Читать книгу The Smiling Desperado - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 4

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North and north and north rode Cadigan, until he came, on a day, into the view of a cow-puncher struggling on the back of a piebald mustang which was leaping off the earth, tying itself into knots in mid-air, and landing again with stiff legs and sickening jolts. At the third jolt, the cow-puncher dived into the corral dust, whereupon the mustang turned and tried to eat his foeman. Cadigan drew rein by the fence, and watched a second hero try and fail. Then, as the others stood back, cursing, none anxious to begin, Cadigan said to the man who appeared to be in control:

“You ain’t got a job floatin’ around loose, have you?”

At this the rancher turned sharply upon him and noted the sleek skin, the mild black eyes.

“I ain’t got a job for you, son,” he said harshly. “We ain’t started workin’ boys up here. This here is a man’s range.”

He turned away, but added as a cruel afterthought: “Unless you can ride that paint hoss!”

When he looked again, Cadigan had dismounted, thrown his reins, and climbed the fence.

In the first ten minutes Cadigan was thrown three times. Once he was hurled clear over the fence. Twice he escaped the wicked feet or teeth of the horse by rolling under the lower bar. The fourth time he tried, and he clung to the saddle like a string to a parcel. The piebald was ridden at last!

So they gave Cadigan a job. Still, they gave it reluctantly. As Tom Kirby, the rancher said: That was not a country intended for youths or those of tender hands or consciences. There was a sheep-cattle war in the offing, for one thing. And when Cadigan was asked if he wanted to ride against them, he replied simply that he had nothing against the sheepmen in that part of the land.

“He ain’t a fightin’ man,” said Kirby to his boys. “He talked like he was pretty peaceful. Still, we seen him show game in the saddle, and I guess that we can use him for a while. Just handle him easy, boys. He can do the chores while you cut out the big work.”

So Cadigan was used for chores on the Kirby ranch. He was given wood chopping, milking, hay pitching, fodder cutting—a brutal labor with a hay saw—and every other odd job around the ranch which required good humor and patience rather than brains or courage.

And all went well on the Kirby ranch so far as Cadigan was concerned. For it was a big country of huge mountains, and mighty pine forests. The cattle grew lofty in stature and thick of bone. And the horses which were ridden at the end of the ropes were twelve hundred pounders, capable of working in a plough team; and the rope itself was a sixty-foot burden. How different from the light, supple thirty-five-foot rope with which your Southwesterner works his cows! And the men on the Kirby ranch were as big as their country. That is to say, they were all proven many times over. Each knew the formidable quality of the other. The peace was that of a drawn battle.

As for Cadigan, they paid no attention to him. Or, if they did, it was only a word or a grunt. He did not mind it when they talked down to him. Therefore there was no friction. No one could have dreamed that trouble would come until Bill Lancaster came into camp and forced the issue.

He went to Kirby and asked for work. Kirby was very polite, because politeness was well known to be a necessity when one addressed Bill Lancaster.

“Certainly,” said Kirby. “I’ll be mighty glad to have you around. They’s a lot of wolves up around my way that been needin’ killin’ for a long time.”

This hint was received by Lancaster with a broad grin, and he rode out to the ranch at the side of Mr. Thomas Kirby, feeling that the world had at least some traces of good sense—in that it knew that Bill Lancaster must always be well received, and at supper that night, Danny Cadigan saw the famous man for the first time. Afterward he talked to Jud McKay.

Jud was the oldest and the most good-natured of the cow-punchers who worked upon the old Kirby place. The others referred to Dan as the “boy.” But old Jud McKay called him “son.” Perhaps he despised Danny more than the others did. But there was this point of advantage. Danny had not heard his stories before, and all his tales were ancient history to the rest of the working force. Indeed, in the whole section there was hardly a man who did not know the stories of Jud McKay as well as they knew the face of that worthy waddie. It had been five years, well-nigh, since he had spun a yarn to any audience without seeing at least one of them begin to yawn. But in Dan Cadigan he found a perfect listener. For hours on end Cadigan was willing to sit passively and drink in the words of the old cow hand, his dreaming, dull-black eyes fixed on the distance, while Jud McKay fought Indians and dug gold enough to have furnished forth another California.

When they left the supper table, Cadigan was full of wonder and full of doubts. For, during the meal, he had noticed that when Bill Lancaster spoke all the others became silent and even Tom Kirby himself lent an attentive ear. So he cornered Jud McKay at the corral where Jud had gone to look over a Roman-nosed filly which had recently been added to his string. It was dusk of a June day; the stars were coming out singly through the haze of the after-glow, and in the south and east the Chico Range was turning black and drawing huge and near. They leaned on the fence smoking their after-supper cigarettes, enjoying the coolness, for their faces still burned from the fiery heat of the day and ovenlike closeness of the dining room, filled with the odor of fried onions and scorched meat.

“Look here, son,” said McKay, “you know something about hosses. What do you say about this mare of mine?”

Cadigan regarded the old puncher with surprise. It was the first time since he came to the ranch that his opinion had been asked about anything.

“She’s a mite heavy behind, and light in front,” he said. “She ain’t apt to last long working a herd, but she might do for ridin’ range. She’ll never do for cuttin’ out. It’d break her down.”

“Right,” said McKay. “You got sense—about hosses, Danny.”

“This here Lancaster—” began Dan Cadigan.

“Oh, him?” said Jud McKay. “What about him?”

“He seems to be quite a man.”

Jud McKay shifted his cigarette dexterously from one corner of his mouth to the other, on the tip of his tongue.

“They’s enough in him to cut out two men, son,” said he, “with all the trimmin’s!”

Cadigan waited.

“What’s he done?” he said at last.

“Growed-up men,” said McKay, “don’t ask so doggone many questions. Gimme a chance to think.”

He went on, pacified by the apologetic silence of Cadigan: “Lancaster was a tenderfoot. He come out to Montana and put some money into cattle. He was trimmed pretty bad, and when he found out what had happened to his coin, it turned him sort of sour. He didn’t run amuck. He just started in to get the gents that had done him. They was five of ’em. He didn’t push things along. He just waited until he got the right chance so’s he could put the blame on them. Well, two years ago he killed the last of the five. One of ’em skinned out of the country. One of ’em is a cripple for life. Three of ’em is dead. That’s the way that Bill Lancaster worked ’em. And he got the taste for that sort of fun. He begun to figure that his time was pretty near wasted if he didn’t have a fight on his hands about every month or so. Some day he’ll be bumped off, but most likely it’ll be with a shot from behind. Because Bill, he don’t booze none, and he keeps in training. He fights himself into shape, you might say, all the time!”

To this thrilling account, Cadigan listened with the proper quiet.

“The trouble with Lancaster,” said McKay, “is that he likes any sort of fight, big or small. He’d corner a rat and make it bite his foot for the sake of setting that boot on it and hearin’ it squeal. He likes to see other gents suffer. That’s the way with Lancaster!”

He added: “But you just pipe down mighty small and you’ll get in no trouble. Just keep away from Lancaster and when he starts badgerin’ you, don’t talk back. But if he thinks you’re scared of him—he’ll never let up on you till—” He cleared his throat and changed the subject abruptly.

“A mean hoss with no sense, and too light in front—it’s like investin’ a lot of work in bum land that won’t give you no crop for all your trouble.”

But Cadigan did not answer. He presently drifted away from the corral and headed toward the bunk house. It consisted of one room with a big window at either end and a large stove in the center—a stove which was a vital necessity in the heart of the stern winter and which served as a target for cigarette butts. The bunks were built against the wall in a double tier, and they were littered with blankets of all colors, faded with dirt and age, gleaming and new, whole and tattered. In the interstices between the bunks, hanging from clusters of nails, were thick bundles of clothing, battered suit cases, wrinkled tarpaulins, and much footgear in various stages of disrepair.

Usually the cow-puncher does not accumulate much old stuff. What is worn out is thrown away. But the men at the Kirby ranch remained long enough to have about them the apparel of three or four years, at the least. Hence the wreckage which made the bunk house look very much like a junk shop.

Cadigan removed his boots and lay down after lighting the lantern at the head of his bunk. He pulled a dog-eared magazine from his blankets and folded it open. But this was only a mask behind which his attention wandered dreamily to other things.

Half of his thoughts were in the past, and half were in the present. Out of the past he was remembering two things only. One was when the frightened school children had poured out into the school yard to look up at the racing windmill. And the other was his single fist fight in the whole course of his boyhood. For, on each occasion, there had welled up into his blood and into his brain the same strange, tingling joy. He had felt it again, more mildly, when he conquered the fighting mustang on the Kirby ranch, but otherwise his life seemed a dull desert stretching to a dreary horizon of the commonplace. Sometimes it seemed to Cadigan that he was not constituted for happiness. Other men could be full of gayety. But the only landmarks in his life were the deaths of his father and of his mother. There was no great soul-possessing happiness excepting, only, those trials by fire—the climbing of the windmill, and the fight in the school yard. What had there been in them? It was danger, and danger only, which intoxicated him with pleasure. It was danger which acted upon the dull, sleepy soul of Cadigan like the sun on a closed flower.

Now Lancaster came, and once more the old tingle of delight began to warm his blood like wine.

His awakening eye glanced to the left and caught on two small holes drilled neatly through the boards of the wall beside his bunk. They had been covered with a nailed plank on the outside to shut out rain and wind. He had never noticed them before. But at some time in the past a revolver must have barked twice in the bunk house. There was absolutely no doubt of it in the mind of Cadigan.

In the meantime, the bunk house was filling gradually with tired cow-punchers who had lounged outside under the growing light of the stars but had finally been driven in to their bunks by the weary ache of their limbs.

“Hello!” cried the voice of Bill Lancaster. “Darned if I ain’t forgot my tarpaulin. Ain’t there a chore boy here that’ll trot out and get it for me?”