Читать книгу Acres of Unrest - Max Brand - Страница 8

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As they drove alone, with the wheels sagging now and again into a deeper rut and tossing up a whirl of gray dust and a film of white mist, it seemed to the rancher that something else might follow. Something else must follow. There were other explanations owing to him, and Peter would at once attempt to make them. It did not matter that they might be hard to make; Peter would surely make them.

But Peter did not speak. He seemed only to be waiting for his father to open up the conversation again. For his own part, Peter was merely contented to sit there and let the time streak idly on, and the miles jog away toward the home ranch.

The early burst of speed had left the broncos down-headed. Their feet trailed, for the toes of their hind hoofs had been chipped away by constant trailing through the dust of this same road. For how many years had Ross Hale seen them pause to walk up the rises and lurch wearily into a trot again, on the farther slope? How many times had he seen them reel at the same places, and stumble at the same places, and lift their heads with a sudden interest, when they smelled the black mud and freshness of water that always blew to the road from Murphy's windmill and overflowing water tank.

Peter Hale sat like a young Indian, and his father decided, in bitterness, that perhaps he had not lost so very much, after all. For instance, his Peter was not the handsome youth that he had promised to become. Or was this, too, an after-effect of the sickness? It seemed to the broken heart of Ross Hale that the accident that had wrecked the powers of his son had marred his comeliness, also. His square, powerful jaw, for instance, might not look so brutally cruel and stern, if it had been fleshed over a little. And one would not have noticed the forbidding depth to which the eyes were sunk, if it had not been that beneath the brows they were blackened so tremendously by suffering and long years of gloom.

Yes, Peter had suffered. There was no doubt of that. But it did not lighten the load on the soul of Ross Hale to know this. Certainly it would have been a sad thing if his son had turned out too great a fool even to understand how much he had lost, how much had been taken away from him by the fatal accident.

"Tell me how it happened?" asked the father.

"I was up in the mountains with young Bassiter... Dick Bassiter. That was the summer after my freshman year. Bassiter was in my class, and I'd seen a good deal of him at Huntley School. We were what you might call chums."

"I didn't know that."

"No?"

"No, you never wasted much time writing to me, you know, while you was away all of those years at school."

He felt the glance of Peter twitch aside toward his face, but, knowing that the eyes of his son were upon him, he looked steadily down the sunwhitened road before him. And he knew that his jaw was iron, and the rim of his face was iron, also, as Peter looked at it.

"Well," said Peter in his deep, quiet voice, "Dick and I had always been great friends. He had taken me home with him a good many times, you see? I knew his family. They knew me. We were all pretty fond of each other. One day we were all swimming in the river... a little river that runs across the Bassiter estate, you know. There's a huge lake... with the falls tumbling in above the farther end. Dick's little sister, Molly, was there. She said that she wanted to go in swimming above the falls, so we climbed up there with her. But we saw at once that it was no good. The current was smooth on top... smooth but very fast. It whipped things right in and under and it tore for the falls full speed. However, we hardly had time to warn Molly. She had fixed her mind on diving in and the smoothness of the surface deceived her. She plunged in and began swimming, but she'd hardly started when the current took her spinning around and drove her down the stream. Dick leaped in after her with a yell. But the current mastered him, too. I saw that there wasn't much chance, because Dick was a better swimmer than I, by a long shot. However, I couldn't stand there on the bank and do nothing. Anything was better than that. So I dived in."

"And the water, it got its grip on you, too?" asked the father darkly.

"I was helpless in it. I couldn't make any headway. I saw the girl shoot down toward the lip of the falls and then catch at a rock and hold herself there. I saw Dick reach for her and she managed to pull him in to her. They were safe... the two of them. I saw that I couldn't make it out to them. So I swung back for the shore that I had just left and tried to make the shallows. It was no good. I couldn't handle that current for an instant. It was as strong as a team of hard-pulling mules."

He paused, and Ross Hale found his son looking quietly, sternly at a cloud that floated low in the sky, burning with the fire of the sunshine.

"And then?" asked the father.

"Why, the water snatched me down over the edge of the fall, and, when they managed to fish me out, my legs were badly done up, as you see for yourself."

That was all. Ross Hale, setting his teeth, waited for the harrowing details. It is an invalid's privilege to take a bitter glory in the troubles that had stretched him in the sickbed. But to the astonishment of the rancher, his son seemed to have reached the end of his tale with this stroke. He had gone over the edge of the waterfall, and now he cared to talk about it no more.

Ross Hale, breathing a little more deeply, turned his horses in at the gate and handed the reins to his boy. He saw the eyes of Peter flick over the yard and toward the house and he steeled himself to hear the remark that must surely be forthcoming.

But it did not come. One would have said that Peter did not even see that the yard had been denuded of trees. They had all gone the winter before. There had been nothing else to sell, and they had brought in a good, fat price, together with a stiff winter task for him. That money had seen Peter through one crisis of the college career.

However, here was the team going on toward the barn. And there was Peter sitting in the front seat—his son, his treasure, the reward of all of his labors. Ross tipped back his big head, and his laughter was good neither to see nor to hear.

The horses were soon unharnessed, and he noticed that Peter, for his part, managed with a singular adroitness to handle his wrecked body, standing about and working so fast with his hands that he was able to do a full half of the unharnessing and of the tending to the horses afterward.

It gave the father a cruelly sad pleasure to see it. He had not thought to bring back his boy to such labors as these. But now he saw before him the complete wreckage of all his hopes. They came out from the barn. One would have thought that big Peter's eyes had been ruined no less than his legs. One would have thought that he had seen nothing of the poverty that appeared in the mow of that barn, where not two hundredweight of moldy hay littered the floor; that he had been unable to discover the sagging state of the roof, or the loft door hanging from a single broken hinge.

What the barn was, the entire estate had become; it was a burned cinder of a ranch. All that had once been prosperous had gone to the nurturing of Peter. And what return would he make? Well, that was yet to be learned, for there were ways in which money could be made, and it was true that many a man had been able to pile up a fortune despite worse handicaps than the crippled body of Peter. Yet there was little hope in the soul of Peter's father.

When they stood in the welcome brightness of the sun outside the shadowy interior of the barn, a crow lighted on the watering trough and cried at them. And the despair and the rage that had been growing greater and greater in the heart of Ross Hale now burst out in a childish spite. He snatched out his Colt and blazed away. Both shots went wide—one that startled the crow up into the air, and the other as he rose into the wind.

But as Hale lowered his weapon, the strong hand of Peter reached for it and took it. The crow had risen well into the wind and now was flying for the safety beyond the roof of the barn. Peter fired at that black streak.

The crow sagged sidewise and dropped half a dozen yards, shrieking a bitter protest. Then it drove onward once more, but before it reached the barn, the gun spoke again. The black fellow tumbled in silence out of the sky and bumped heavily upon the ground.

Ross Hale observed, and, although he said nothing as he took back his gun, he was keenly conscious of the matter-of-fact expression on the face of Peter.

"That gat of mine bears to the right," said Ross Hale as they went toward the house, across the corral.

"It bears to the right," said Peter. "That's why I winged him on the right side, I suppose."

"You've been trying your hand at shooting, then?" asked the rancher.

"A man has to do something for amusement, you know. And I had no chance at the other sports," said Peter. "So I got me some medals in the rifle and revolver teams." And he smiled, without bitterness, and straight into the eyes of Ross Hale.