Читать книгу The Cossack Cowboy - Lester S. Taube - Страница 13

CHAPTER V

Paul leaned back in his train seat and gazed out of the window with amazement at the mile after mile of open country. He actually didn’t know how to identify and catalogue all the incidents that had taken place since the day he and the three solicitors had stepped aboard the ship at Liverpool. Although the voyage was a slight indication of things to come, inasmuch as he had never seen so much water in his life, it was not really the ultimate but merely a prelude to something he still couldn’t quite place his finger on.

New York had seemed like a scene from one of those crazy novels written by that Frenchman, Jules Verne. Jammed with horse trolleys packed with people, with drays loaded with kegs of beer, and wagons filled with bricks, and carts piled high with vegetables, and carriages carrying swarms of people, it was a hustle and bustle that assailed the ears. Buildings going up at every turn, higher and higher, so high that the neck ached to look up. Everyone was shouting in Irish and German and Italian and a strange kind of English, glib types were grabbing you by the arm to sell you a bridge or a piece of land or a pheasant’s egg just off the Yankee Clipper from China.

They had escaped to a medium-priced hotel, but there the activity of buying land, stock and oil rights, cotton and parts of a shipping venture was no less intense than on the streets, only less noisy. Service at the hotel was riotous, with waiters rushing about slamming down plates in front of the customers and whisking them away before they had time to say howdy-do, and everyone eating faster to keep up with the tempo. And the food - it was a nightmare! Steaks two fingers thick that only a man with razor-sharp teeth and an iron jaw could grind small enough to swallow, incompletely boiled potatoes that were served in plates as large as baskets, and enough sharp-tasting cabbage to feed a family, but even more raw than the potatoes.

The one thing which met with Paul’s complete approval was a short stroll in the Bowery, short because within a whisper of time he had become as drunk as a lord and had been led up to a room where two ladies of the evening taught him a few tricks he had never encountered before, including the imbibing of a liquid which had clubbed him into a slumber so deep that he did not waken until noon the following day. His empty pockets did not disturb him too much, since he had left most of his money with Mr. Blatherbell the night before.

It was with relief that they boarded a train the next morning, and this too was an uncommon experience, seeing the breadth and brawn and bread-box of a land so varied and rich that it staggered the imagination. Russia was a land of great distances and open spaces, but it was nothing compared to what he saw as the train passed through the sharp hills and by the coal mines of Pennsylvania, and between the corn fields of Ohio and Illinois and Indiana, fields so vast that they dwarfed the pigsties and beef cattle and dairy herds, and were broken by patches of cotton and tobacco, potatoes and apple orchards. Then entering the booming, crashing, smashing St. Louis, with its madness, its preoccupation with cattle, railroads and immigration to the west, while struggling to cope with the horde of river boats piling supplies haphazardly along its shores. A city bursting at its seams, everybody walking, running, riding, galloping, racing as if there was no time to stop or even pause for breath.

They had lain over at St. Louis for two days to recover from their five-day trip from New York, then were off again. And suddenly, as if Jules Verne had placed another book in his hands, Paul saw a new, strange world, a no-nonsense world of the rolling Missouri and the flat prairie-like Indian Territory of Oklahoma. A raw land where the soil, the sky and the people lived together only by dint of never-ending labor, of relying not upon each other but stepping warily round one another. The soil capable of bearing fruitfully and accepting calmly the floods and torrents, the unseasonal snows and the seasonal winds howling over the face of it, skimming the crust from the surface and flinging it helter-skelter to the four corners of the earth. Everything there seemed to be spaced farther apart, desolate, in conflict with the stubborn nature of the land.

Here also, for the first time, he saw Indians, and they were a far cry from the fierce warriors he had been led to expect. They swarmed about the railroad stops, begging, holding up scraggy furs for sale or barter. A pack of short, unwashed, evil-smelling thieves, dressed in worn cotton trousers and shirts, who would reach through the windows and run off with whatever they could grab if not closely watched. Paul eyed the women, and quickly lost interest.

The train kept moving along, and then Paul was in paradise. It was not a blending of one color with another, or even a change of shading, nor was it a gradual shift from a familiar world to a composite world and then to a new world. It was an explosion! It was abruptly the harshest, most deadly, God-forsaken land Paul had ever seen, and he fell in love with it instantly.

Where are we?” he asked a lean man seated behind him.

“Mistah, yo'all in Texas. Up ahead there a bit, that’s New Mexico Territory.”

“How far ahead is New Mexico Territory?”

“Jus’ a short piece. ‘Bout a hunnert or a hunnert an’ fifty miles.”

“Is it like this?”

“Wal, reckon it’s a mite wilder. Ain’t settled like heah.”

Paul laughed aloud, for he hadn’t seen a habitation of any sort for the past twenty miles, then he turned back to the window and gazed rapturously at the primitive land of sand and rock, dotted with cactus, junipers and tumbleweeds, and patched with grazing cattle as the only vivid spots of color. Then in the distance he saw a stream feeding life into a stand of piñon trees, and the sheen of a small lake, seeming almost alien in this nearly deserted wasteland.

It took six days to travel from St. Louis to their final destination, Rijos, and here they alighted, surprised to find a bustling, thriving town of almost five hundred people. As Paul stepped down to the railroad platform, he took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and gazed with fascinated curiosity at the huge mountains rising loftily in the western sky.

He looked about for the man to whom he had sent a telegram - a Mr. Ned Fenton. The solicitors had found his name mentioned in correspondence between his uncle and an attorney residing in Santa Fe, seventy-five or eighty miles further along the line. The attorney had handled the sale of the ranch to his uncle two years ago and had written that Ned Fenton was a most reliable foreman. There was also a short note from Ned Fenton in the files - a scrawled request for permission to sell some cattle a year ago to defray a large item of expenditure which his uncle seemed to know about. There was also the name of the ranch - The Three Barbs.

He didn’t notice the man until he heard a voice at his side. “Mr. Sanderson?”

He had to conceal his reaction to his first sight of the man. He had probably been six feet tall at one time, but he was bent over from a deformity or accident to almost six inches less. His face was marred by deep scars, and his hands were turned inward, as if the wrists had been broken and not set properly. His age would be in the late forties, decided Paul, although his hair was already completely grey.