Читать книгу The Ancient Highway - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 3

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Clifton Brant believed himself to be only one of innumerable flying grains of human dust in a world gone mad. And among these grains he knew himself to be a misfit. For which reason he was walking the wide highway from Brantford Town in Ontario to the ancient city of Quebec on the St. Lawrence, an unimportant matter of seven hundred miles or so, not counting the distance he would travel in crossing and recrossing the road on the way.

In the scale with which he was measuring life at the present moment time had no specific value for him, just as his objective was neither far nor near. People passed him, smothering him in the dust of their thirty and forty and fifty miles an hour, and wondered who he was. There was something picturesque about him, and worth remembering. He was, without shouting or advertising the fact, an adventurer. People sensed that quality about him after they had left him behind in a cloud of dirt. He caught their attention even as they bore down upon him—his lithe, khaki-clad form, the clean, free swing of his shoulders which bore a worn knapsack, his easy stride, as if he had walked from the beginning of the world—and then, as they passed him, the quick, flashing gray of his eyes, the debonair wave of his hand, a smile, a nod—and someone would ask, "Who do you think that man could be?"

"Out of a job and hoofing it to the next town," one would submit.

"An ex-soldier, by his walk," another would suggest.

"Or one of those walking idiots out on a week's vacation"—this from a man who curled up and snapped whenever his wife asked a question about another man.

And behind them, spitting out their dust, Clifton Brant wondered what life could hold for people who went through it always on four wheels questing out its beauties at a-mile-a-minute speed.

The golden sun was hanging low behind the spires and maple-clad hills of Brantford Town when he swung from the main highway into a road that angled southward. It was a modest and inconspicuous little road, slanting downward as it ran, carpeted with soft dust and winding between cool and shadowy thickets of bushes and trees in which the birds were beginning their evening song.

A thickening came into Clifton's throat and his heart beat a little faster as he looked ahead of him, for it was more than twenty years ago that his feet had last traveled this way. He was sixteen then, and barefooted. And time had been kind to the little road, he thought. The velvety dust was the same, and he caught himself looking for the imprints of his naked feet as he waded through it; and the trees were the same, seeming not to have grown in those twenty years, and the thickets of his boyhood sprang up one by one, with the big rocks between—only the rocks seemed smaller now than when he was a boy, and the hollows seemed a bit less steep, and the Big Woods, still uncut, held less of their old mystery and fearsomeness in the shadowing depths of sunset. A smile crept gently over his face, and in that smile were the pathos and joyous grief of reminiscence, of precious memories rising in his path and of faded years stirring with life again.

Verging on forty, he felt his boyhood was only yesterday. He was foolish, he told himself, to allow things to come back to him so vividly. And he had been unwise to return at all to this little road and its hallowed past. He had not thought it would hurt quite so much, or that such a vast and encompassing loneliness would descend upon him.

Almost as if a danger might lie in his path he paused hesitatingly at the top of a little hill which in childhood had been a big hill to him, and made his way through a fringe of thick brush and over a rail fence. The birds twittered about him. A yellow-breasted chat scolded him and a kingbird sent up a warning cry or two. Then he heard the twitter of swallows and caught the shiny flash of their wings over the clearing which lay just beyond the fence. A lump rose in his throat. It was as if the same swallows he had known and envied and loved as a boy were there still, dipping and shooting and sweeping the air as they cast about for their suppers among the insects that rose up from the earth at sunset. And there, just a little way ahead, was what he had once called home.

He was not ashamed of tears, in spite of the fact that he had passed through searing fires and had seen much that is hard for a man to look upon. He could not keep them back from his eyes and he did not try to wipe them away.

The old home was a ruin. Fire had gutted it and its walls of flat stones picked up from slate and sandstone ledges had fallen in. One end wall stood triumphant above the desolation, and this was the end which held the big fireplace chimney. He was born on a cold winter night when a fire had roared in that chimney. And before it he had dreamed his first dreams of conquest and adventure in the wonderful world which reached for such illimitable distances about him.

He went nearer and walked slowly about this ghost of a habitation which had once been home. He was surprised at its smallness. He had always carried with him the impression that this first and only home of his had been little less than a castle, at least three times as large as it now appeared to be. He chuckled, though he did not feel happy. Childhood memories were funny things. They were best left alone if one did not want to feel real grief. And what had been the inside of the house was pathetically small, now that he measured it with the eyes of a man.

The whole was overgrown with creeping vines and bushes. There were blackberry and dewberry vines with green fruit; bitter-sweet had tangled itself among the stones; wild cucumbers festooned one side of the chimney, and long grass had grown up quickly to cover the scars of dissolution. And other life was there. A pair of thrushes hopped about unafraid of him. A golden humming-bird flashed in and dipped at the honey-sweet hearts of red clover blooms. A yellow warbler dared to sing and the swallows were using the old chimney for a home.

Over near the fence he heard a red squirrel chatter, and the sound drew his eyes. There had always been a red squirrel in the old hollow oak near the fence, usually a family of them. The oak had changed amazingly, Clifton thought. He had remembered it as the biggest tree that had ever painted a picture of itself in his brain; now it was a most ordinary oak, not nearly as large as some he had seen up the road. His father had made him a swing in that tree, and his mother had played with him a thousand times in its shade.

His eyes turned from the tree, and suddenly his heart gave a queer jump.

For a moment his sensation was almost one of shock. Half a stone's throw away was a huge boulder from under which had always bubbled the icy water of a spring. Near this spring, looking at him, stood a boy—a boy and a dog. And this boy, as Clifton remembered himself, was the boy who had played about and drunk at that same spring a quarter of a century ago.

He was a pale, slim, rather pathetic-looking object who seemed to have grown mostly to legs. He had on the same old hat, too, a straw hat with a ragged brim and a broken crown; and his knee pants were too short, as Clifton's had always been, and were of the blue overall stuff which he could remember as clearly as he remembered Bim, his dog, who was buried down at the edge of the woods. And it seemed to Clifton the dog, as well as the boy, had come like an apparition out of the past. For it was a "hound-dog," a mongrel, just as loyal old Bim had been; a yellowish dog with loppy ears, big joints and over-grown feet and a clublike tail in which every joint was a knot.

Clifton saw all this as he drew nearer, smiling at them. The boy did not move, but remained staring, holding tightly to a stick, while the dog's big, lank body pressed closer to him, as if to protect him. Then, at close range, Clifton observed other things. The beast's ribs were as prominent as the knots in his tail, and in his eyes and attitude was a hungry look. The boy, too, was thinner than he should have been. His waist was ragged. The bottoms of his pants were in frayed tatters. He had blue eyes, wide-open, straight, strangely old but beautiful blue eyes, in a face which was too white and which was troubled with the same hungry look that was in the dog's.

"Hello, you and your dog," greeted Clifton, with a comradely grin. "Is the water still running?"

"Sure," replied the boy. "It always runs. We keep it dug out—me an' Bim."

"You and—who?"

"Bim. That's my dog, here."

Slowly Clifton took off his pack. "You and—Bim!" he repeated. "And your name doesn't happen to be Cliff, does it?—and your nickname Skinny?"

The boy eyed him wonderingly. "No. My name is Joe. What you carrying in that bag?"

"And where did you find that name—Bim—for your pup?" asked Clifton.

"Down there in a beech tree. It's cut deep in with a knife. An' there's figgers, but they've faded out. That's a funny-lookin' bag you got!"

Clifton turned away a moment. He could see the big beech tree under whose sheltering arms he had dug Bim's grave, and where he had worked the whole of one Sunday afternoon in carving his comrade's epitaph. His mother had helped him, and had comforted him when he cried. He was ten then, so it must have been twenty-eight years ago.

"Dear God, but life is even less than a dream," he whispered to himself.

The boy was inspecting his pack.

"What you got in this bag?" he demanded again. "It looks like a sojer's bag."

"It is," said Clifton.

The boy's blue eyes widened.

"You a sojer?"

"I was."

"An' you—you've killed people?"

"I'm afraid so, Joe."

For several seconds the boy held his breath. Bim was cautiously smelling the stranger, and Clifton laid a hand caressingly on his head. "Hello, Bim, old comrade. Are you glad I've come back?"

The mongrel licked his hand and wagged his knotty tail.

"What do you mean—come back?" asked the boy. "You been here before?"

"Sure," replied Clifton. "I used to live in that pile of stones when I was a boy, Joe. It was a house then. I was born there. And I had a dog named Bim. He died, and I buried him under the old beech tree down there, and carved his name in the trunk. This isn't your spring. It's mine!"

He tried to laugh as he knelt down to drink. But there was a choking in his heart that seemed to have taken away his thirst. When he got up the boy had tossed his old hat on the ground beside the pack. He was tow-headed, with freckles in his pale skin.

"What you got in this here bag?" he asked again.

An inspiration came to Clifton.

"I've got—supper," he said. "Do you suppose your folks will mind if you stay here and eat with me—you and Bim?"

A look of surprise, and then of pleasure, came into the boy's face.

"We'll stay," he said.

"But your folks? I don't want to get you and Bim into trouble. When I was a kid and wasn't home at supper time my father used to go to those big lilac bushes you see out there, and break off a switch—"

"I ain't got any folks," interrupted Joe hastily, as if to settle any possible objection the stranger might have. "We'll like as not get it anyway, if old Tooker is home, won't we, Bim?"—turning to his dog.

Bim wagged his tail affirmatively, but his hungry eyes did not leave the pack which the man was slowly opening.

"No folks?" queried Clifton softly. "Why not?"

"Dead, I guess. Old Tooker says I was wished on 'im. Mis' Tooker ain't so bad, but she's bad enough. They both hate Bim. He never goes home but just hangs around in the edge of the woods waiting for me. I get him what I can to eat an' we hunt the rest. That's a dandy kit, ain't it?"

Clifton was undoing his aluminum cooking outfit—a skillet, coffee pail, plates, cups, knives and forks—and paused for a moment with a brown parcel in his hand. Bim grew suddenly stiff-legged and thrust out his long neck to get a sniff of it.

"Meat!" exclaimed the boy. "Bim knows it. He can smell meat a mile away—meat an' chickens. Watch out or he'll lam it!"

"You mean—"

"Grab it. He's quick on meat an' chickens, Bim is!"

Clifton drew out two big onions, a link of bologna, half a loaf of bread made into buttered sandwiches, four oranges and a glass of marmalade. This stock, with a pound and a half of fresh beef ground into hamburger, he had planned as sufficient for both his supper and breakfast. The bologna was an emergency asset.

He smiled up at Joe, whose eyes had grown larger and rounder with each additional appearance of food. He had a hand gripped firmly in the folds of loose hide on Bim's neck.

"Look out for your bolony!" he gasped. "Bim's awful quick!"

Clifton held out a pack-strap. "Better tie Bim up until we're ready," he advised. "This bologna is especially for Bim, but we'll make him wait and eat with us like a gentleman. Heigh-ho! Now for some wood, Joe. We're going to have a great feast!"

He stood up, and for a moment watched Joe as he dragged the reluctant Bim to a near-by tree. And in this moment he became conscious of an amazing change in himself. The loneliness which had oppressed him all that day of his "home-coming" was gone. Tragedy and pain had crushed him a few minutes ago when he had looked upon the crumbled and overgrown ruin of what had once been his home, the shrine forever hallowed by the presence of mother, father, his dog—and boyhood. In those minutes he had felt and seen only the melancholy ghosts of dissolution and death, of broken dreams, of grief and the emptiness of life.

Now in the strange and swift reaction which swept through him he saw about him a sweet and wondrous beauty. There was no longer gloom or a suffocating heaviness weighing down his heart. The thrushes were singing their praise of the glorious sunset in the western sky. In the oak tree the red squirrel and his mate were scampering in play. Out of the woods came a low, familiar drone of life; a catbird offered up its incomparable melody from a thicket near the rail fence, and he sensed a new joyousness of greeting in the softer, lower twittering of the swallows skimming over his head. His heart beat a little faster. He raised his head and drank more deeply of the cool air of evening, and suddenly it came to him that the great and glorious nature which was his god had made itself a tenant here and lay like a benediction upon all that had ever been.

And then the truth pressed upon him as his eyes went back to the boy and the dog.

They had made this change for him!

He began to whistle as he gathered dry sticks of wood. The boy ran back and helped, his eyes shining and his voice a-tremble with the thrill of his wonderful adventure, while Bim settled back on his haunches after one mournful howl and waited like a stoic.

A thin white spiral of smoke rose in the sunset.

And in their new comradeship the boy became the inquisitor.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Clifton Brant. You may call me Uncle Cliff."

"You got a dog?"

"Yes. You took my old Bim's name so I'm half owner in your Bim."

They peeled and cut up the onions. Water simmered in the coffee pail. The skillet grew hot and thick patties of hamburger sizzled as they were dropped into it.

"You got any folks here?"

"I'm like you, Joe. I haven't any folks anywhere."

"Whadda you do?"

"Oh, I just sort of wander round. I'm what they call a—an adventurer."

"What's that?"

"Can you read, Joe?"

"I'm in the sixth grade. They make old Tooker send me to school."

"Ever read a pirate story?"

"You bet!"

"Well, a pirate is an adventurer."

The boy gave a sudden gasp.

"Gee whiz, are you a pirate?"

"A—sort of one," laughed Clifton.

"An' you kill people?"

"All adventurers don't kill people, Joe. Some of them just pretty near kill people, and then let them go."

The boy did not know the meaning of the steely flash which came for a moment into Clifton's eyes.

"You goin' to stay here?" he whispered worshipfully.

"No. I'm going on tomorrow."

A blue jay screamed in the oak. Bim howled again. For a space the boy no longer smelled the delicious aroma of frying hamburger and onions.

"Why don't you stay?" he asked. "What you goin' on for?"

Clifton laughed. He leaned over and took the boy's thin face between his two hands. Even with the laugh the steely glitter was not yet gone out of his eyes.

"I'm on my way to collect a debt of a million dollars, Joe," he said. "I've been on my way for a long time, and now I'm almost there. That's why I can't stay. Understand?"

The boy nodded. "I guess so," he said. "Can I bring Bim now?"