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

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When Bobbie saw that the old way was ended and that he was come to the crossroads, he was silent for a moment. Then he murmured: “I didn’t suppose—I thought, you know, that father had left me enough. I thought you said so, Uncle Jimmy?”

“Did I?” said Uncle Jimmy, growing rather red. “Fact is, I was always a fool about talk. But you see—I didn’t want to have it on your mind. I just wanted you to finish up your college course and—I dipped into my pocket pretty deep to manage the thing.”

“That was like you!” cried Robert. “But I want to know what you’ve spent, and you shall have every penny back that you—”

“Hey, hold on, will you?” said Mr. Dinsmore, growing redder and redder. “It’s all right, I say. Don’t get excited. But the money used up. Finally—well, some day I’ll strike it rich and pay you back everything that—”

“Pay me back what, Uncle Jimmy?”

“Pay you back? What am I sayin’? Bobbie, you ain’t accusing me of stealing from you what—”

“Stealing?” Robert exclaimed, his eyes filling with tears—as they often did when he was moved. “Good God, sir, there’s nothing under heaven that I trust so much as I trust your honesty and goodness, Uncle Jimmy!”

He clasped the brown hand of the prospector, and Uncle Jimmy muttered: “Didn’t mean to have it turn out like this—but there was the money, and it went—not enough left for me, hardly—I mean, not enough left for me to do what I wanted for you! Always considering you, kid, from the first!”

“Yes, yes!” said Robert. “And to think that you’ve been depriving yourself while I idled through college—”

He stopped and mopped his forehead.

“But I’ll go to work,” went on Robert, “and I’ll be able to pay you back before long and—”

“Hold on! Don’t run away with yourself. Let the horses do that,” replied Uncle Jimmy. “Maybe there’s enough left—I mean, maybe I could rake enough together to give you a flying start on that law course and you could raise something from some of your rich friends back East.”

“Maybe it’s fate,” suggested Robert in an awed voice. “Maybe it’s fate that has stopped my work in school because perhaps, after all, I could learn to fit into the big things out here in some small way. I don’t know what would be the best way to begin. But I think that I should begin by going to the spot where my father lies buried, Uncle Jimmy. A sort of pilgrimage, you understand?”

Uncle Jimmy pointed a brown forefinger at the boy.

“You stick to books!” said he. “Don’t you go wasting your training—”

“You don’t think that I could do anything real,” acquiesced Robert sadly.

“Oh, hang something real!” said Uncle Jimmy. “Is it real to toil in the sun, and get sand down your throat and in your eyes and have sore feet and a sunburned neck, with a danged mustang stumbling under you?”

“You want to make it seem nothing,” said Robert, with his wistful smile. “But I’ve heard the truth from you. I know the wonderful, free, big life that’s to be found in the mountains and the desert. The sort of a life that you and Wild Bill—”

“Oh, damn Wild Bill!” said the prospector.

Robert was shocked. Not by the oath but by the name to which it was coupled.

“I suppose,” said he sternly, “that no one during Wild Bill’s life dared to damn him!”

“Oh, well,” said Uncle Jimmy, “let’s go down and cook a snack for supper. Can you eat pone, kid? Or are you plumb above it?”

They went down to the shack, where Robert made the fire in the crazy cast-iron stove while Uncle Jimmy Dinsmore mixed corn pone and sliced ham. As the ham sizzled on the stove, Robert stood outside the door in the cool of the evening and whistled in a high, weird key, and all the animals of the place came hurrying as to a familiar call.

There was a shambling mule, a lump-headed mustang, a jennet, and a couple of goats which were kept for milk today and meat tomorrow. But tomorrow never seemed to come for them. They gathered about the doorway and from Robert eagerly received various tidbits.

“Now, kid,” said Uncle Jimmy after supper, while Robert washed up, “lemme hear what you gonna do with yourself out yonder on that desert.”

“I’m going first on a sort of pilgrimage,” said Robert, “to the very spot where my dear father—”

“And after you get there?” said Dinsmore.

“I don’t know, exactly. I’ll find something to do. You know, one must have faith!”

“Faith? In the desert?”

“Oh, yes,” said Robert with the quiet of conviction, “because without faith there would be no friendship, or love, or kindness, no trust in the world; there would be no religion, there would be no God in heaven!”

Robert looked up, and a greasy frying pan dripped gray water on his trousers, unregarded.

“Now, look here, and I’m gonna tell you something,” said Dinsmore, “and the fact about the desert is that you ain’t seen nothin’ but the edges and the trimmin’s of it. You’ve gone onto it because it was a lark, and the desert don’t pay no attention to kids out havin’ their game and their fun. But when you go onto the desert because you have to, then it’s likely to be different! It’s a treacherous, sneakin’, good-for-nothing thing, a desert is. Just when you think you got it patted and petted and smoothed down and sleepy, it just nacherally opens up and swallers you alive. And you never can tell what’s stealing up behind to hit you when you ain’t looking. No, kid, the desert is like a whole cage full of starved painters. That’s how much I would trust it, and nobody with real good sense would ever want to have nothing to do with it at all!”

To doubt his uncle’s words never occurred to Robert. But he had already discovered that there were certain contradictory moods and humors in the older man that must be outwardly respected, though they need not be taken to heart too seriously. After a time he said, “But tell me, Uncle Jimmy, why you still get onto the desert whenever you can?”

Mr. Dinsmore gathered his brows.

“The trouble with you youngsters—you all got to argue things. Got to find out for yourselves. Well—”

He left something dire unsaid and fell into a brooding gloom, from which he roused himself only when Robert suggested: “Uncle Jimmy, what about a yarn?”

“I ain’t feeling like yarning,” declared Dinsmore. “I ain’t feeling like making up—remembering, I mean—”

“I’d like to know, though,” said young Robert, “about that time you started on the trail of Spotted Antelope—”

“The Comanche? Yep, I remember that and—”

“No, no! The Sioux.”

“Well, didn’t I say he was a Sioux?” asked Dinsmore, frowning again.

Robert was silent. He could feel the spell beginning to take effect; the atmosphere altered; Uncle Jimmy was donning a robe of dignity and impressiveness, and many an evening in the past had this ceremony been repeated.

“I was sitting with ‘Kearsarge’ Pete in his lodge, and his squaw had laid some boiled buffalo tongues in front of us. I remember that Kearsarge was feeling kind of mean at her because the day before a cracking thunderstorm blew up and she sacrificed her best dress and a couple of strings of beads to the Sky People to keep a thunderbolt from hitting the tepee. But her and Pete had a kid, and she was kind of soft about it. Pete reached over and picked up a fine pipe and began stuffing it. ‘There’s a yarn that goes with this pipe,’ says he, ‘and it takes a back trail to the Sioux; and, by the same token, I’m gonna take that same back trail with my feet and not with my tongue only, one of these days—’ ”

Softly, moving with utmost precaution lest he make a sound, Robert slipped to his bunk and clasped his hands behind his head. He closed his eyes to the drab little shack and the star or two glinting through the wide edges of the hole up which the chimney passed. The melancholy night wind of the mountains was beginning to sing and brought down from time to time the voice of a wild hunter, the sob of a puma, or the hunger call of a coyote coming out of Bender Pass.

As it was now, so had it been before on how many and many a night!

If he waked, the steady, strong voice of the narrator would continue almost endlessly. And if he slept, what he had heard would pass into reality in his dreams.

Robert’s breathing grew more and more regular. Indian ponies, a winter storm, a perilous crossing over an iced river, an avalanche bursting down a mountain slope, the yellow eye of a camp fire looking up from the heart of a black valley—such things passed into his mind with the words of the narrator.

Roused at last from his slumber, he raised his head to see the rose of dawn streaming through the open door. The beauty of the morning and the snoring of Uncle Jimmy filled the cabin with an equal power. He glanced at the open mouth and grizzly, unshaven face of the prospector, and then hurried into the open air.

The grand procession of the mountains assured Bobbie that all his dreams were true, and he hurried down the slope to take his morning plunge. The pool was sheeted with thin ice along its margin; but if one wants a cold bath, the colder the better; and is he not a fool who quarrels with the provisions of our mother, Nature?

So thought Robert, and with his heel he broke the ice.