Читать книгу The Long Rifle - Stewart Edward White - Страница 28

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Andy traveled the back roads through the forests and by the little backwoods farms. He did so partly to avoid possible inquiry and pursuit; partly because he was only nineteen. With the long Kentucky rifle across his shoulder, his bundle at his back, the powder horn just nudging his elbow, the tomahawk and knife touching his hip, he felt somehow romantic as though he had set the clock back fifty years. The spring was swelling to maturity and the tonic of her intoxication was strong. Andy stopped of nights at one or another of the rare farmhouses. He started out afoot betimes of each morning. On most days he managed to hitch-hike a good proportion of the way on farm wagons or slower-moving ox carts. At noons he stopped to eat his lunch, furnished him by his last night’s hostess. Before resuming his journey after the meal, he drew the knife from its sheath at his belt and practised throwing it at a selected mark on a tree. He cast it with a full round sweep of the arm. The long blade, turning slowly, nevertheless invariably struck point-in. Andrew did this practice studiously, pacing off odd distances, considering thoughtfully the result of each throw. The same care he bestowed on his rifle practice, for invariably each day he fired five shots. Then, having cleaned the piece, he resumed his journey. All this he performed with an intense gravity of purpose, a gravity underscored, as it were, to the beholder, by the cast of his dark complexion and the straight heavy line of his eyebrows. His earnestness managed to impart indeed quite an Indian-behind-every-tree illusion to the woods, an illusion only partly dissipated by the tootling of the stagecoach horn on the great highway a half-mile distant, or the peaceful blatting of the sheep in pasture just beyond the forest’s screen. Certainly Andy himself, running away to the wild west, entered whole-heartedly into his game.

Therefore it was that, turning at the sound of a chuckle behind him, he experienced no immediate shock of surprise at the figure he beheld. Only after a moment or so did he come to a realization of its extreme and theatrical incongruity in this peaceful and ordered land.

He saw a tall, slender, and wiry man of uncertain age. His face was clean-shaven, lean, leathery, and brown; his deep-set eyes were blue and twinkling with humor. His head, innocent of hat, was bound about by a blue kerchief from beneath which escaped long hair. A plain cotton shirt was confined at the waist by a buckskin girdle from which depended a variety of little bags. Another belt, crossing his left shoulder supported, under his right arm, a powder horn and shot pouch. He wore no breeches. In their stead his legs were covered by leggings cut away at the seat, so that as he moved Andy saw the breech clout and the leathery, chapped, browned hard skin of the man’s buttocks. The leggings themselves were tied at the knee, and were ornamented by many fringes, embroideries in beads, tufts of hair and feathers dyed in brilliant colors. His feet were encased in decorated moccasins. He carried across the crook of his left arm a rifle not unlike Andy’s own except that it was somewhat shorter and heavier.

Andrew stared at this strange figure, taking in these many details, his mind separating it slowly from the congruity of his play-acting, where it belonged, to the unbelievable actuality of the tamed countryside from which it should have vanished generations agone.

The man chuckled again, evidently relishing Andy’s bewilderment.

“Look yore fill, lad, I’m used to it,” said he. “Lord love you, an you keep on far enough on the road you travel you’ll see many a more of Mountain Men besides Joe Crane.”

He seated himself on a fallen tree, laid aside his rifle, slipped from beneath his belt a pipe of stone with a long reed stem, which he proceeded leisurely to stuff with tobacco. His form was relaxed in every muscle; but his blue eyes were never still. Even as he drawled on they flitted here and there about him. Not for an instant did they seem to rest, yet somehow Andy felt that their sharp scrutiny was seizing upon every item of his own appearance and equipment; and that behind them a shrewd brain was estimating him.

“Come, lad, sit down,” advised the stranger, puffing forth a cloud of smoke. He reached out a long arm to pluck Andy’s knife from the tree into which the last cast had buried its point.

“That is a proper blade.” He balanced it appraisingly. “And you cast it not badly. But you lose yore force.”

He flickered his arm. The knife flashed through the air, to bury itself half-hilt deep in the soft pine.

“See!” commented the stranger. “’Tis a trick; I’ll larn ye.”

He reached for Andy’s rifle, which he examined as critically.

“A proper piece too,” he said, “properly made and kept. Though a leetle on the light side for buffalo. Still, it’s said its say in its day, I’ll warrant, and will say it again. Give me a good flint gun. Your percussion arms are all right,”—he held up a didactic forefinger—“and you’ll find a-many to urge you to a change. They’ll tell you that in wet weather they are more sartin, and that the high wind of the prairies will blow away your flint gun’s priming. That may be so for a mangeur de lard but not for one who looks to his priming as an old hivernant should. And mark you this, lad; with these new-fangled cap guns, when you run out of caps you’re done. You ain’t got no gun. She ain’t even a good club. But with a flint gun, as long as they’s rocks, you can chip you off a new flint. And thar you be!” he ended triumphantly. His scrutiny fell upon the patch box plate and its inscription. His eye narrowed, and he looked up suddenly at Andy, but he said nothing.

Andy’s scattered wits focused at last.

“Who are you?” he blurted out. “What are you doing here?”

The stranger’s face darkened momentarily; then cleared. He threw back his head and laughed.

“I nearly forgot,” said he, “and came nigh to anger. You are a likely lad, but you have much to larn. When you come to the prairie do not ask a man his name or his business. That is not taken kindly.”

“I’m sorry,” stammered Andy. “I meant no harm.”

“No harm is done,” conceded the stranger handsomely, “And mebbe you are not to blame. ’Tis a matter of upbringing mebbe. But look yere, I didn’t ask yo’ nothin’ about yoreself, though you carry here Boone’s rifle, as the mark on it states; and that is sure enough to make a man curious!” He glanced down at himself humorously. “I’d as soon tell you of myself, lad. I am from Washington, jist now, whar I’ve been to speak to the President of sartin things which have to do with the fur. It was decided that someone must speak. So I have been; and now I return.”

“You have been to Washington—you have seen Mr. Monroe——” Andy broke off, embarrassed that his bewilderment had carried him so far.

But the Mountain Man read him perfectly.

“In this guise?” He chuckled again. “Even so. I might well, thinks you, put on the foofaraw of proper dress, but, thinks I: Joe Crane, never in all your life have you acted like anybody but yoreself. Do not make yoreself out a fool by trying to ape other folks now. Joe Crane you have always been, and Joe Crane you still remain. Go ahead, Joe Crane!”

“I see,” murmured Andy. “And was your—did you succeed in your mission, Mr. Crane?”

“I know now what I only suspicioned afore,” replied the Mountain Man cryptically. “And now that you have shown me the way to the manners of this country, I’ll make bold myself. How came ye by Dan’l Boone’s rifle, and whither go ye with it?”

“It was my grandfather’s, given him by Colonel Boone himself.”

“Your name?” enquired Crane quickly.

“Andrew Burnett.”

“Wagh! Then you’re Gail Burnett’s son—no, his grandson?”

“Yes. Did you know him?”

“I hear’n tell of him. Old Dan’l set store by him.”

“You knew Boone?”

“Not to say knew him. No. He was afore my time. But I met up with him one time on the Platte.” Under Andy’s breathless urging he elaborated. It was at the time of Boone’s great age, when he was living on the farm of Nathan, his son. He had heard trappers’ tales of the salt mountains, lakes, and ponds, and he had made up his mind to see them. So, disregarding the family’s protests, he set out.

“I was comin’ in to St. Louey with my furs and possibles,” said Crane, “and I run across him on the Platte. He had jist one Injun with him. He was a good Injun, an Osage. I talked with him. He told me he had orders to bring Dan’l back dead or alive before snowfall, and he was a-goin’ to do it. The old Colonel was risin’ on eighty-four years but he was as straight as an arrow. His eyes wasn’t good. He had little pieces of white paper on his sights so he could see ’em; but his hand was as steady as mine is to-day, and he was eating his own meat. We come back together to Missouri. He shore hated to quit without seein’ them salt lakes; but winter was comin’ and his Injun headed him back. He allowed he’d make it next spring. We made heap many smokes together. He was worse’n you for makin’ me palaver. Nothin’ must do but I had to tell him all about the Mountains. Allowed mebbe he’d get him two-three Osages, and mebbe a white man or two and go see. So you’re Gail Burnett’s kin! Well, from what old Dan’l told me, you come of good stock.”

The Mountain Man glanced at the position of the sun and arose from the log.

“You live yereabouts?” he asked Andy.

“No: I’m traveling too.” Andy hesitated. “I’m going west.”

Crane dropped the butt of his rifle to earth with emphatic delight.

“Wagh!” he cried. “So that’s the way yore stick floats! We will e’en travel together!”