Читать книгу Trouble Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

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In the old days, when Griswold was the boss in the valley, it was pretty uncomfortable to look down there and see the runty mules and scraggy mustangs, and the no-account longhorns, that could live on thistle, but that couldn’t get fat even on cottonseed cakes and good oat hay. The fences leaned all together to the south, which way the wind mostly blowed in winter, when the ground was wet; and the house was a knock-kneed, broken-backed sort of a shack with sheds around it that you could see right through. Take it by and large, the old Griswold place had always looked as though an army had bombarded it, and then sacked it, and then marched on along just leaving behind the cripples out of its livestock.

That was all very different, now.

You take that Wally Ops, he was different from most.

Up to this time, I had loafed it around taking things easy and doing what I wanted to do, and when I wanted it. But along comes Wally, and then I got thin and Cherry lost some of her figure, too. You would say that Wally Ops just nacherally hated to stay still.

You would say that to be on the jump, wearing out horseflesh and man-flesh, was his idea of a good game.

The same way down there in the valley. Looked like he had been working night and day these past eight years, whacking the valley into shape.

I never seen so much prosperity. There was big fat-bellied haystacks, and black-topped straw stacks from last harvest time, and there was a stretch of ground all checked off with regular corrals and feed sheds, where he could put up the section of the cows that got run down during the bad weather. Besides all of that, the sheds were fixed up, and a lot of new ones built, and I couldn’t make out the Griswold house at all, until I seen that what it used to be was now just used as the kitchen part of the new place.

Trees, too! They changed the face of everything. Of course old man Griswold had just gone out and chopped down everything near the house for firewood, and it amazed me to think that trees could of growed up to look so real and so nacheral and so big in eight short years. Which they couldn’t, either, and I knew that all of that grove by the house must of been dug up as good big standing saplings by Wally Ops and brought down to plant around the house. Why, man, it would stagger you to think how much work that meant! Any sort of a sizable sapling, with its roots dug out far enough to make sure of it living, and all the mold and the moss and the dirt sticking to it, why, one sapling would make a whole wagon load. But anyway, there was the trees, and not just one or two of them, but a whole little wood of them standing around the house and covering it right up to the red edge of the roof.

It made the sun seem hotter, to look down into that pool of coolness and greenness and shadow. Cherry had noticed it right away, of course, and she had her head cocked up high.

But of course I couldn’t go prowling around there in the daytime.

How I was to soak the sheriff, and soak him most hardest, I couldn’t make out; but I knew that, with him having a place as big and as flossy as this, it wouldn’t be hard for me to work some way out.

I took Cherry back into cover in a nest of rocks and smoked cigarettes in the shade for the rest of the afternoon while I worked out ways of making Wally Ops damn the day when I was ever born and he took up my trail.

Because I decided that I had stood enough and that the time had come for me to make an end of this thing and to set Wally Ops up as an example, so that the next sheriff that come onto my trail would have Wally to remember by, and not wear himself out chasing me any more than his reputation required.

After I had fixed Wally good and proper, then I would go back and take up with Doctor Grace and his yeggs, right where I had left off.

This idea seemed sensible and sound all over. I allowed that I couldn’t improve on it, so I took a last look at the blue of the sky and the gray of the rock that leaned out over me, and I closed my eyes for a little snooze.

It was dusk when I woke up. I was hungry, but I was ashamed to do my own cooking when the smell of woodsmoke sloping out of the valley told me that there was women folks at their cookery down there below me. So I smoked another cigarette, and listened to a bird singing his head off somewhere over my head, and when the bird stopped singing, and the dark come, I went down to have a closer look at things.

Coming across a field, a bunch of shorthorns heaved themselves up out of the shadows and went away grunting, with their round sides flobbing up and down and the water sloshing and jostling and gurgling in their stomachs as they trotted.

There was a bull with that set. He took no kind liking to me and aimed to slide his horns into Cherry, but she flicked across the first fence, and we heard that bull go crash! into it.

The fence posts held, though they groaned under the shock. I looked back at Mr. Bull standing in the field shaking his head after us, and snuffing at the ground, and blowing up clouds of dust, and pawing back great chunks of sod. There ain’t anything more foolish than a bull.

Down in the floor of the valley everything was easy. I just left Cherry Pie standing on the outer edge of the trees, and I sneaked up and walked around the house.

It was very slick. There was a couple of sprinklers spinning on the front lawn and whirring out spray that flew so high the wind caught it up, every now and then, and blew a breath of it across to me, under the trees. There was a good smell, too, of rich, wet muck in the garden beds, with roses flowering on top of it, and other blossoms, too, that I could only guess at. Because I’m not much of a hand at flowers. Except that roses you can tell them by the peppery something in the smell of them.

There was a veranda running on two sides of the house. That veranda was built deep and low, and floored with narrow boards just like the slickest kind of an inside room. You could of danced on that veranda, I tell you, because the lamplight that spilled out of a window across it was as bright as the moonpath over a muddy pool.

The whole house was set down low and comfortable toward the ground. You could look into the rooms as you walked around, because every window was wide open and the curtains drawed back, and wherever there was light enough you could see everything that was there.

I had aimed to go into that house and snoop around through it, but somehow I couldn’t do it, now that I was there. You can’t steal from a gent that offers you his purse. And it was sort of like that, finding this house so foolish and so open. I was main surprised that the sheriff was fool enough to leave his place without no better instruction than that. But when I come to think about it, I seen that it was safe enough, because most of the boys, even the tough ones, would of stopped a bit at the idea of robbing the sheriff’s own house.

However, as I was saying, I couldn’t go inside. I just went around, admiring to see how fine all the rooms was, with lots of red carpets, and such cheerful things, and more pictures on the walls than you could look at in a year of Sundays. A good summer house, and a good winter house, too. There was about all that you could ask for!

When I got to the kitchen, I seen that it was fixed real fine, with a new big wood range built into one end of the room, and great sinks and such, of stone, standing handy by, and a neat little oil range for breakfasts, and such.

Everything was clean, too. And the litter was of pots lying on their sides, with the creamy streaks of mashed potatoes showing on the bottoms, and baking pans with their black iron lids lying a bit off center and breathing out a slow, rich, lazy steam; and there was a half dozen of flat layer-cake pans with the leavings of the cake crusted on them, and the smell of butter, and spices, and baking, and such, all about.

I leaned beside the window, looking this all over, and while I was looking, I fetched from the window sill a loganberry pie that was sort of standing there and cooling off, d’you see?

It was the sort of a pie that you would expect from that kitchen. There is pies and pies. I would say that apple pie is as good as most, and I can eat my half of a good cream pie, and I ain’t backing up when a lemon pie walks up and looks me in the face, and blackberries can be prime; but, you take them by and large, when the loganberries is ripe enough but not soggy, and when the crust is made thick, and there is just the right amount of sugar worked in, and when there is a little jerk of something else put in to polish it off, there ain’t anything in the way of eating that comes over a loganberry pie.

This pie that I’m speaking about, it was right. I couldn’t say no more. By the time that I had finished looking, that pie was gone, and if there had been a brother of it standing lonely like behind, I wouldn’t of left it stay.

I crossed around from the kitchen, though, with just a look into the creamery.

Most creameries ain’t so pleasant to see, or even to think about. But the first thing that you could smell in this one was the good yellow soap that had been used for the scrubbing down of the floors and the tables and the walls. I went inside, and I listened to the sound of the water, dripping down along the sacking of the coolers. I pulled open a couple of the doors and seen the glimmer of the milk pans standing one above the other, and I went out almost as contented and rich feeling as though that place had belonged to me!

By my left there was the smell of a shed of cords and cords of good, sweet, dry wood stacked up, as I went along, and then I stopped to look in at the dining room.

There was where I seen the family for the first time.