Читать книгу The Gentle Desperado - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

Table of Contents

In a little house under the shoulder of a hill lived James Dinsmore, but his favorite dwelling, that in which he had his spiritual being, was a low, round-headed tree on top of the shoulder of the hill. There he could weave a lariat, looking from time to time toward the piled mountains on the one side or the heat mists of the desert on the other; there he could ponder his plans for another prospecting expedition among the higher peaks; and there, also, he could lie on his back and look through the branches at the blue sky or the pure white clouds. There had been a time when he spent more energy and hours on the trail of lost mines than he did dreaming on his hill, but after he turned fifty he began to relax; and thus it was that he was lying on his back looking up through the branches when Robert Fernald came up to him and called out: “Hello, Uncle Jimmy! Here I am!”

Dinsmore started—guiltily, one might have said—and with one hand he combed the disorder, and a few dead leaves, from his magnificent beard; the other hand he extended to greet the boy.

Dinsmore replied to Fernald’s announcement of his arrival: “And so you are, Bobbie! And I’m glad to see you! Sit down—wait a minute—lemme see you walk!”

“No,” sighed Robert, “I still limp. The doctor says that I always will.”

“You were a fool kid to ride that mustang,” declared Dinsmore. “Sit down here, and tell me about yourself.”

Robert sat down obediently upon a rock.

“Lemme see your diploma,” said Uncle James.

“I left it below in the house.”

“Why, kid, you don’t seem very proud of it. Is it everybody around these parts that can sport a college diploma?”

“It doesn’t mean much, really,” said Robert gloomily. “You don’t have to know a lot to skin through a college. But I suppose that law will be different. You have to work in the law school, they say.”

“Let the law go for a minute,” said the older man in some haste. “But here you are, twenty-two—sixteen years of studying and grinding behind you—and tell me what you have been specially doing with yourself?”

“I was too light for football,” said Robert with a greater sigh than before. “I tried pretty hard, but I kept on getting broken up. It seems that I smash rather easily. Too light, and my eyes, you know—”

His voice trailed away. Robert always intended to be stoic, but sometimes he slipped a little.

“Then I went in for boxing,” he continued.

“Did you get licked?” asked Dinsmore, rather anxiously.

“Not in my own class,” said our hero, setting his jaw in a way that made it seem not quite so soft. “But what good is a lightweight? What good, I ask you? What good in the world?”

His head fell. He prodded at a rock with the toe of his shoe and gouged the leather without stirring the stone.

“You can spoil your shoes, kid,” said Dinsmore, “but you can’t move a whole porphyry dyke. Well, you didn’t do much at boxing, then?”

“Nothing at all!” said our hero.

“What else? Rifle team again, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And pistol team, too?”

“Yes.”

“Matter of fact you got a medal or something, I think?”

“You’d laugh to see the shooting we do,” said Robert, smiling without mirth. “Perfect guns, perfect ammunition, but men in these days aren’t like the men you used to ride the plains with, Uncle Jimmy. They’ve fallen off a lot!”

“Lemme see,” said Dinsmore.

And then he tossed a twenty-five-cent piece a few yards away.

Robert produced a heavy automatic with an easy gesture—as though the gun had been dropped into his hand. And he hardly looked at the twenty-five-cent piece as he said: “Oh, of course, with a target as big and as close as that—”

He fired.

“By jumping Jupiter!” cried Dinsmore.

He leaped up and came back with the blasted coin; one-half of it was blow away.

“Even then, you see,” remarked the boy, “I couldn’t make a center hit.”

Mr. Dinsmore did not seek elegant speech. He said: “Well, what the devil do you want? The world with a fence around it?”

Robert looked up at him and smiled.

“You always want to make me feel that I’m some one,” said he. “You always want to make me happy! But I know; I don’t forget. You and ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Wild Bill’—why, you could hit a dime at twenty or thirty paces every time!”

“I—” began Mr. Dinsmore, and smoothed his beard with haste.

“I’ve worked for hours nearly every day,” said Robert. “You know—practicing the draw—and snapshots—and yet I can’t hit a dime with a quick shot at twenty-five paces! Not more than once in four times, or hardly that.”

Dinsmore said nothing. He took out a great black square of chewing tobacco and bit off a liberal chunk on which he began to work so rapidly that it seemed as though he were eating it.

Robert looked across the heat mists of the distant desert.

He was not seeing the desert, however; he was seeing the future.

“You always knew that I wouldn’t make good in this country,” said Robert; “but I always hoped that some day, if I worked very hard and patiently, I’d be able to box, and wrestle, and ride, and shoot, and be able to go hunting, and really living, the way you did in the old days. I’ve studied trailing, for instance, but I haven’t the eyes for it. Even these glasses won’t completely help. I can’t shoot the way real men can. By instinct, you know. And now that I have this bad leg, I can’t run all day like an Indian. In fact, of all the things that I wanted most to do and to be, I can’t say I’ve succeeded in a single one. And I see that I’m a failure!”

“How many men can ride or shoot with you, kid?” asked Dinsmore with great heat.

“The world is filled with dubs and fools,” said Robert bitterly. “What good is it to be a shade better than most? I’m going to give up the West, and I’m going to settle down to three miserable years in the law school—”

“Hold on, lad,” said Uncle Jimmy. “The fact is—I hate to say it—but the real fact is, that the funds have run out. I can’t keep on sending you to school!”

“Not to school?” echoed Robert.

Mr. Dinsmore combed his beard vigorously. “Bobbie, the money’s all gone,” said he, and he looked sadly across the desert and shook his head.