Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 61

“I wouldn’t say he exactly threatened me,” Jesse Applegate said.

It was the middle of July, and heat of the summer was on them. Far as the eye could see, the air shimmered over the dry sage-brush. On the hottest days, a haze hung between the house and the western mountains. Medicine Mountain was blue now. The tip of Shasta stood white beyond it.

“What was it he wanted, then?”

The round-headed man with the neatly trimmed grey whiskers stood in the still-unfinished living room. His tan summer suit, the pongee cravat, the hand-lasted fine-leather boots said ‘city.’ The flat wide-brimmed black hat with its silver concho band said ‘vaquero.’ All of him said ‘rich.’

His clipped words were insistent, the voice one of a man who brooked no interference.

“Rent,” Jesse Applegate said.

“Rent!” the man exclaimed. “By whose leave? Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“No need for that,” Applegate said. “In fact, that would be quite a mistake.”

He could see by the arched eyebrows that had flown up and were yet to come down that the man was in some consternation. He set out to soothe him.

“It doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “Jack’s just feeling his oats, I’d guess. This is an old issue between us.” He could see the man was waiting. You couldn’t slide by him without full explanations.

“The trail.” Applegate gestured along the lake’s shore. “Coming through here when we blazed it, we actually followed along an old Modoc path. It took us past half a dozen or more Modoc places between Goose Lake on over past Lower Klamath. Summering places, mostly. All of them abandoned at least half the year, since the Indians move back and forth between summer and winter quarters.

“That’s what got their noses out of joint. They always complained we whites and our wagons drove the game off -- or desecrated their sacred places.”

“So what?” the man asked. “How did they expect you to get through here? Fly like a bird?”

“No, I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.” It was clear Mr. Carr was impatient, so Applegate hurried to finish. “These Indians just walked off the reservation a couple of months ago, and so far no one has forced them back. Now they think the treaty doesn’t count any more and they aren’t bound by it. In this Captain Jack’s mind, that means all this range is still his. He wants rent.”

The man puffed at Applegate and turned away on his heel, tapping his hat against his thigh, impatient at being detained by a ridiculous idea.

“Well,” Carr said. “You should shoot him. Then he wouldn’t think it was his.”

He walked out of the house through the still-empty door-frame and stood in the shade, squinting his eye against the bright sunlight, scanning from west to east and back again.

“Tomorrow I’ll want to ride down on the far side of the lake and see if we can’t figure out the southern boundary. You bring along your surveying stuff. I’ll need a legal description of all the lines, metes and bounds I guess, before I put a word out about this. I want you to survey it, if you can do it.

“And if you’re going to manage this rancho for me,” he continued, “you’re going to have to ride better herd on those Indians. I don’t put up with insolence, and I don’t want my foreman doing it either.”