for himself, if not for the mare. And when she’d growed up, he takes all his savin’s again—mind you, he lives worse’n a squatter—and away he takes her again. But he says that he’s got a great idea, and that all his other breeding ideas, they were no good at all. We could’ve told him that ourselves, mind you! The new daddy is Westminster. And he gets still another filly by name of Gray Iron, that’s the worst of the whole string. Broke down in front when it was two, and not so good behind, neither.

“ ‘What a grand middle piece, though!’ says poor Morice.

“We all figgered he was a crazy man, by this time, though.

“We felt sorry for him, and used to shake our heads over him, and then comes the time and he takes Gray Iron away to a stallion by name of Woodman, that never had done nothing on the track, but old Morice, he could talk to you for a week to show you that Woodman was the right cross for his blood. Woodman, he got still another filly, called True Iron, and I gotta say that True Iron is quite a mare. You can see her. She ain’t fast enough for the track but she’s got points that a blind man can see, and the old girl can gallop all day. Old Morice, he says that he’s got the right strain at last, and he takes back True Iron to another stallion of the same line, by name of Forester, which was another that had broke down in training. And by the jumpin’ Jiminy that Forester, he gets the first colt that poor Morice had had, and the name of that colt is a name that you’ve heard about. It’s Ironwood! He looks like something. Not that we believed in him. Morice, he’d failed so often that we couldn’t believe. But a coupla the boys, they offered a good price for Ironwood, and Morice, he just laughed at him.

“ ‘You can’t buy history that cheap!’ he used to say.

“We got kinda mad, hearin’ him talk.

“He’d backed old Chris Main with a stake, and dog-gone me if Chris didn’t strike it up in the hills. He struck it pretty good, and old man Morice, his share was enough for him to send Ironwood off and put him in training as a yearling. Along comes his two-year-old form. He runs eight times and gets a third out of it.

“ ‘Patience and time,’ says Morice, ‘is all that he needs.’

“We listened and we laughed.

“Then comes the three-year-old form, and that there dog-gone Ironwood, he keeps on runnin’, and he never gets anything at all.

“ ‘The distances is too short,’ says old Morice. ‘He needs a mile and a half. I’m gunna enter him in the Creole Stakes.’ Which he done it! Yes, sir, he sold his place, put out his girl to board, and goes back to see the big race. He had five hundred left over and he puts it down with the bookies. He gets good odds, too. Fifty to one looked easy to those bookies. What had Ironwood done? Why, one third in two years of runnin’! And when the old man gets back there, he says that he finds out the dog-gone trainer that he’s trusted the hoss to ain’t been doin’ him right—has been short-changin’ him right along for food and exercise. So he makes a switch, and signs up a cheap apprentice jockey that’s a good deal overweight.

“ ‘Weight’ll only warm up Ironwood,’ says he.

“Well, sir, along comes the day of that race. And they line up for a mile and a half, and twenty-five thousand hangin’ in the air for the luckiest and bestest hoss of the bunch. They had hosses there, mind you. They had Lucifer, all the way shipped from Saratoga. They had Irish Doctor, too, that was a champeen. They had Grievous, and a grievous hard mare she always was to beat. And in under a feather’s weight.

“They spring the barrier. They go off with a roar, I reckon, at a great big track like New Orleans.

“They do the first half with Irish Doctor a coupla jumps in the lead. Then along comes Lucifer, and Grievous close up. And who’s last? Why, whacha think? Ironwood, of course!

“Ironwood last!

“They come to a mile in mighty fast time, and now Grievous and Lucifer is close up and when they turn into the stretch, there’s Lucifer stickin’ his head out in front. He was the favorite, and all the people, old Morice says, are yellin’: ‘Lucifer, Lucifer!’ like to bust.

“But Lucifer, he didn’t have the race in his pocket, not yet. No, sir, because that Irish Doctor, he was game, like all his race are. Show him a fight, and he loved it, and he comes again, hard under the whip, and right along with him comes Grievous on her second wind, fair wingin’ it along!

“They go like lightning, sir, down that stretch, and the people, they begin to get pretty wild. They pretty nigh stand on their heads.

“Lucifer, he still has his nose out in front, still workin’ hard and not givin’ no tricks away, and Irish Doctor splitting himself every stride, all done up and gone, and sprawling, but his heart still lifting him along, like a good heart will. And on the outside, there’s Grievous flowin’ over the ground. ‘In faultless style, as always,’ says the writer in the paper. Now, in the span of your hand you could stretch the difference between their noses, and the wire winkin’ and shinin’ ahead of them, and the jockeys swingin’ with their hosses and ridin’ for glory and a fat bonus, when all at once they gives up a screech in the stand, and there’s old Morice, a-standin’ alongside of the rail and yellin’: ‘Baby, baby, d’you see me? Come on, baby!’ Which was the kind of a fool name that he had give the colt in the pasture at home.

“Why, yes, sir. Out there, clean on the outside, they was a gray hoss that left the pack behind him like he had smelled the home barn. He’d got his second wind. He was stretchin’ to his stride for the first time in his life. He was goin’ so fast that the apprentice on him leaves his whip and takes a hard hold and hopes to Heaven this here streak of lightnin’ won’t slide out from under him.

“The longer that race went, the harder he fights for his head, the more that fool lump of a jockey holds back, and the wider Ironwood splits himself. And he comes up on the outside faster’n fire in dry stubble. And he leaves them three dog-gone high-priced thoroughbreds to study the look of his tail, and he opens up a coupla lengths of daylight, and makes it three for luck as he goes under that wire with fifteen pound overweight and chills and fever on his back. And he runs another half mile past the finish, and then bucks his jockey off to show that he ain’t only beginning to fight.

“So that’s how Ironwood won the Creole Stakes and put Alcalde on the map.”