Читать книгу Wild Freedom - Max Brand - Страница 4

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There followed a drowsy time for Tommy. Now and again he was roused with a sudden shuddering to a memory of the labor up the mountainside. But those daylight touches of realization were only momentary. On the whole, he was lost in warm content by the fire. He roused himself for five minutes to drink coffee and eat bacon and flapjacks. But after that he sank back into a semi-trance. Afterward, he could remember seeing and wondering at the livid face of his father and the great, feverish, bright eyes of John Parks leaning over him watching as he fell asleep.

And in that sleep he was followed by dreams of disaster. He found himself again struggling up an endless slope of ice-glazed snow, with the wind shrieking into his face and tugging at his body, while his father strode before him with long steps, tossing up his arms to the driving clouds and laughing like a maniac.

Once he came dimly half awake and actually heard the voice of John Parks, laughing and crying out near him. It seemed odd to him that his father should be talking like this in the middle of the night, but sleep had half numbed his brain, and he was unconscious again in a moment.

He only wakened with the sun full in his face and shoved himself up on his arms and blinked about him. The nightmare gradually lifted from his brain. He was able to see that the little clearing in which the fire had been made the night before, the embers of which were still sending up a tiny drift of smoke, was fringed with young aspens, now newly leafed with sprays of young yellow- green - almost more yellow than green as the sun shone through the fresh- sprouting foliage. And yonder was the burro, absurdly nibbling at the sprouts on a bush and paying no heed to the rich grass.

"Oh, Dad!" called Tommy, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

There was no answer. The silence swept suddenly around him and became an awful thing. And, at a little distance, a confused roaring and dashing, which had troubled his sleep, he now made out to be the voice of a river. They must be close, then, to the bank of the river; it was that famous Turnbull River of which they had heard so much. As for the absence of his father, that could be explained by the fact that he had gone fishing to take their breakfast out of the water.

So Tommy stood up and stretched himself carefully. To his surprise, there was nothing wrong with him, more than a drowsiness and lethargy of the muscles, if it might be called that. And, before he had taken half a dozen steps about the clearing, that lethargy was departing. The very first glance told him that his surmise had been correct. A trail well defined in the rain-softened ground led away from the camp in the direction of the river.

He followed the trail easily, but as he went his wonder grew, for the signs wandered back and forth drunkenly. And sometimes the steps were short, sometimes they were long. Here he had stumbled and lurched sidewise against a young sapling, as the damaged branches showed, and a deep footprint at its base as well. Tommy paused and drew a breath of dismay. Something was decidedly wrong. His father was no expert mountaineer, he knew. When the doctor's orders, three years before, had sent poor John Parks in search of health in the open country, he had been a great deal of a tenderfoot. And at his age it was impossible to learn all that he needed to know about mountain life and mountain ways. But to have made this trail required that a man should have walked in the darkness, stumbling here and there. And if John Parks had walked away from the camp in the darkness -

Here the mind of Tommy trembled and drew back from the conclusion which had jumped upon him full grown. Before his mother's death, he had heard her once in a raving delirium. And now, as he thought back to the husky, harsh voice of his father which he had heard laughing and talking near by him in the darkness, he felt certain that John Parks, also, must have been delirious. Yes, that was it, for otherwise men did not waken and laugh so wildly in the heart of the night. Why had he not wakened the instant he heard that laughter and taken care of the older man?

Tommy hurried on along the trail. It was more and more sadly evident that something was wrong as the trail reeled onward. It reached a grove of close- standing, lodgepole pines. Apparently, John Parks had been unable to find his way among them. Here and again he had attempted to go through and had recoiled after running into a trunk. Finally, he had given up the effort, and the trail wound fifty feet to the left.

By this time Tommy was half blind with fear and bewilderment, and he ran on, panting, his feet slipping on the wet grass. Momently, the noise of the Turnbull grew louder, and at length he came through a scattered screen of trees with the dash of a waterfall making the ground beneath his feet tremble. A hundred feet above him, the smooth, green water slid over the edge of a cliff, surrounded itself with a lace of white spray as it fell, and then the solid column was powdered on the rocks, spread out again in a black, swirling pool, and finally emptied into a long, flumelike channel down which the current raced like galloping horses.

And where the bank rose sheer, twenty feet above the edge of that whirling pool, the tracks of his father ceased. Tommy, strangled with fear, looked up to the pale blue sky above him. By an effort into which all his will was thrown he managed to look down again - then fell on his knees moaning.

To his eyes the whole matter was as clear as though he had read it in the pages of a book. Here the ground on the lip of the bank had been gouged away by the feet of John Parks as the poor man slipped and fell. Whirling in that fall, he had reached out with both hands. There one had slipped on the wet grass. There the other of them had caught at a small shrub and torn it out by the roots. And finally, there was the place where both hands had taken their last hold on the edge of the bank - a hold beneath which the dirt had melted away and had let him drop straight to the water below.

Tommy cleared his dizzy eyes and crept closer. There was no hope that John Parks could have lived for a moment in that run of waters. A twig was dislodged by Tommy's hand and fell into the stream. It was whirled wildly around, danced away from the teeth of jag-toothed rocks, and then darted off down the foaming length of the flume. A tree trunk might be ground to powder in that shoot of water.

Tommy drew back from the water. The moment the hank cut away the view of the stream, he turned and fled as though the waterfall were a living enemy ready to plunge in pursuit with mighty leaps.

Breathless, he reached the clearing. He ran to the burro, he threw his arms around the neck of that scrawny little beast.

"Oh, Billy," he cried, "Dad is gone - Dad is gone! Dad can never come back to me!"

And "Billy" canted one ear back and one ear forward, as was his way in all emergencies calling for thought, and, swinging his head around, he looked mildly upon his young master. The next instant he was calmly reaching for more buds on the shrub off which he had been feeding.

Tommy stepped back and watched the burro calmly making a meal, stamping now and then to show his content, or flicking his long ears back in gloomy anger when he caught sight of the packsaddle near by. And it seemed to Tommy Parks that the patient munching of the burro was a symbol of the bland indifference of all the world. His father was dead, but here was the wind bustling merrily among the twinkling leaves of the aspens, and yonder were the white heights over which they had just come, and in the distance was the voice of the Turnbull, an ominous, small thunder. His father was dead, but all went on as it had gone on before. The very fire which he had lighted still sent up a straggling wisp of smoke. And at sight of this, Tommy, who had remained dry- eyed, suddenly burst into tears and wept in an agony of grief and loneliness and fear.

The burro wandered over and curiously nudged his shoulder with his nose.