Читать книгу Westy Martin in the Land of the Purple Sage - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 4

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Squatter Sam was a dubious character. If he had possessed ordinary intelligence he would have enjoyed the little triumph over Temple Camp involved in his rescue of the scout. For Temple Camp had forbidden him to visit its precincts.

He had been suspected of taking a couple of chickens from the little poultry yard maintained by the camp commissary. Moreover, he had entertained the scouts with reminiscences of his life as a sailor and smuggler, and these narratives had not been edifying.

At the time when these events befell, he was a sort of farmer, and a very poor sort. He lived on the edge of the marsh in a ramshackle house that he had built for himself out of discarded lumber, grocery boxes and barrel staves, and it was an astonishing triumph of architecture.

Within this hovel was a filthy bunk in which he slept. Two of the window panes were broken and had been replaced with greasy brown paper. There was a tiny and primitive chicken coop, but since the chickens had the run of the house they had no cause for complaint.

Squatter Sam also owned one poor cow which supplied the milk for pot cheese which he sold about the sparsely settled neighborhood. He caught and sold fish, and specialized in frogs’ legs. These were his staple commodity for the spot abounded in frogs. Any night you might hear them in that dismal, scummy marsh, chanting their discordant chorus. He was somewhat like a frog himself, with long, ungainly legs and a sort of flat head with a mouth that reached from ear to ear.

Yet this poor, shiftless soul had saved Westy Martin from a horrible death. One of the scouts who had been forbidden to associate with him owed him his life. There was not one hint of the heroic in this wretched, inefficient man; a squatter upon worthless, unclaimed land. But even his shiftlessness and laziness had done Westy a good turn, for the old door which the man had been too indolent to rehang had enabled him to reach the victim sinking in that deadly marsh.

And the boy was grateful. “You bet I’ll never let anybody say anything against you,” he said almost threateningly. “Where would I be if it wasn’t for you? Gee, that’s what I’d like to know! You saved my life, you did, Sam.” He did not say Squatter Sam—just Sam.

“Would you want ter come in and get a drink o’ milk before you go back? And mebbe wash the dirt off your clothes, like?”

“I should worry about my clothes,” laughed Westy.

“If you feel kinder like shaky I’ll go ’long the road with you. I don’t have ter go inter the camp.”

“You don’t need to go back with me,” Westy said, and then with a note of indignation, he added: “Gee, if you did you come right up into camp; I’d like to see anybody stop you.”

They paused just short of the rude abode where the poor man lived, quite alone. Westy could see where the door had blown down; it was the door of a makeshift shed, and its absence exposed the wretched interior where a solitary hen could be seen sitting on a woodpile. An old chair was there with a couple of empty burlap bags in the seat; it had the look of long and constant use.

Suddenly an impulse of prideful independence and retaliatory anger took possession of Westy. “Come on, I’ll go in,” said he. “I’ll drink a glass of milk. Let anybody tell me I can’t be friends with you—oh boy! Why, where would I be if it wasn’t for you? If I can ever do anything for you, I’ll show you! I should bother my head about Temple Camp.”

“You’d best not say anything about it,” said Squatter Sam.

“I’ll tell the world, I will,” said Westy.

“If you get in trouble you can come here.”

“Leave it to me,” said Westy.

He made his way up the road which was littered with fallen trees and broken limbs from the recent unprecedented storms. Here and there were little washouts. The rivulet in the gully along the roadside was swollen to the volume of a sizable brook and trickled over on the road in places making many puddles. The road was only a country byway and nothing had been done to clear away the débris.

The marsh in which Westy had all but lost his life was only another manifestation of the havoc caused by these recent rains which had terminated in a record breaking wind storm. Ordinarily the marsh was not a large or dangerous place. But all the low land had been excessively flooded and there was no way of identifying the well known danger spots. And it was into one of these that Westy had sunk as he waded toward the base of the mountain in search of huckleberries. He was doing penance to Roy Blakeley’s Silver Fox Patrol for losing in a potato race and had been ordered to secure enough huckleberries to make a pie for its eight hilarious members. “Be thankful you don’t have to get enough to feed Pee-wee Harris,” Roy had said.

As Westy approached Temple Camp, the big scout community where he spent his summers, he saw a little group of camp councillors standing outside Administration Shack talking with a stranger whom he at first thought to be a visiting scout official. A Ford car stood in the trail which led up through the woods to the Catskill road and in this car sat two young men with surveyors’ apparatus. The stranger seemed to be attracting considerable attention from the scouts for there were quite a number of them who stood about listening.

The man was of trim physique, about thirty-five years old, and wore a green khaki uniform with a pleated and belted jacket which fitted him to perfection. A hat of the Rough Rider type with a lead pencil stuck under its cord was tilted on his head in a nonchalant manner. He was tanned almost to the hue of a mulatto and he had a small mustache as black as ebony. A pair of good natured brown eyes sparkled through his rimless spectacles and Westy fancied that he was somewhat enjoying the consternation of the scouts who stood about. As for our hero, he quite forgot for the moment his recent mishap, though several scouts commented on his bedraggled appearance.

“Yes sir,” said the stranger, “we’ll have to tear down your whole camp and open up the lake two-thirds the way up that hill; carry it way down to that range of mountains and plug up that pass.”

“What for?” a startled boy asked.

“Oh, just so some cities can get a drink of water,” said the stranger, winking at one of the camp councillors.

“You’re not going to tear up this camp—no siree!” spoke up a small boy with a voice like thunder. “Geeee whiz, you’re not going to do that! That’s no fair, I don’t care who you are.” This was Pee-wee Harris, mascot of the camp.

“Oh, is that so?” laughed the stranger, ruffling the little fellow’s curly hair. “Well, we won’t then; whatever you say, of course.”

“Hey, Mister Captain, don’t pay any attention to him,” said Roy Blakeley, the most uproarious boy at camp. “He doesn’t know anything about a drink of water because he lives on chocolate sodas.”

“Well, I guess we’ll let the camp be,” said the stranger in his pleasant, bantering way. “We’ll go back out west and kick up a rumpus. You’ve got a nice place here.”

“Yes, and you needn’t think you’re going to spoil it, either,” said the irrepressible Pee-wee, “because anyway my father knows a man that’s a lawyer and he works for the government in Washington and he’ll stop you—geee whiz!”

“That settles it,” laughed the stranger. “Well, I’ll say goodbye to you all. I’ve lived the outdoor life enough so that I can appreciate a place like this. Don’t worry, you kids. You can stay here for a week or two yet.” He gave another wink at one of the officials, shook hands all around, jumped into the Ford car and was gone. His unexpected call had been quite a diversion.

Tom Slade, the young camp assistant, who had been an attentive listener, gave Pee-wee a good natured shove, then turned on his heel and hastened off about his duties. Westy followed him.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“That’s the man that’s going to tear down the camp and build a reservoir,” said Tom, hurrying along. “What’s the matter with you—fall in the water? You’d better rustle in and change your duds.”

“I’m going to—I got in the marsh and sank down and nearly got killed and Squatter Sam helped me out. But who was that man?”

“What were you doing with Squatter Sam?” Westy told him the whole story. It was characteristic of Tom that he took adventures rather lightly. “Well, I’m glad Sloppy Sam did something useful at last,” said he. “Didn’t you know enough not to go through the marsh when it was flooded?”

“You needn’t say anything against him,” said Westy, “because he saved my life and—and I won’t let anybody say anything against him.”

“That’s the way to talk,” said Tom, walking so fast that Westy had to run to keep up with him.

“Will you tell me who that man was?” Westy persisted.

“That man,” said Tom, “is Captain Richard Winton, army engineer, who builds dams and all that kind of stuff. He’s with the Reclamation Service of the government. Now is that all you want to know?”

“What was he doing up here?”

“Kidding Pee-wee Harris.”

“No, honest, what was he doing here?”

“He was up here looking around. He’s stopping down in Catskill. He’s inspecting the Hudson River. He’s not satisfied with North America and he’s going to make it all over again. When he gets through, the Mississippi River is going to flow into the North Pole. He’s going to bring Lake Michigan over and put it in Central Park. He talked about Black Lake as if he could put it in his pocket. Don’t ask me what he’s up to. I think he has an idea about using the Rock of Gibraltar to plug up the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Anyway he’s doing something out in Arizona—a dam or something. He’s got troubles of his own, that guy. He doesn’t seem to be worrying. If you’re asking me, I wouldn’t trust him with the equator.”

“Will you tell me what he came up here for? Are they going to really do anything with Temple Camp?”

“I wish they were; I’d like to see the whole place flooded with all you fellows included. Why weren’t you here for dinner today?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I don’t see what he came here for.”

“Who’s looking after the launch this week?” Tom snapped.

“I am—and I hiked down every day so far, too.”

“That’s what I thought. All right then, you’ve got the captain wished onto you and you’ll know more about him than I do by the time you’re through. What he wants to do,” Tom continued rather more seriously, “is to chug up and down the creek and squint around and size up the shores—that’s the big idea. Then he’s going to say whether it ought to be dredged or not and what other things they ought to do to it.

“It seems these birds like to pike around just after floods, hunting for trouble. You’d better go into the office and tell them that you’re the one that’s looking after the launch this week and they’ll probably let you take the captain joy riding. It’s all for Uncle Sam. Only don’t mention that you’ve tied up with Sloppy Sam. You’d better go and change your clothes first. Stick to the captain and some day you may help to dump the Rocky Mountains into the Pacific Ocean.”

He did not pause at parting with Westy. Off he strode in his hurried, preoccupied way, picking up a ball which a little tenderfoot had failed to catch and throwing it to the boy’s companion. He then disappeared around the cooking shack.

Westy hardly knew what to make of what Tom had told him in his customary boisterous and half-joking way. Was he indeed to be the one to pilot this stranger in an inspection of neighboring waters?

He hurried to his own patrol cabin, washed and changed his clothes, then went to Administration Shack which housed the office of Temple Camp.