Читать книгу The Whisperer - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 4

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The scattered length of Rusty Gulch drew the whole heart of Harry Quinn. By the roofs of the houses he knew them. His brow puckered at the flat top of the jail, and his mouth watered when he identified the saloon. He could hear, merely through the power of the mind, the clicking of dice as they rattled and rolled, the whisper of shuffled cards, and the clinking of ice in the glass. As he looked across the town, he was biting his teeth into the fat of a good cigar and lifting one finger to tell the bartender to set them up all down the line.

There were not many elements in the heaven desired by Harry Quinn; he could find them all in Rusty Gulch. But instead of riding straight into the arms of that paradise, he knew that it would be wisest for him to turn aside, at the outskirts of the town, to what looked like a barn from a distance and only appeared as a dwelling when one came up close to it and saw the high, wooden wall pierced by a few shuttered windows.

The gate to the yard was open, so Harry Quinn jogged his mustang inside and looked over the familiar heaps of junk that were arranged in ordered piles. It always seemed to him that Pop Dickerman’s junk yard was a cemetery for the entire range. The rags and tags of everything used by a cowpuncher, lumberman, or farmer could be found in these outdoor heaps, or in those that filled the huge mow of the convened barn where Dickerman lived.

Pop himself was now unloading a wagon in front of which stood two little down-headed skeletons of mules. He must have been out early to collect this load, the relics of some small shack among the hills, the sign that one more family had moved away. Pop Dickerman, buzzard that he was, had come to the emptying house and picked up for a song an entire load, in which Harry Quinn could notice the joints of a stovepipe and the dingy gray-black of the stove, a little single plow with toil-worn handles, a heap of old furniture, the clustered handles of brooms and spades and axes, a mound of saddles, and even a pair of chicken coops had been added.

On top of this load or rubbing against the legs of Dickerman on the ground were a score of cats. A Maltese giant sat on the driver’s seat and luxuriously licked a forepaw and washed his face with it. Harry Quinn thought of rats so strongly that he could almost sniff the odor out of the air. He thought of rats, too, when he saw the long, grizzled face of Pop Dickerman, furred over with curling hair like the muzzle of an animal. Harry Quinn came up close and dismounted, calling out: “Hello, Pop. How’s things?”

He began to untie the lead rope of the wiry roan mare he had brought in with him.

Pop Dickerman went straight past Harry Quinn as though his arrival were a matter not worthy of comment, as though he had not schemed day and night for the delivery of him from most imminent death. But Dickerman went by him and first greeted the mare, stroking her ewe neck with his grimy hand.

“How are you, Sue, old gal?” he asked. “How they been treatin’ you, honey?”

She pricked one ear and looked at him with lazy eyes.

“And where’s him that was ridin’ Sue?” asked Dickerman.

“He’s gone,” said Harry Quinn.

“Dead?” asked Dickerman.

“He ain’t dead. But he’s gone. He brought me all the way along the trail until we come in sight of Rusty Gulch, and, when he seen the roof of your house, he looked like he was smellin’ rats under the roof of it. He hopped off Sue and throwed me the reins. He ain’t dead, but he’s gone for good.”

“If he ain’t dead, he’ll come back,” said Dickerman. “He’s swore to me, and he’s got a conscience. Maybe he thinks now that he won’t come back, but a conscience is a funny thing. You dunno nothin’ about it, Harry, because you never had one, but when the night starts and the world gets dark, a gent’s conscience will come out with the stars. Yeah, we’ll have Reata back here with us not long after dark. Here ... gimme a hand unloadin’ this stuff, will you?”

“I ain’t hired out to handle junk,” protested Harry Quinn. “I’m goin’ to put up the hosses and go have a snack of sleep. I stopped sleepin’ when the hangin’ day got closer.”

Pop Dickerman did not argue. He merely stood there with a rusty bale of plowshares in his hands and watched Quinn lead the horse away.

Afterward, Quinn entered the barn. He so hated the sight of the piles of junk on the floor of the old mow and the great bundles that hung down on ropes from the rafters of the place that he half squinted his eyes and hurried on to the little rooms at the end of the building. There he entered the kitchen, found the five-gallon jug behind the door, helped himself to a large slug of good whiskey, and then went up to a room where bunks were built in two tiers against the wall. Those bunks were heaped with disordered, second-hand blankets of all colors, but the taste of Harry Quinn was not at all fine.

“In jail again,” was all he said, and, pulling off his tight boots, he lay down and rolled himself in one blanket. He stared for a moment at the window, dusted over with cobwebs, and then went to sleep.

When he wakened, it was near the end of the day. He went down and discovered Pop Dickerman cooking supper. On the oilcloth covering of the kitchen table, three places were laid out.

“Who’s goin’ to chow with us?” asked Harry Quinn.

“Reata. He’ll be back,” said Dickerman.

“Yeah? And the devil he will,” answered Quinn. “That hombre was so fed up when he just seen the roof of your barn, Pop, that he looked sick at the stomach. He couldn’t come no nearer.”

He went to the stove and lifted the lids from the pots. He found boiling potatoes, stewing chicken that gave out a rich mist of savor, and a great pot of coffee. Inevitable bacon simmered in another pan. He opened the oven door. A hot breath of smoky air boiled out at him, but he saw a deep pot of baking beans, brown-black and bubbling at the top, and two wide pans of baking-powder biscuits that were just coming to the right golden brown.

“You feed a man,” admitted Harry Quinn, slamming the door shut. “I gotta say that the chuck is all right here. Dog-gone my heart, though, but it must nigh kill you to part yourself from so much good grub.”

“A good man has gotta have good grub,” said Dickerman. And he lifted an eyebrow at Harry Quinn.

“Meaning that I ain’t so good, eh?” said Quinn. “That’s all right by me. But hop to it, Pop. It’s sundown, and I get a regular appetite at the regular hour.”

In fact, food was presently on the table, and Harry Quinn sat down to it with a capacious grin on his bulldog face. He held a fork in his left hand, but it was poised in an attitude of attention and only made vague dipping motions toward the plate from time to time. Sitting well slued around in his chair, far enough back to have leaped to his feet at any moment, Harry Quinn leaned forward and with sweeping gestures of a broad-bladed knife conveyed quantities to his mouth.

Opposite him, at the other end of the little table, Pop Dickerman ate some stale pone he had found in the bread box and drank small sips of some milk that had just gone sour. He seemed half revolted, and one could not tell whether it was the taste of his own portion or the vast appetite of Quinn that disgusted him. Certainly, Quinn’s manners made no difference to him. He kept his shoulders hunched up a little in rigid disfavor as he lowered his hairy face toward his sour milk. Now and then he put out a hand and stroked one of the cats that rubbed against his feet. One or another of them was continually jumping onto his lap, the half-starved creatures reaching their paws out in vain, tentative gestures toward that richly loaded table.

“This kid ... this here Reata,” said Quinn, when his mouth was only occasionally filled, “what I’d like to know is how you ever tied him up to you, you old blatherskite?”

“Brain work ... brain work is the thing,” answered Pop Dickerman thoughtfully. “I seen him workin’ in a crowd at the rodeo the other day with his reata.”

“Yeah, the damnedest thing I ever seen,” declared Harry Quinn, “the way he handles that rope of his. It ain’t no bigger’n a pencil, but it’ll hold a hoss. It looks like rawhide, but there’s gotta be something stronger than leather inside it. Is it wire?”

“I dunno,” answered Dickerman. “I seen him playin’ his tricks with it and pickin’ the pockets of the gents that stood around him while he was workin’, as slick as you ever seen.”

“Him? Pickin’ pockets? Hey, I wouldn’t think him that kind of low-down,” declared Quinn, amazed.

“There’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t think,” answered Dickerman, “and one of ’em is that young gents is often young fools, not meanin’ no real harm. I watched him, and his style was mighty fine. His hand was faster than any eye but mine, all right, and I seen that he didn’t lift nothing off anybody but the gents that looked like cattle kings and what not. You take a young fool like Reata and he wouldn’t steal enough to harm a man. What happened was that when he gets his loot, he looks it over and finds Tom Wayland’s watch that has a picture of Tom’s gal in it, and she’s so pretty that Reata is ashamed of stealin’ that watch and goes and puts it back in Wayland’s pocket.

“And while he’s puttin’ it in the pocket, puttin’ it back in ... the poor fool! ... Tom happens to catch him at it and raises a holler and downs him. But you can’t keep a cat like Reata down, and he eases through that whole crowd and swipes a hoss from the rack and gets away. And he ropes a new hoss pretty soon out of a field, and goes on. He leaves the whole gang away off behind him till he comes to the river, and there he sees a fool of a little mongrel dog on a bit of a chicken coop on a rock that’s been washed down the river. And he can’t leave that dog, but has to ride in and get it, and by that action he lets the sheriff and all come up to him.

“Well, they take and put him in jail, but on the way I give him a handshake, and I leave a good saw and a key to the back door of the jail in his hand. So, when he gets out that night, he comes to me and asks what can he do to pay me back. And I say that he can do for me what I’ve done for him, with three hundred percent interest, because I’ve got three men in a jam, and want to get them home. So he says he will and shakes hands on it.”

“That’s what he done, is it?” said Harry Quinn. “Well, conscience or no conscience, he’s done enough to pay you back already. When he got me loose, he did what nobody else in the world could ’a’ done, bar none. Not even Gene Salvio could ’a’ done it. Those Gypsies were goin’ to hang me up the next day, and they kept two men watchin’ me night and day. But Reata stepped in and fixed things.”

“Without a gun!” exclaimed Dickerman.

“Aye, with only hands and brain.”

“And how did he do it?”

“Well, I hardly know. But he sold himself to Queen Maggie, the head of the tribe, and she let him into the gang. Then he manhandled a couple of the Gypsies that was jealous of him, and they try to cut his throat, and he dodges that. And he picks out the prettiest gal you ever seen, which is Miriam, their bareback rider that hauls in the dough for them when they give their show at a town, and he gets her pretty dizzy, and he gets her to tell him where I am. Then he goes and just ties up the two mugs that are guardin’ me ... and here I am. But here he ain’t, Pop, and here he’s goin’ to never be. There’s something kind of clean about him, and he wouldn’t stand the dirt around here.”

With irritating assurance, Pop said: “Conscience, it comes out with the stars. I’ll get some of this food back into the stove.”

He set about it as Quinn said: “Leave me another slab of them biscuits, and I’ll mop up some syrup with ’em. Gimme some more coffee, too. You think Reata is goin’ to come back here, do you, and keep on with you till he’s got Dave Bates and Salvio both loose?”

“He’ll try,” said Pop Dickerman.

A shrill sound of barking came stabbing through the night, small and thin.

“There,” said Dickerman, his little eyes glistening. “There he is now, with his dog, Rags, tellin’ him not to come back inside here, and Reata comin’ along just the same. You’d think that a smart feller like him would have sense enough to listen to a dog, wouldn’t you?”

A moment later the back door opened, and Reata stood on the threshold. The little dog, Rags, crouched, whimpering at his heels.