Читать книгу Trouble Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 12

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Suppose that you stop for a minute and think it over. Here is a young girl raised as fine as could be, and mighty delicate, and all that, and right in front of her is an outlaw, a bad actor, with eight thousand dollars on his head, him that she herself had called “murdering Larry Dickon” not so long before. Now the outlaw up and says that he wants to know what he can do for her, and what does she say? Does she tell him to just vamoose and raise a dust up the road as fast as he can go?

No, but she looked me right in the eye and she said: “If you’re here, Cherry Pie isn’t far off. I’d like to see Cherry!”

I reached for the nearest wooden pillar of that veranda and steadied myself a little, because I’m free to say that I’m not used to being taken so free and easy. I have known hardy gents to turn white at the sight of me, you understand, not because of what I am, but because of what folks have said about me, and what the fool newspapers have printed.

But this girl walked along beside “murdering Larry Dickon,” and: “Mind the ditch,” she says. “I nearly sprained my ankle there, last week.” And then: “This way, please. Because that ground is all planted with sweet peas. There’s the moon to let me see Cherry. What luck!”

Because a big, fat-cheeked, golden moon had come up through the eastern trees and set the woods drifting with shadows, like images in water.

I whistled, and Cherry came out to us.

She stopped at the sight of the girl and pricked her ears.

“What a darling!” says the girl.

“Now go steady,” says I, “because Cherry ain’t fond of strangers—”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She walked right up and rubbed Cherry Pie’s nose, and by the look of Cherry, you would have said that she was getting sugar, she was so happy.

Julie was no baby about horses, either. She stepped back and looked over the lines of my mare.

“No wonder that Dad has such a time corralling you,” says Julie. “Why, if I had a horse like this, I could be a bandit.”

“Julie!” sings out a voice from the house, and just at the same minute, I heard a horse galloping down the road, and by the moon it was easy to see Danny Murphy, that had worked himself loose five times quicker than I thought he could and was coming bareback on one of his nags to see what was what.

“Thanks for telling me about the pie,” says Julie Ops. “It saves me from thinking that Lew might have told a lie to me. So long—I hope you have all the luck that’s coming to you!”

And as I ducked into the saddle, that girl stood there and waved to me, and a minute later she was screeching: “This way. He’s here, Danny!”

It didn’t make me mad. She was simply playing the cards the way that they had been dealt to her. And since she had been half an inch from collecting eight thousand dollars and a lot of headlines for being a “heroine,” you couldn’t blame her for wanting to see me done for.

Danny Murphy came on as fast as his horse would let him, and it was a good horse, too. But I jumped Cherry over the hedge back into the grove, and when I cut out on the other side, all that Danny could do was to empty his revolver at me from a distance, as Cherry bobbed away through the moonshine.

Altogether, I felt pretty good over this thing. But if I sat down and tried to figure out why, I was puzzled. Because I had come down here to raid the sheriff’s house and raise Ned, and all I had done was to steal a loganberry pie!

However, there ain’t any accounting for the things that make you happy, any more than there is for the things that make you sad.

I streaked Cherry right across the country for eight miles and got down at the shack of the only man in the world that valued me more than the price on my head. I mean, that was old Choctaw’s place.

Why he was called Choctaw, you know as well as I do, except that when he was a youngster he had been as wild as any Indian. He was smoking his pipe in front of his house when I drifted up through the woods.

Even before I brought Cherry to a walk, he sang out: “It’s all right, son. The coast is clear, except for me. Put up Cherry and give her a feed of barley. The bin is full up.”

I did as he said, and left Cherry having a go at that good fodder while I went back and sat down beside Choctaw.

I got out my own pipe, and it was real restful to sit there and watch the tree tops stirring across the stars.

“Grace made it too hot for you, I see,” says Choctaw.

“What do you know about Grace?” I asked him.

“Doctor Grace,” says Choctaw, “is a real wicked man that salts mines and sells them to tenderfeet when he ain’t got a fine murder job on his hands. I would like to know, how come you had to try your hand on Grace? Wasn’t Wally Ops enough for you?”

It was no good asking him where he had got his information so sudden. Matter of fact, telephones and telegraph wires had been laid so free and far, lately, that the whole country was getting uncomfortable, and everybody was apt to know more about you than you did yourself. But even before telephones and such, old Choctaw seemed to have underground ways of knowing. He was a wise old devil, for fair.

“Grace stole my mare,” I told him, “and I followed along and snagged one of his gang.”

“I know. But Sandy was the foolishest of the bunch. You won’t handle the rest as easy as all of that! Not when they get onto your trail again!”

“Listen, Choctaw,” I said, “it ain’t a question of them trailing me. It’s a question of me trailing them. Didn’t I tell you that they stole my mare and left me stranded without even one gun in the middle of the desert?”

“Sure,” said Choctaw. “I hear you talk.”

He was busy filling his pipe, and I lay back in my chair and sang a song.

“There is only one thing,” said Choctaw, “that you ain’t instructed me about. I’ve got your money all invested as safe as can be. But you ain’t told me what am I to do with it when you get snagged?”

“Keep it and spend it,” said I.

“No,” said he. “I wouldn’t take the coin of a partner. You got to give it to somebody else. But tell me, old son, what that somebody or something could be. Churches is good on the receiving end of gifts!”

“Churches may be damned,” says I. “How come you to talk so much about me dying, Choctaw?”

“Because the time ain’t far off,” says he.

I sat up. When you heard Choctaw yap, it meant something.

“The time ain’t far off? Well?”

“That’s what I said.”

“What do you know?”

“Oh, I know enough!”

“I mean, what’s the deal that I got against me?”

Choctaw made one of his long pauses. A damn mean man about slow talking, that Choctaw was.

He said: “You having that Wally Ops after you don’t count, and getting mixed up at the same time with Doctor Grace—that’s nothing worth talking about, I suppose?”

“I’ll handle them,” I told him. “What else?”

“Stop singing, then.”

“Go ahead.”

“I was saying that Ops and Grace ain’t enough to bother you very much. It’s something else that makes me know that you’re about at the end, my lad.”

“I’m listening.”

“When a gent plays a lone hand,” says Choctaw, “he gets by pretty well. But when he ties himself up to partners, then he’s in for trouble. How many times have they laid for you, because they knew that you was my friend, and that you would come this way if you was in my part of the country?”

“They’ve tried to tag me three times here,” I admitted.

“Which is bad, Larry. But there is something a lot worse than a man for a partner. I mean, a woman.”

I jumped up.

“Hey, Choctaw,” said I, “what are you talkin’ about?”

“I say that you got a woman back in your head, lad, and you ain’t gunna sleep so sound on account of her, and you ain’t gunna shoot so straight!”

It upset me a good deal.

“Choctaw,” I told him, “you listen to God honest facts, will you?”

“Sure,” said he.

“Now I tell you that there ain’t a woman in the world that I’m dizzy about.”

“You do some thinking and unsay that,” said Choctaw.

I thought back. I had hardly laid eyes on women folks half a dozen times in the last year.

“No,” said I, “there ain’t hardly a one that I’ve so much as looked at!”

“Hardly?” says he.

“Oh,” I told him, “that’s the sheriff’s daughter, that stuck one of my own guns into my floating ribs tonight and tried to get herself famous. She’s a nervy little runt, Choctaw!”

“Ha!” says Choctaw, breathing out a big chunk of smoke. “That’s Julie, eh?”

“That’s her name.”

“Well,” says Choctaw, “she would make a good wife for a hard-handed gent. Maybe you are him. But she means trouble, old son. Couldn’t you pick out something easier than a sheriff’s daughter?”

“Listen, Choctaw,” I tried to explain. “I ain’t picked her out. The reason that I come up here was to raid the sheriff’s house and—”

“But you seen Julie and forgot?” said Choctaw.

It made me mad. But what could I say? I just damned and sat back and lighted my pipe.

“What’s filled your head full of this kind of an idea?” I couldn’t help saying.

“Why,” says Choctaw, “when I was young, I was in love, too.”

“Was you?” said I, sort of interested. “But never married?”

“Only three times,” says Choctaw.

“Three times married!” I shouted. “And nobody ever knowed about it?”

“One died of whooping cough, which is a fool thing for a growed up person to die of, but she had got her throat real tender by sitting up late, lecturing me about what I was and wasn’t. One of them ran off with another gent while I was on the trail of a gold mine that never turned up, and one of them turned out to have another husband cached away some place before me. So out of the three I drawed this shack, and a billion dollars’ worth of peace, son. But each of them three made some kind of a fool out of me. But never the kind that you been turned into by your woman.”

“Tell me what kind that is, Choctaw.”

“A singing fool, Larry,” said he. “No woman ever made me a singing fool, and Julie Ops has done that for you. That was how I knowed that you was gone.”

I started to answer him, pretty severe. But then I got to thinking. How long had it been before tonight since I had done any singing?

I couldn’t even remember!