Читать книгу Westy Martin on the Santa Fe Trail - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 9

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At the start Westy and Rip’s interest was keenly aroused. They were stopping at places often and long enough to keep them from getting bored. Places that were rich in tradition failed to strike them very forcibly, it seemed. Helping out here and there it filled in time and they also posed at intervals to make the scenes abound with the human touch.

To boys craving adventure, it was just a daily routine of shooting scenes along a highway that occasionally ran through towns and hamlets of various sizes and descriptions. Nothing exciting about it, Westy mused. An old trail, it might have been once, but a plain, everyday, modern-looking highway now. Time had indeed spoiled everything for him, that was certain.

They had left the town of Great Bend in the distance after spending the morning there taking pictures of the Court House Square, through which place the Old Trail had run in its palmy days.

“What good does it do, Unk?” asked Rip, whose thoughts were following the same trend as Westy’s, “to take pictures like the one in Great Bend? How can people be interested in what’s there now? They can’t tell from that what the Old Trail really looked like. I know I couldn’t.”

“Do you know why you couldn’t, Rip?”

“No. Why?”

“Because you lack one of the greatest assets or gifts, call it what you like, that life could possibly endow a human being with. That gift is commonly called Imagination.”

“Each little hill and dell hereabouts”—Mr. Wilde swept his arms wide, indicating that he was taking the entire country surrounding them as an example—“has its own tale of adventure and romance to tell, if we have the mental capacity to draw out these tales from the dumb silence of their unspoken words and hidden secrets. A silence that reveals itself. Do you comprehend my meaning?

“Silence speaks only to those who are willing to listen. Imagination, if you want to call it such, but my theory is that any one who is highly spiritually attuned can hear the heart throbs in a pile of rock and detect the anguish in the tinkling murmur of a mountain brook.

“Why do people flock to see these pictures and landmarks that are but poor imitations of this once glorious Trail? Why? Because the sub-titles will inform them that on the site of what is now the Court House Square in the town of Great Bend the Old Trail ran through. And on that very spot occurred the terrible fight of Captains Booth and Hallowell in eighteen hundred and sixty-four. What happens? They absorb the seed and with plenty of fertility Imagination becomes a budding flower. That gift enables them to visualize from that peaceful picture another scene depicting a bloody encounter. Or, again, as the film unwinds a plateau is pictured with a herd of cows grazing and lying on its grassy slopes in the late twilight. That which was once famous as the battleground of a terrible conflict between the Pawnees and Cheyennes is now being used as a corral for cattle.

“Does that knowledge so lucidly pictured before them detract one bit from the glamor and charm that is Adventure and Romance and which even the ravages of Time cannot mellow?

“Not if they have imagination! Try it on your piano some time!”