Читать книгу The Long, Long Trail - Max Brand - Страница 3

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He was popularly nicknamed Morg, and it may be understood that strangers were apt to spell the name Morgue; yet his full name, as he signed it on the day of his wedding and never again, before or after, was Morgan Algernon Valentine. Someone discovered that hidden and forbidden signature and once addressed the rancher as Algie, and the result was a violent accident.

Yet Morgan Valentine was a peaceful man. He was one of those who accomplish romantic results in an everyday manner. Banish his mountains from his horizon, and he would have been a wretched man, and yet when he thought about the mountains at all, it was only to remember the trails that netted them and the sweat of the hard climbs. His labor in life had been noble and was apt to prove enduring. Thirty years before—he and his brother, John, followed the Crane River, where it splits through the higher mountains and comes out upon the lower, rolling hills on the farther side—it occurred to John Valentine, who was the dreamer of the family, that the slopes might not be too steep to preclude cultivation with the plow, and though the regions of the hill crests were a jagged soil, much broken by rocks, there might be enough grass to graze cattle on. Five minutes later he was painting a picture of the house which might be built there—one for Morgan and one for John, on opposite sides of the Crane River. There they could live in eyeshot, each with a broad domain separated by the arrowy, yellow waters of the Crane. There was ample room for both—a hundred thousand acres of hill and valley land.

And still another five minutes found John Valentine already tired of his dream and ready to spur on. But Morgan would not stir. There he resolved to pitch his tent. And though John tried valiantly to dissuade him, the tent was pitched and the two brothers remained. Forthwith, the empire which John had seen, the younger brother proceeded to build. Who are the greater men—the empire seers or the empire makers? At any rate the thing was done; front to front, a couple of miles apart, and with the noisy river splitting the landscape in the middle, rose the two houses. The house of John Valentine was planned as a nobly proportioned structure, and though it had never progressed beyond the columns of the entrance and the first story of the original, it was nevertheless beautiful even in the piece. On the other hand, practical Morgan Valentine built himself a plain shack and gradually extended it. Now it stumbled up the hills on either side, big enough to shelter a whole clan of Valentines and their supporters.

From which it may be gathered that John Valentine lived his life as Byron wrote his poems—he leaped once, tigerlike, and if he failed in the first attempt, or grew weary of labor, he was off to fresh fields and pastures new. He was the sort of man of whom people can easily expect great things; he could have sat on a throne; he could have painted pictures or written verse or made shoes for his own horses; but in accomplishment he was continually falling short. But Morgan Valentine seemed to have reached above his height; people wondered at what he had done. Yet perhaps his neighbors overlooked this fact: that simplicity may be profound; and though few thoughts came to him, those he had worked deep into the roots of his being.

For instance, there was only one human being whom he had ever truly loved, and that was his brother. And when John died, Morgan transferred a portion of that love to the orphan daughter of the dead man.

But Morgan's own wife and children were merely incidents in his life.

It is necessary to be so explicit about this Morgan Valentine, because, in spite of his simplicity, this narrative could never have been written were it not that he did some astonishing things. Indeed, so unusual were some of the things that he did, that one is tempted to add fact to fact so that there will be no misapprehension—no tendency to call him a dream figure. On this night he was exactly fifty-one years and three months old. He stood five feet nine and three-quarter inches and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds; he had a gray head and a young, stern face; he was slow in speech and agile in movement; and at this particular moment he was smoking a stubby corncob pipe on the front porch of his house, with his heels cocked upon the top of the railing.

His wife was in bed; the servants dared not make a sound in the house even if they were awake; the songs and the laughter of the men in the bunkhouse had long since died out; but Morgan Valentine, who slept never more than five hours a night, was still wakeful at twelve.

But if his body waked, his mind slept indeed, and only his eye roved lazily through the valley. A broad moon, nearing the full, had rolled like a wheel up the side of Grizzly Peak, and it cast enough light for him to make out the details of his possessions. In the heart of each valley there was the black- plowed land in narrow strips—incredibly rich loam; and over the rest of the unfenced ground where the cattle ranged, the moon flashed here and there on a bit of outcropping quartz, or twinkled along a line of new-strung barbed wire. But far and wide, over the neighboring hollows, all to his right was his, over range after range of hills, rocking away toward a dim horizon. And looking straight ahead all was his to the silver streak of the river. Indeed, this was little more than an imaginary boundary, for though the great district beyond belonged to his niece, it would be, by all prospects, many and many a year before Mary Valentine was married, and until such a time, he was the executor, his will was law through all the rich region of that valley.

No wonder that the bowl of the pipe tilted up as he set his teeth, and he was filled with the solid sense of possession.

Into his quiet thought beat the swift tattoo of a horse coming across the valley road; it rounded the hill, and at once the hoofbeats rang loudly through the night with the speed of the fugitive—the speed of the pursuer—the speed of anger, perhaps. Now the horseman lurched into view, a black form, with a black shadow trailing beside it over the white road. Straight up to the front of Morgan Valentine's house; then out of the saddle with a leap; then heavy heels and ringing spurs on the high flight of steps. He caught sight of the figure of Morgan.

"Morgan Valentine?" he called.

Now, midnight hushes voices and makes men walk lightly, but the ring in this question was uncontrolled, as if the fellow had a right to waken the entire house if he felt so inclined.

"Gus Norman?" queried the rancher, rising.

"That's me!"

He came along the porch more slowly now, with the slowness of one who deliberates and prepares words. But when he came close, the calmness of Morgan Valentine snapped his self-control, and he burst out: "Valentine, it's got to stop!"

"What's got to stop?"

"That—that girl!"

He turned his head as he spoke mechanically and looked across the shining strip of the Crane River toward the unfinished house of John Valentine which stood on the crest of a hill, white under the moon, and with a solemn, Doric beauty.

"What girl?" persisted Valentine obtusely.

"What girl? Mary Valentine; your niece! That's what!"

"Stop? How stop?"

"Stop her from going about—man-killing—"

"What!"

"That's what it amounts to. It's murder, Valentine!"

The ugly word came out with an ugly oath behind it, and the change in Valentine was instant.

"Seems to me," he observed in his unhurried manner, "that you're talking kind of foolish, Norman. Suppose I give you a minute to think that over and then say it again!"

The other shifted his position a little, but he rushed on with his speech of accusation.

"I don't need no minute, nor nothing like it. My boy is lying home, bleeding; that's why I'm here talking to you now. What I got to say won't keep. He's shot down, and it's her that has it done!"

For a time the glance of Valentine traveled gravely up and down the form of the other.

At length he said quietly: "I'd sort of hate to have Mother woke up with news like this; mind talking sort of soft?"

"There's no use talking soft," said the other, but nevertheless he lowered his voice. "The whole world is finding out things about Mary Valentine, my friend, and the whole world won't be talking in a soft voice about what it knows."

"Ah?" murmured Valentine. Suddenly his tone changed, as though the idea had just filtered completely home in his brain.

"Now, what the devil d'you mean by that, Norman?"

"I ain't here to argue with you. I'm here to point out facts. My boy is shot down; your son Charlie is the one that done it. How d'you explain it?"

"By the fact that your boy Joe ain't as handy with his gun as my boy Charlie. That's a tolerably clear explanation, I figure."

"Tolerable clear for some, maybe, but it ain't the fact. The hand that held the gun was Charlie's, but the mind that directed it was Mary Valentine's."

"All these here remarks," declared Valentine, "is considerable compromising, which maybe I'll be asking for more talk later on. But now, keep right on. Charlie shot Joe, but you say that Mary had a hand in it? Where's Mary now?"

"She's taking care of Joe; your boys, Charlie and Louis, is both there, too; up at my house."

"She's taking care of Joe?" echoed Valentine.

"Listen, Morg, while I go back a ways in this story. You remember that there was a dance last Saturday night at Dinneyville?"

"I don't."

"Anyway, there was. Well, did Mary say anything to you the day after that dance about her and my boy Joe?"

"She didn't."

"Then, sir, she knows how to keep a lot to herself. But Joe had something to say to me on Sunday. He says: 'Dad, I'm the luckiest gent on the ranges. I'm going to marry Mary Valentine.' I was struck all of a heap by hearing that. But Joe tells me that they can't be no mistake. She'd as good as promised to be his wife. He'd never knowed her much before the night at that dance. But he took a liking to her right off; and it seemed she done the same by him. He smiled at her; she smiled right back. It kind of went to his head. He started talking to her real serious; and she seemed just a wee bit more serious than him. Well, she scarce danced with anybody but him the rest of the night, and when he come home the next morning after the dance, he was like drunk. Couldn't think, couldn't talk of nothing but how beautiful Mary Valentine was and how quick he was going to marry her, couldn't hardly wait to get started with an outfit of his own.

"I spoke to my wife about it. The old woman didn't say nothing. She just grinned at me. Pretty soon she allows that it's all right. But maybe Joe had better make sure of the girl before he got out any wedding license. That sounded like funny talk to me, but I didn't pay no attention.

"Well, along comes the dance at Salt Springs school-house tonight. My boy goes over. He don't see nothing nor speak to nobody until he sees Mary Valentine come in. Then he goes straight for her.

"Then something mighty queer happened. They was another man with her. His name was Henry Sitterley; Hank Sitterley's boy. And when Joe goes up to her and starts talking sort of foolish, the way a boy will when he's in love, she looks right through him. Acts the way she'd hardly ever met him before. And pretty soon she goes dancing off with young Sitterley, and Joe can see her talking to him and knows that she's making a mock out of him—my son!

"Well, it gets into Joe's head and starts him seeing red, and it gets into his heart and starts his heart aching. He don't think it's really no ways possible. He waits till the dance is over. He tries to see her ag'in. But she sees him coming and slips away into the crowd and laughs back at him.

"Then it comes into Joe's head that she's jilting him, and—"

"Wait a minute," broke out Valentine. "Did she promise to marry him that other Saturday night?"

"They's other ways of promising things than with words, friend Valentine. She sure promised Joe with her eyes and her smiles and her sighs. So when she give him the go-by like that tonight, he mighty near went crazy. He goes out into the hall where they was some of the other boys standing smoking, and there he busts out with something about Mary being a flirt.

"Quick as a wink, your boy Charlie takes him up—like a bulldog, he was, Joe says. Besides, Joe was too mad and sad not to fight it out. First thing you know, guns is pulled?"

"Who pulled his gun first?" cut in Valentine, snapping his words.

"Joe."

Valentine sighed.

"Joe pulled his first, and Charlie beat him to the draw. But here's the point. Your girl starts flirting with my boy; she gets him so he can't sleep for a week, thinking about her—and then when she meets him ag'in she don't know him, or lets on that she don't.

"Then my boy says something he shouldn't of said; they's a fight; he gets shot through the arm—thank Heaven it wasn't no worse!—and I tell you that it was Mary that had him shot, and not Charlie Valentine! Because why? Because when Mary and Charlie drive my boy back home in their buckboard and while they're fussing over him, and after Joe has told me what happened, I go to my wife and tell her I think Joe was crazy the first time he seen Mary. He was crazy with love—calf love. But she just grins at me. 'Why,' she says, 'don't you know she's the worst flirt in the country?'

"And that's why I'm here, Valentine. Two inches more to one side and that bullet would of gone through my boy's heart. And the murderer would of been your girl Mary. Valentine, I'm new to the country; I don't know your folks nor your ways, but I know that in the part of the country that I come from a girl like that ain't allowed to run around loose. She's kept up close, and if her dad can't look after the way she handles her eyes and her smiles, then her ma goes along to watch out for her; and if her ma can't do it, then she ain't allowed to go out where they's young men to be made fools of and their hearts broke, if it don't come to no other thing. I'm a tolerable reasonable man, Valentine, and that bullet wound don't amount to nothing.

"Two weeks, and it'll be all healed up; but what if it had struck two inches away? So I come here straight to you and say, 'Something has got to be done!' I leave it to you, what."

During the latter part of this talk Morgan Valentine had abased his head and stared at the floor of the veranda, but now he raised his head, and even through the shadow the other could see the black frown on the forehead of the rich rancher.

"You got a reason for your talk, Norman," he admitted. "Now step inside and I'll tell you just how this matter stands. You ain't the first that's had cause to complain. I wish you could be the last; but come on inside and we'll talk."