Читать книгу Trouble Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 5

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To make sure of the desert catching me, they had cleaned me out. They had even found the revolver which was tucked under my blanket near to my head, because the last few years I had had to get into the habit of sleeping like that.

My guns and my ammunition was gone, and all my pack of chuck.

What I had left was the blanket that I was sleeping in and my knife.

So I sat down and looked at the lonely water of that little pool. And it didn’t seem half so fine, just now. If I stayed there, I’d starve quick. If I left it, I didn’t have even a canteen for the carrying of water.

So I looked away to the south where those mountains had been showing up blue and fine the evening before.

They was close enough to be brown, now, and that meant that they couldn’t be such a terrible long way off. But they must be far enough, and I knew that there was nobody able to lay down the distances by just looking at mountains in the distance. The air was clear as a glass, this day, and maybe there was fifty miles between me and the foothills.

Besides, maybe the mountains was not the way that the six of them had started off with my Cherry.

I went down to the lake and took a long drink. Then I took a squint at the sun and damned it for its brightness. And after that, I settled down and trudged out along the sign of the thieves.

I could tell, now, why it was that horse stealing had been a surer way than murder of getting the thief lynched in that part of God’s country. Because when a horse is stole from you in the desert, it’s the same as murder—of the worst and slowest kind!

Ordinarily, I would of been so scared and sick that I would of just folded up and sat down to die, maybe; but I’d been through so much, since the sheriff took up my trail, that I was used to bad luck and hardship, so I just buckled down to that trail.

It was clear enough reading, and pretty soon I had something to be grateful for, because the wind fetched around into the north and blew a few jags of clouds across the sun and then filmed the sky across with thin gray—just enough of it to take all the fire out of the air.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t be alive to tell this, because that day I walked fifty miles without another drink of water—fifty miles across the sand to the bottom of those hills, and into them until I found a dirty little muddy stream.

There I rested for a good long hour. And then I started up the slopes puzzling out the trail that grew a bit hard to manage, now and then, because it often passed across hard granite where a shod hoof left hardly a scratch. And besides, that long march had left me dizzy and sick, and I was only gradually getting my strength and my senses back.

They had gone brisking across the desert and piled up a pretty big lead on me, during the first part of the day, but now as it come along to the late afternoon and the evening, they slowed up to nothing. They had done a good hard day’s march, and now the signs grew fresher and fresher, and I could feel reasonable sure that I would catch up with them before the next morning.

The dusk began to gather. And just then, not a mile ahead of me, I seen the pale glow of a campfire, just a couple of strokes brighter than the last of the daylight.

I knew that I had them, then.

I headed straight on, making pretty good time, and after a while I cut around to the lee of their camp and sneaked up from rock to rock and from bush to bush until I was stretched out and could peer down at them from behind a little thicket.

The first thing that I seen was Cherry Pie, hobbled close and pegged out, too, and standing with her head down, pretty sick looking. And she wasn’t touching that fine grass.

You’ll say that horses ain’t made that way, that they can’t miss a man enough to go hungry for his sake. Well, I don’t argue. I don’t say that they will or that they won’t. Maybe Cherry Pie was sick that evening, though she didn’t show no signs of it a little later. But all I know is what I state—that there she stood not touching the grass.

One of the gents by the fire sings out: “Try her with a handful of that crushed barley, Sandy!”

“I’ve tried her,” says Sandy. “She won’t touch it. Except that she tried to take my hand off! She snaps like a tiger!”

It pleased me a good deal, that.

I turned away my eyes from my gold and silver beauty and begun to size up the men.

I had followed six horses, and there was a man for each horse. I learned their names, while I was lying there, drinking in the information, and printing their faces into my mind.

Sandy Larson was a big Swede or Scandanoovian of some kind.

There was a Mexican they called Dago Mendez. I suppose that Dago come from “Diego.”

There was a big Negro that went by the name of Little Joe.

There was a long, lean, shambly looking tramp—Missouri Slim.

There was a brisk-looking gent with nervous, snappy ways—a stocky-made man, called Lew Candy.

But the only name that I had ever heard before was that of the chief of the gang, Doctor Grace.

Of course everybody else had heard of the doctor. And a lot of sheriffs in one place or another would of been pretty glad to set their eyes on him—if they had enough numbers on their side to give them a show at capturing him! Because it meant money to get Grace, dead or alive. I know what it amounted to, later on. But even then, I think that it was something like twelve or fifteen thousand in hard cash that would be got by him that downed Doctor Grace.

Still, here he was at liberty.

It done me a lot of good to have this chance to watch him, because I figured then, as I lay on the rock, and squinted through the brush at the circle of them, that my hardest job would be in the handling of that same Grace. And I wasn’t mistaken.

He was a picture-man, was the doctor. I mean to say, that he looked like a drawing out of a book.

In those days, mustaches was still fashionable, and the doctor had a black, silky beauty, so mighty well trained that it never fluffed out and got rough looking or fell in his way. You could tell, just to look at him, that that mustache would never get tangled with the cream on his cup of coffee.

He had a black eye to match the mustache, and he had, besides, the finest kind of long, half-curling black hair—because the style was for a gent to wear his hair pretty long. It was sort of poetic, folks thought in those days, just the way that they think now it’s very neat to show the white of your scalp all the way up to the crown of your head, so’s the back view of a gent is like the back view of a porcupine.

What set off the blackness of the doctor’s mustache and eyes was the whiteness of his skin. You would think, by the look of his hands and his face, that he had never spent a single day riding out under the hot sun. And the same was true about his clothes. I mean, he took care of his clothes just as though they was a part of his skin—something that he felt. To have anything wrong with his clothes, you could see, would upset him, and a hole in his coat would be almost like a bullet through his hide.

So he looked as neat and as dapper as you please, sitting there by the fire.

“You need not worry about the mare,” he said. “She will come to time in a very few days. I think that she misses her master.”

By the way that they gaped at him, it was easy to tell that they would of broke out laughing, if it had been anybody else.

But Missouri Slim said:

“Do you mean, Doctor, that she’s grieving for her boss, and that’s why she won’t eat?”

“That’s exactly it,” said Doctor Grace.

“Humph!” said Slim. “I used to think that I knew a good deal about horseflesh.”

“You do, Missouri,” said the doctor in his gentle voice. “You know a very great deal about them, but there are a few things which have never come to your attention. You really must not forget that a horse cannot be studied pound for pound and known.”

“And why not?” asked Missouri.

“Because a horse has a soul,” said Doctor Grace, as solemn as you please.

“Gunna go up to heaven with their souls, then?” grinned Little Joe.

“And why not?” said Doctor Grace. “When I remember some of the horses who have lived with me and died for me, I feel certain that they could not be snapped out like a candlelight. No, we shall find them hereafter, I think.”

He said this serious, not smiling. And the gents around the campfire frowned and hung their heads and looked on down to the fire, like folks that want to talk back but partly don’t know how to do it, and partly they’re afraid of making a fuss.

It was wonderful to see how Doctor Grace had that lot in hand, and yet they was as rough a bunch as I ever saw collected in one herd.

Pretty soon he said: “When you’ve finished that cup of coffee, you might take a walk around and look over things, Sandy. Not that anyone has followed us, but we may as well make sure.”

So Sandy walked out of the camp, and into my hands.