Читать книгу Trails to Two Moons - Robert Welles Ritchie - Страница 7

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CHAPTER III

Hilma Ring was not emotional. The petty reflexes of thought and action that come to women of finer fiber, of more pampered lives—to your idle beauty of the flowered boudoir—were unknown to her. Impulse and emotion were with her primitive, direct, unaffected by any reaction of sensitive nerves. The springs of her life were elemental as that secret force which each year covers the face of the Big Country with lusty verdure. When, after that last shot and that derisive farewell by the one coolly daring it, Hilma turned to ride back to her house she was conscious of but a single response to the events of the past few moments, cold anger. Anger at the impudent stranger who had driven off the yearlings in the face of her fire; anger more particularly at herself. Why had her hand tipped up the head on the barrel's end that instant her finger pulled the ​trigger? Why, when she had every intention of shooting to kill when the smiling face of that cowman looked at her between the prongs of the buckhorn—why had she let him live? Hilma did not find an answer to this question. Her anger but fed itself on answer denied.

She rode her sorry pony into the corral, unsaddled him and threw him an armful of hay, for the beast was her sole companion in much lonesomeness and there was love between them. Then she carried her rifle to the doorstep and, sitting there, fired many shots at the rusty butt of a tomato can a hundred paces away. Every shot missed and at each miss her anger increased—that curious double anger linking the smiling stranger and her own self for its object. Hilma only stopped her savage practice shooting when the growing clutter of empty shells at her feet suddenly aroused her to the waste. Rifle cartridges cost money; her father would fly into one of his rages when he discovered what she had done. Then they would quarrel; perhaps he would strike her, as he sometimes did, and she would strike back. All that would not be worth while.

Hilma carefully cleaned the rifle, reloaded the chamber; then gathered the empty shells ​into her apron and carried them far away from the house to spill them down the steep gorge of the coulee. She returned to her lonesomeness, and her still-gnawing anger.

Lonesomeness had been this girl's portion almost since she could remember. There had been a time—away back there in Minnesota—when there was a mother; but that time was all in the dim forgotten land. Almost the only fact Hilma remembered about her mother was that she was American, and for that the girl was devoutly thankful. That this shadow figure of child memory should have been American instead of Danish had always been to Hilma a sort of investiture of sainthood. Hilma hated the Danish blood in her; she remembered how children had called her "Scowegian." When the mother went—Hilma was six then—the lonesomeness had come. First the lonesomeness of the scrubby farm in the flat lands but with neighbors so near one could see their windmills. Then the greater and more terrible lonesomeness of this vast country, where one looked a hundred miles from the Broken Horns across and across to the Black Hills, where it was a day's ride to a neighbor's house.

​Four years now this lonesomeness of the wilderness had been hers, had grown to be the most intimate thing in life. It had stamped an indelible mark on her mind. Hilma Ring, at nineteen, lived solely within herself. She sought sympathy, communion in thought and understanding with no one. Her father was the only person who came near invading this hard barrier of self-sufficiency. Perhaps she loved him; Hilma did not know. More often than not she considered him merely a shrunken little man with a bad temper with whom she must work in order to live. His Danish burr of speech was a dull irritation.

So it was into the selfish sphere of this narrow life that the smiling and impudent stranger had shot, comet-like. Reason enough for Hilma's disliking him. But because he had taunted her with her poor shooting, defied her to kill him if she could, she hated him. Because, too, he was of the cattle clan—that caste deeming itself superior and demanding for itself subservience of all others—she hated him. Hated him, also, because he had run off with four misbranded yearlings which Zang Whistler had left in their secret corral under a working agreement with her father.

​The day wore to a purple and carnelian close. Hilma sat in the doorway and watched the riot of the sunset play all along the saw edge of the Broken Horns—the thin blue rim was like the lip of a volcano confining fires of creation. Billows of cathedral light streamed down the flanks of the mountains and out over the great range. The crystal air was a lens focusing into sharp relief dots of pines on the higher ridges, clumps of squatting sage fringing the nearer divides. Heavens paled from rose to lemon yellow and to green.

Against this eerie light the figure of a horseman, at a great distance, appeared black as charcoal.

Just this figure of a horseman visible for a minute against the sky line, then disappearing. Hilma saw it; she watched it with intentness until it was swallowed by the black shadow of a butte. Long she sat, waiting for the tiny silhouette to reappear. The dark came, but the specter of the afterglow did not show itself again. The girl found herself idly wondering about it. That would be on the road to Two Moons where the horseman appeared—on the road over which her father would be traveling homeward. No ranches lay over there; no ​cow outfits were located between Teapot and town. It must be her father, returning.

The girl cooked supper and laid out two plates on the oilcloth-covered table. Supper grew cold; a smell of stale grease and cooling tea filled the long room. The clock with the picture of the Minnesota state capitol on its pendulum case banged out ten. Hilma ate alone.

When she had dried her hands of steaming dishwater she went out to the dooryard and stood a long while listening for the sound of hoofs. A coyote somewhere out in the dark complained dolefully of life's bitterness, but that was the only sound. She moved round the log walls, closing and bolting with stout turn buttons the wooden shutters covering each of the three windows. This was a nightly precaution of hers; just why she did it Hilma never knew. Maybe it was to shut out the great dark. Then she reëntered the house and slipped the heavy oaken bar into place behind the door. The house was hers to possess in lonesomeness.

Mercifully constricted and intimate was this oasis of lamplight in the desert of the night. Just one long room, twenty feet from end wall ​to end wall; one door leading to the lean-to kitchen; another through the thin partition of Hilma's own room; a great fireplace of stones and mud bisecting the rear wall. The furnishings were Spartan: A heavy table in the middle of the floor; three homemade chairs with rawhide bottoms; a squatty trunk of blue glazed zinc and chipped lacquer; on the walls four colored lithographs from which the advertising matter had been cut; and a glassed-over print of a Danish king and queen—the king had quaint old-world whiskers and his royal spouse wore her gown in early Victorian decolletté. Nothing more to look at than this scant inventory. If the mind of one alone tired of reviewing this slender invitation to beguilement there was a huge Bible in the zinc trunk and a pink plush album of atrocious portraits. Also, a doll.

The lonesomeness of the great range came to sit down with Hilma. To-night it was more poignant than usual. The girl's imagination, never obtrusive, began to play in a manner surprising to her, and it centered round the silhouette of the horseman against the green sky. Insensibly her thoughts drifted to Jed Monk, sheepman, and what her father had ​journeyed to Two Moons to tell the sheriff concerning the manner of Monk's taking off. The stone on the forehead—she could see it, could see the unlovely face of their nearest neighbor with a pebble balanced grotesquely just above one lumpish jaw socket. This was very unusual and not a little disturbing. Hilma laid it all to the door of the impudent range inspector, her visitor of the afternoon. As she phrased it aloud—and Hilma always talked her thoughts when she was alone—he had started her thinking. It was not everybody who could start Hilma Ring thinking.

"Fool!" she chided herself, and she undressed and rolled herself in the blankets of her bunk. Sleep would not come. Instead a brooding formless something, which might have been the shape of fear or—had Hilma known it—a messenger of ill from the Norse god Frey, took substance of the dark about her. She shivered. Hours passed.

A noise brought her bounding to her feet by the bunk side. It was a stuttering whinny, and it came from the direction of the corral where the shabby little horse was penned. Hilma stood breathless for many minutes, then native courage pushed through her panic. She ​hurried surely through the dark to the fireplace corner where the rifle stood, seized it and threw a shell into the chamber. After a minute spent with ear close to the outer door she pushed back the bar and let the heavy slab door swing inward. Rifle ready, Hilma peered out.

The many-starred night told nothing. Naught there but the dead black shoulders of the mountains, deeper shadows below, and on high a spangled vault which seemed to hum with the energy of its myriad lamps. Hilma went back to bed.

Near noon next day Christian, her father's horse, ambled head down to the corral bars and there stood, resting easily on three legs and patiently waiting to be uncinched. The saddle was empty.

Hilma threw herself on Christian's back and started him at a labored gallop down the road toward Two Moons. Her mood was not one of surprise or consternation; the night had left her expectant, and the return of the riderless horse was but part of fulfillment. So she rode, eyes scanning the hard road ahead and the little swales and buffalo wallows on either side.

​She had journeyed perhaps ten miles when a speck on the thin ribbon of dust ahead of her slowly took shape of horse and rider. As she drew near she recognized the tall, gaunt shape and prophet's beard of Uncle Alf, the circuit rider—crazy Uncle Alf, he was known to all the Big Country. Something bulky cumbered the saddle before him and dropped to either side in shapeless, swaying extremities. Uncle Alf recognized her when she was still a distance away. He halted his horse and shot one skinny arm high above his head, the hand wide spread.

"The murderer rising with the light killeth, and in the night is as a thief." His hail came bellowing in deep diapason—a voice almost terrifying in volume. The circuit rider's eyes showed white under his flapping hat brim; the eyes of Jeremiah they were.

"I heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe to the inhabiters of earth!" Uncle Alf swept his outstretched arm in a fearsome gesture.

Hilma rode, clear-eyed, close to the evangelist's side and looked down at that which he carried over his saddle horn. It was the body of her father, murdered.