Читать книгу Trouble's Messenger - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

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Our significant moments, as a rule, we recognize by looking backward, rather than forward. The dull day turns, in time, into the great one; the lesson that is at first refused is at last accepted; the great enemy becomes the greatest friend; and the old friend is discovered to be half fool and half knave. But Henry Lessing, as the strange lad held out his hand, recognized instantly that a great thing was taking place before his very eyes. He could not help but see that there was far more in that silent gesture than in a thousand words of gratitude from another man. Yet he hesitated to accept the hand that was proffered. However much he respected this boy, and however much his interest was intrigued by him, yet something made him at the last moment draw back, as though there were a distinct realization that, if he dared to become the friend of the tenderfoot, a thousand dangers would instantly be heaped upon his head. Yet that instinct had only a momentary and hardly noticeable control over him. Then he thrust out his hand and grasped that which was offered to him.

The fingers were long, hard, and cool. They pressed those of Lessing with strength, but not with a foolish use of force. Afterward, Lessing felt as though he had taken a hand of iron in his own.

“Now will you tell me what made you come after me?” asked the boy.

“Because you’re young,” insisted Lessing, “and because every older man is every younger man’s father, in a way.”

Young Messenger looked rather quizzically at the other. “Father?” he said, and then he smiled.

The cold insolence of that smile almost made the trapper strike him in the face. “Not meanin’,” said Lessing angrily, “that I’m the father of any Duke of What Not, like you.”

The youth was not angered by this remark. He accepted it with his accustomed calm. “You’ve been kind to me,” he said. “You’ve given me some good advice. I’ve told you that I thank you. Is there anything else that we ought to say?” It was like a machine speaking.

“You’ve added everything up, and there ain’t anything left over, I guess,” suggested Lessing, suddenly smiling.

“Why do you smile?” asked the boy.

“Why, because you act like such a thing as conversation never existed.”

“Ah, you mean that you want to stand here and talk?”

Lessing conquered his first impulse regarding an answer, and merely said: “There’s nothing that I want to do more.”

There was impatience, there was contempt, and there was endurance, in the face of the boy. “Very well,” he said after a moment of struggle, in which it was apparent that he mastered himself even more strongly than the trapper had done. “Very well, you have the right to ask questions, and I certainly shall answer them. Will you begin, sir?”

“Look here,” said the trapper. “Who said that I wanted to ask questions?”

“I imagine that is the ordinary process of conversation.”

“Do you?”

“How else can it progress?”

“Why,” said the trapper, more and more intrigued, and more and more irritated at the same time, “you could say that’s a whale of a big oak tree, and I could tell you about another I’d seen that was bigger, and with more of a head to it, too. Or you could say how fast the water’s runnin’ there, and I could tell you the kind of fish that you could catch out of it. If you’re interested in fishin’.”

“I am not,” said the boy coldly.

“Well, I was aimin’ to point out what could be said, and no questions asked. You might call that the track of a mule deer, there....”

“I wouldn’t,” said the boy.

“You wouldn’t?” asked the trapper with a sudden glow of interest as the talk turned to his peculiar province of lore. “And what would you call it, then?”

“I wouldn’t attempt to name it. It looks like a cow track to me.”

“Cow track?” cried the trapper, almost shouting. “That a cow track? Did you ever see a cow track with such toe prints?”

“I’ve never looked very closely at a cow track, either,” said the boy.

“Cow track, my foot!” said Lessing, and even chuckled, rather complacent in that his knowledge surpassed in at least a few details the accomplishments of the unusual lad. “There never was a cow that could make a track like that. Nor a mule deer, neither, for that matter.”

“I suppose you know what you’re saying,” said the boy.

“D’you think that I don’t?”

“I don’t presume to criticize. I’ve never seen a deer, not even alone its track.”

“Jumping, flopping thunderbird!” exclaimed Henry Lessing. “You’ve never seen a deer?”

“No, sir.”

“How did you ever get this far north, then? Or this far west, without seeing a deer?”

“By keeping my eyes on the road in front of me.”

“By daydreaming you mean to say?”

“You can call it what you please. But I’ve never seen a deer.”

“Never seen one! Never shot one! Never taken off a hide with your knife! Never seen how it was fitted under the knees and the elbows ... never seen a deer?” repeated Lessing. “Why, boy, you ain’t lived, hardly.”

This made Messenger look quizzically up through the green gloom of the branches that hung above them in tower upon tower. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I can fairly say that I never have in the sense which you give to the word.”

“Sit down,” said the trapper. “I gotta talk some more to you.”

Messenger glanced impatiently down the course of the river as if he wished urgently to be gone. But again he controlled himself, and slowly he sat down on the edge of a fallen log. Lessing dropped down nearby and, half turning, faced his companion squarely.

“You never killed a deer!” he began, gasping out the word.

“I’ve never even seen one,” said the boy, nodding almost sternly.

Lessing raised his hand and pointed his forefinger. “How come that you could use a hunting knife so slick, then?”

The boy hesitated.

“How come,” went on Lessing, “that you took a ten-inch knife and handled it like it was understanding what you talked and wanted?”

“I was raised to understand knives and their ways,” said the boy.

“You were?”

“Yes.”

“How do you mean that you were raised to understand knives and their ways?”

“That’s all the explanation that I care to give,” said Messenger calmly.

“I’m kind of interested,” said the trapper at last, although he had been halted by this rebuff. “I know a little about guns and gun work, and knives and knife work myself. Why would you get to learn about knives if you wasn’t going to learn about deer, I’d like to know?”

Messenger considered this for a moment, as though he wondered whether or not he should answer the question. At last he said: “Well, are knives used on deer only?”

“No, on other varmints. But if you’ve never seen deer, you’ve never seen much else that a hunting knife would do you any good on.”

“No,” said the boy, “I never saw wildlife. Just in a zoo, I might say, and a very small zoo, at that.”

“My friend,” said Lessing, “I never heard somebody talk like you before.” This drew no answering comment from the other. “Lemme find out, will you, what you ever used a knife on before today?”

“Certainly,” said Messenger. “I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t tell you that. I used it on a strong sack, glazed with tar, and stuffed hard with sawdust.”

“Why was that, might I ask?”

“The sack, do you see, was no larger than the round of your arm, and the glazed canvas was so hard and tough that only a knife thrown dead to the mark and thrown hard would cut the canvas and stick in that hard-packed sawdust.”

It was time for the trapper to stare again. And he stared in earnest this time. “Which I’d gather that you throwed a knife a good deal at a sack, like that?”

“Yes, a good deal.”

“And what the hell was you practicin’ for, and what made you so hot to stick a knife into a canvas sack, will you tell me, son?”

Messenger allowed a faint smile to touch his stern, rather habitually compressed lips. “Suppose you had to throw that knife across the width of a room,” he said, “and, if you failed to stick it in once in every three times, you got five strokes with a half-inch rattan across the bare of your back at the end of the day ... would that make you interested in getting the knife into the sack?”

Lessing exclaimed. All his free-born American blood boiled suddenly in his veins. “By the jumping, flopping thunderbird,” he cried, breaking out into his favorite oath, “what scoundrel done that to you?”

The eyes of the boy narrowed. He rose from the log. “I’ve talked long enough, I feel,” he said.

Lessing shook his head. “That was where you learned to handle a knife, eh? And the same gent taught you how to use your fists, too?”

“Oh, no,” said Messenger. “There was a separate man to teach me that, of course.”

“You was taught special! You was taught special!” exclaimed the trapper, highly pleased. “I knowed it when I seen you sidestep. You wouldn’t learn how to sidestep like that without special teachin’ ... steppin’ out as though the ground had turned red-hot under you. You had a reason for learnin’ to step fast, I reckon.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “Either step fast, or be knocked down.” And, with rather an absentminded look, he touched his chin with the tip of a finger. Lessing noticed, for the first time, a thin white scar that curved along the sharp angle of the jaw.