Читать книгу Acres of Unrest - Max Brand - Страница 4

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Andy did not know what the touch of Midas might be. But he gathered from the sneering tone of his brother that it was something rather disgraceful, and he returned a hot answer. Humility was not the chief virtue of Ross Hale, and so one word led to another until they parted from each other in passion and never again returned to the former kindly footing.

No doubt, Ross Hale should have been big enough of soul to look upon the waxing prosperity of Andrew without jealousy, but he could not control himself. About this time, too, Andrew took a second wife, and for some reason Ross felt that this was an indubitable token of the other's prosperity, for, after all, wives cost money. Ross Hale felt that his brother was getting money to burn. Moreover, on his way to and from town, the road passed close to the house of Andrew, and Ross could see, with almost every trip, some new token of the comfort of his brother.

There was either a new bit of fencing, or else a new brand of cattle among those in the fields—for Andrew had taken to buying up the run—down and starveling stock of the neighborhood. Perhaps there was a new coat of paint on house or barn—fancy wasting paint on barns!—or the roof of some brand-new shed piercing the horizon. Andrew's ranch was beginning to extend itself, too. Andrew needed more land, and yet more land. He was renting great acres of alfalfa among the irrigated little valleys among the foothills and he was carting the produce of alfalfa to his ranch. Then he bought up, in the dreary winter of the year, half-starved stock from far ranges, where the winter offered wretched pittance to the grazing cows. Yet these cattle, almost too thin to be driven to his ranch, soon grew plump. They were wretched poor strains, most of them, but they sold at so much a pound, once they were fattened, and Andrew always knew just when to take his stock to market to get the top prices.

His fields were expanding, therefore, to meet his requirements. He did not buy rashly, but a little here and a corner there, when one of his neighbors was in a desperate need of hard cash. Clever Andrew was so well established by now that the banks in town were fighting to get his business, and they were more than willing to lend him money, all the money that he could use, at six percent.

"Someday it'll be the ruin of him," said Ross Hale darkly and bitterly, "usin' money like this, because the money sharks'll swaller him. It ain't gonna be for the lack of my advice to keep him from it!"

He dressed himself in his best clothes—that he might pass the inspection of the wife of Andrew—and rode over to offer that advice and, incidentally, to see if it were true that Andy was laying out the foundations for a barn that would hold 300 tons of hay. It was true; he found Andy assisting the workers to sink the foundations. Part of those foundations had been dug already and laid, and the building was to be built upon—concrete piles!

Ross Hale stared with wonder and sharp envy gnawing at his heart. Standing there, he spoke out his heart to his brother and gave his warning against the money sharks, as he had conceived it. Andrew listened with an intent frown, at first, then shaking his head and smiling. At last he laid his hand upon Ross's shoulder.

"You mean me the best in the world, I hope," he said. "I wouldn't think that it was just envy of me that brung you over here, Ross. You mean me good, and that's why you warn me. And lemme tell you that sometimes you're right, and there's more than one man that's working for a bank and not for himself. But not me, Ross. No, not me. I've learned something, and I tell you that, so long as I got my wits about me, I'm gonna keep right on borrowing from the banks. Why? Because I need capital that I ain't got. I want to go out and buy when the season is right. When I hear that there's a bunch of a hundred worn-down, dying cows some place, I want to be able to ride right out and pay down the cash and snatch up that band. I can't do it with my own money. I could only bargain for a corner of that whole herd. Well, the bank lends me that money at six percent interest, but maybe I make hundreds of percent in the meantime. I give you an example... last November I heard of a batch of eighty dogies down in the Sawtrell Valley dying of hunger... no way to save them. Well, I borrowed money from the bank to buy them. Now look at what happened. Ten months later I sold off that batch. Eight of them had died. Too far gone for me to save them from starving to death. But seventy-two of them pulled through. The result was I cleaned up near twenty-five hundred dollars, old son! I paid back the bank a few days ago. Besides, I sank the twenty-five hundred in the vault, but not for long. I'm going to have that coin out again. It'll rot in the bank at a miserable rate of interest. I'll soon want that money out and working in my hands."

This was all a little bit beyond the ken of Ross Hale. He knew, however, that transactions that looked simply gigantic to him were as nothing in the capable hands of his brother, and he felt that time had transformed Andrew into a new and formidable force. To dare to gamble on such a scale—to clear $2,500 in cash in a single, simple transaction, and clearly to regard that transaction as a mere nothing. This was like handing fire to Ross Hale. He stared at Andrew with awe, and the spite of malice could not be kept a little from his eyes.

"Well, Andrew," he said, "I dunno that I understand all of these ways of doing business. But I wish you all kinds of luck."

"Thanks," said Andy, "and lemme give you a mite of advice... which is that, if you want to make money out of Durhams, you had ought to... "

"Curse the Durhams!" said Ross Hale. And well he might curse them, for disease was wasting his herd strangely and swiftly.

"Well," Andy said kindly, "you take care of your own business. How's things with Peter, though?"

A broad grin of triumph twisted the mouth of Ross Hale, and his eyes shone with triumph. He tried to make his voice casual and unimpressive. "I just heard from him, sort of indirect. Someone that knows him sent me along this clipping, but Peter himself, he wouldn't say nothing about it."

He took out a newspaper clipping, already well worn in the creases and the seams, telling the tale of how Huntley School, in its great annual football contest with Winraven School, had triumphed gloriously with two touchdowns to one, through the heroic work of young sixteen-year-old Peter Hale. His burly shoulders had burst through the line from his place at tackle, blocked a punt, and carried the ball to a touchdown. Again he had broken through and tackled a back, so hard that the fumbled ball was picked up by a fellow Huntley man, and so the second touchdown was achieved. There was not so very much about the game, but there was a great deal about Peter Hale. His name was in the big, flaring headline. And there was a whole long paragraph, at the beginning of the story, telling about the manner in which stars are born and made.

This missive was read through twice, from beginning to end, by Andy Hale, and his lips pinched a little as he handed it back.

"Curse it, Ross," he said frankly. "I really dunno whether to be proud of having that boy for a nephew, or to envy you for having such a son. Still, I ain't ashamed of my Charlie, only I don't think that he's any such headliner as all of this."

He turned his head to mark Charlie in person, big and bronzed, healthy and laughing and handsome, as he galloped his big, fast cow pony around the corner of the barn.

"He's sixteen, but he does a man's work," said Andy Hale. "Maybe he don't speak trimmed-up garden English, like your boy most likely does, but he can tell which side his bread is buttered on, and he knows how to ask for more. I ain't ashamed of my Charlie, even if he ain't made any touchdowns."

However, Ross Hale felt, when he rode back home that night, that he had scored a great triumph. True he had sold the corner lot to Andrew. But he had been able to sit in the sun of Peter's glory and lord it over the others. That was enough. In the meantime, if he had to ride back to a cheerless house and to a cold kitchen, he felt that it was worth the agony. And that night he entered his damp bedroom and went to sleep well acclimated to his fate.