Читать книгу The Ancient Highway - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 4

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West of Brantford Town the sun sank behind maple hills as they ate.

Clifton was hungry, but he held his appetite in leash as he watched the boy and the dog, yet appeared not to notice them at all. For the boy's hunger was a thing that made him think of starvation, and Bim swallowed chunks of bologna with gulping sounds that emanated from the very depths of his being. Quite frankly Joe confided that he tried to smuggle to Bim a part of the food which was given him each day at old Tooker's.

"When we have milk an' boiled meal Bim goes pretty hungry because I can't sneak that in my pockets," he added.

"Who is Tooker, and what does he do?"

"He's just Tooker, an' I never see him do much of anything. Riley's boy told me once that his dad said Tooker peddled likker to the Indians on the reservation. When I asked Tooker if he did he whaled the life out of me an' told me if I didn't lick Riley's kid the next time I saw him he'd whale me ag'in. I tried it, but I couldn't lick Slippy Riley. He licked me. An' then old Tooker whaled me until Bim run in from the woods an' took a chunk out of his leg. Looky here—"

He bent over and pulled up his ragged waist. His thin white back was streaked with the scars of a lash.

"He did that day before yesterday because Bim and me come on him way down in the swampiest part of Bumble's Holler cooking something in a queer-lookin' kettle over a fire."

"The devil!" said Clifton.

He changed the subject, and after a little the boy leaned back with a deep sigh, his hands on his stomach.

"I'm full," he said. "An' I guess Bim is, too. Want me to wash the dishes?"

They leaned together over the little pool and scrubbed the dishes with white sand, then dried them in the air. The last red glow of sunset was fading away when they climbed the rail fence and struck the soft white dust of the road.

The boy's face was filled with a grave anxiety as they walked down the road side by side.

"Where you goin' tonight?" he asked.

"As far as the little church and the cemetery."

"The old Indian church?"

"Yes."

"I'm goin' that far. Tooker's is the second house beyond."

He waited a moment, and his hand touched Clifton's arm timidly.

"You got anybody there—dead ones, I mean?"

"My mother, Joe."

"You ain't an Indian?"

"A part of me. My mother's grandmother was a Mohawk princess. She is buried there, too."

A silence fell upon them. The boy's bare feet made soft little pattering sounds in the thick dust, and behind them came Bim, so that looking back Clifton saw a trail which was very much like his own of many years ago. Twilight was falling and shadows were growing deeper in the thickets, and pale gloom descended like a veil upon the land about them. In the grass at the roadsides crickets chirped, and ahead and behind them tree-toads called their half-hearted promises of rain.

It was that part of evening which Clifton loved, yet in its stillness and peace was an unspeakable loneliness for him, and this loneliness seemed to fall upon the boy. A small hand gripped his sleeve and Clifton's fingers closed about it. For a little while longer they did not speak. A pair of night-hawks gave their musical calls over their heads, and from a long distance came the soft tolling of a bell. Then a rabbit scurried down the road like a torpedo shooting through the dust, and with a sudden wail Bim took after it.

The boy's fingers tightened. Ahead of them a darker glow grew in the twilight where the patch of maples and evergreens marked the churchyard.

"I'm sorry you're goin' on tomorrow," said Joe, and his voice seemed very faint and tired. "I wish we was goin' with you—Bim and me."

"I wish you were," said Clifton.

They came to the high bank where the church stood and the evergreens grew. And here, at the beginning of the worn foot-path which led up to the picket fence and the old-fashioned gate, Clifton stopped.

"You ain't goin' to stop here—now?" whispered Joe, with eyes that grew big in the dusk. "It's dark!"

"Adventurers aren't afraid of the dark," Clifton laughed softly, "or of graves. I'm going to sleep in the churchyard tonight. They're beautiful, Joe—churchyards, I mean. Everybody's your friend, there."

"Ugh!" shuddered the boy. "Bim—Bim—where you goin'?" The dog had moved away, but came back and snuggled close to his master's legs.

"You'd better run along now," urged Clifton. "I'll stand here until you are well down the road. Maybe—in the morning—I'll happen to see you again. Good night!"

"Good night!"

The boy drew away, and as he went it seemed to Clifton that something dragged itself out of him to accompany this ragged and barefoot youngster of the highway. Half a dozen times before he disappeared in the gloom Joe turned and looked back, and when at last the twilight swallowed him, with Bim trailing at his heels, Clifton went slowly up the little path and passed through the open gate.

He wondered, as he paused inside the gate, what the world would think of him if it could know what he was doing tonight. Would it call him a little mad? Or would it put him down as a sentimental fool in a day and age which had lost its sentiment? For surely it would not understand a man in his normal senses coming to sleep among the dead.

It still lacked a few minutes of darkness and he could make out the little cemetery quite clearly, with its crumbling gray headstones and the old board church. He knew there was no change, for this place never changed. It had not changed in nearly two hundred years. He went to the front of the church and looked up. There, indistinct in the dusk, was the time-worn tablet whose words he had learned by heart in boyhood, telling the occasional passer-by that this was the first church built in Ontario, and that it was erected by His Gracious Majesty King George the Third for his "children," the people of the Iroquois nation. It was Indian then. It was Indian now. In the plot of ground about him slept the dust of hundreds.

He took off his knapsack and hung it on the end of a box-like rack at the corner of the church. In the rack was a cracked bronze bell, and on the bell was the same ancient date as above. He had often played on it with sticks when a boy. Now he tapped it with his knuckles and found its melody still there.

He sat down and waited for the moon.

And now, it seemed to him, his mother came in the softness of the evening and sat beside him near the old bell.

The moon came up. It rose in the clear, where the trees thinned out. In their play his mother and he had had a lot of fun with the moon. It had been very much alive for them, and when dressed up in its various poses and humors they had given it different names. Sometimes it was a very gentlemanly old moon, with a stiff collar and a tilted chin; at others it was a Man out for Fun, with a cock-sure look in his eye. But best of all they had loved their Man in the Moon when he had the mumps. And it was the Mumpy Moon that came up tonight, with a head askew and one cheek swollen, as if he had been trampled under a cart and horse. But always, when the Man in the Moon had the mumps, he also had a jolly smile in his broad, fat face and a merry twinkle in his eyes.

"And when you are sick or things are going wrong you must always remember the Man in the Moon when he has the mumps," the mother had impressed upon Clifton. "It is then, when he is feeling very badly, that he laughs at us and winks. That is what the brave old moon does, and all brave men do the same."

Clifton remembered. He remembered so vividly that a strange thrill ran through him as he stood up to watch the transformation which the moon was making in the darkness and shadows about him. Objects began to take form and the trees grew out of night. Light played on the old bell and crept warmly over the church. It fell on the iron grating and stone tomb of Thayendanegea—of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk, greatest of the Iroquois. He saw the earth slowly taking new form on all sides of him, rising in little mounds that were marked with old and crumbling stones. And there were mounds and little hollows from which even the dust of stone had been eaten away by the centuries. Here were drama, romance, adventure and unspeakable tragedy—here where the last and the greatest of the chivalry of the Six Nations lay buried in a refuge given them by an English king when their blood-soaked empire was lost south of the friendly Canadas.

And they were his mother's people, and his people. He had always been proud of that. And the memory which came back to him so vividly now was of another night when his mother and he had watched the moon light up this acre of silence just as it was doing now. Their dead was what they had called these sleeping ones. His mother had known their tragic history and the stories and legends that reached back a hundred years beyond that; and she had told him they were so many here they slept one above another, and sometimes in twos and threes and with arms and shoulders touching—forgotten and nameless ones, buried even before King George built his church or ever a white man had come this way.

He passed out among them, and over him came a strange sense of restfulness and peace, as if he had reached home after a long and arduous struggle. He did not feel again the thickening in his throat or the tightening at his heart when he stood at last beside the spot where his mother lay. That had passed, and his emotion was one of gladness and a sort of exultation. It had taken him many years to achieve this moment, and he was amazed at the tranquillity which became almost instantly a part of it.

In a little while he spread out his blanket and sat down and then he lighted his pipe and began to smoke. The incongruity of it all did not strike him. He had sat and slept with the dead when they were above the ground and it did not embarrass him to be with them when they were a part of it. The thought that remained with him was that he had been traveling in a circle for twenty-two years and had at last come back to the starting point.

He was rather disturbed by the fact that he soon surrendered to the desire to stretch himself flat on his back with his pneumatic pillow under his head. It was his quixotic notion that the act was a selfish one. But he was tired, and the carpet of cedar needles under his blanket was soft to lie upon. Occasionally he closed his eyes as he looked up at the sky. The stars made him think of the tree-toads and the falseness of their prophecy. And he wondered if Joe had another whipping to his credit, and if old man Tooker was down in Bumble's Hollow cooking something in a queer-looking kettle over a fire.

Tomorrow he might look into it, for he knew that very spot where Tooker would undoubtedly hide.

Then, he planned sleepily, he would go on and collect his million dollars.

He smiled, and his eyes grew heavier. On that adventure the spirit of Molly Brant would go with him. For this she had waited, as he had waited, and they would collect the debt together.

And when it was over—

The wise-eyed old owl in the thick evergreen tops above him knew when he slept. The bird hooted softly and drifted out into the moonlight and away to its open hunting-fields. The night grew cooler and the aroma of the earth lay heavier as the hours passed. Overhead the moon climbed higher and began its descent into the west. The owl returned and croaked from the belfry tower. Darkness followed moonlight as the crickets and katydids hushed their cries, and out of the east crept dawn.

In that dawn Clifton dreamed. He stood with his mother in the cemetery, and he was a boy again. And Molly Brant was as he had so often seen her at his father's side, with her dark eyes afire with love and laughter and her long hair in a girlish braid down her back. They were alone, hand in hand, and suddenly all about them the earth began giving up its dead.

Chieftains rose to salute them and warriors sprang up so swiftly that very soon it was beyond his power to count them. They were in war-paint and feathers and ready for battle, and behind them, gathered in a great circle, were countless women and children. And in his dream Clifton saw that his mother and he were the center of this gathering host, and that his mother stood with her hand raised above her head, as if she were princess of them all.

The chieftains advanced toward them one by one, and he knew them as they came—first Red Jacket the eloquent young Seneca, with his eternal plea for peace with the white men on his lips; then Cornplanter, the terror of the Mohawk settlements, fierce and implacable, and Peter Martin the Oneida, and after them—tall and calm and splendid in his power—Joseph Brant, the Mohawk, chief of all the Iroquois nation. And they bent their heads to his mother!

And then Thayendanegea began to speak.

"Tomorrow you seek vengeance," he said. "It is well. The Iroquois go with you!"

"You will find strife and death and unhappiness," interposed the peaceful Seneca. "The hatchet is rusty. Let it remain so."

"Only cowards like the backsliding Oneidas fear those three things," boomed the Mohawk in a voice that rolled like the deep beating of a drum.

"The Senecas are not cowards—yet I fear."

"I am an Oneida—and I do not fear," said Peter Martin.

In his dream Clifton saw a sudden break in the circle of warriors as an Indian girl ran through and knelt at the feet of his mother. It seemed she had run fast or far, for she could scarcely speak as she raised her bare arms. His mother bent down to her so that she could hear her whispered words, and in those few moments Clifton heard his own name spoken.

Then his mother stood erect, and faced the chiefs.

"Tomorrow we go," she said, and a murmur of approbation came from all except the Seneca, who stooped sadly to gather up a handful of earth and throw it westward over his shoulder.

A part of the earth struck Clifton in the face. It was soft and warm. And in that moment he saw a strange and amazing transformation in the girl kneeling at his mother's feet. She was no longer Indian, but a white girl, and she was looking straight at him with laughter on her lips and in her eyes. He felt himself grow uncomfortable and tried to wipe the wet dirt from his face, but no sooner did he remove it from one spot than it came back on another, and the greater effort he made the more amused she seemed to be.

In sudden rage he turned upon Red Jacket and found the Seneca gone. The Indian host was melting away and the going of the last of it was like the dissolution of shadow before swift dawn. He turned again, and his mother had disappeared. Only the girl and he were left, and it seemed to him this impertinent young person disfigured her pretty nose in making faces at him as she faded away, like the others, into nothingness.

A fresh bit of the warm, soft dirt struck Clifton on the cheek and roused him to a comprehension of other phenomena. He found himself suddenly lying flat on his back with his eyes wide open and he could see tree tops with the filtering gold of sunlight in them. A bird was singing.

Then appeared a grotesque head between him and the light above and Bim's warm and friendly tongue caressed him again.

He sat up.

"The deuce take me if it wasn't a perfectly ripping dream," he said; and then added, "Good morning, Bim!"