Читать книгу The Long Rifle - Stewart Edward White - Страница 33

Table of Contents

The steamboat curved grandly and ceremoniously to the docks at St. Louis. The ship’s company had shaken off its monotony of routine and crowded the rails. Andy, clinging with difficulty in the jostling of the crowd to his place by the bitts, looked with all his eyes.

St. Louis of that day lay on a terrace below abrupt limestone bluffs, long since graded away, atop which defensive works stood like sentinels. A row of warehouses faced the docks, and behind them straggled streets parallel with the stream. The docks themselves were wide and long. At this moment they were crowded with a mixed and miscellaneous throng. Andy filled his eyes with their picturesque incongruity. There were gentlemen in the height of fashion, French engagés dark and vivacious; rivermen in high leather boots; absorbed and businesslike clerks in sober garb; ragged stevedores; bullwhackers swaggering bare-chested and hat-tilted; plainsmen leaning on their long rifles, eyeing the hubbub sober and aloof. And here and there Andy’s first plains Indians, gaudy and painted. The din was tremendous. Men shouted; the paddle wheels beat; and the safety valve took this occasion to cut loose with a devastating roar.

Joe Crane thrust himself through the crowding passengers to Andy’s side. He had become abrupt; businesslike; remote.

“You can get track of me at the Rocky Mountain House, if you change your mind,” said he briefly; and was gone. A moment later Andy saw the Mountain Man gain the wharf by a flying leap; and, indifferent to the protests and invectives hurled after him by the outraged crew, disappear in the throng.

A lump of hurt and resentment arose in Andy’s throat at this abrupt and indifferent farewell. But now the gangplank was lowered, and he was swept away by the rush toward shore, carried helplessly forward, his arms jammed to his side, crowded and jostled. It was a human stampede, each regardless of anyone but himself. Buffeted, his nostrils filled with the reek, Andy was swept forth at last to the wharf. As soon as he could do so he stepped aside, drawing a deep breath of relief, his hand seeking the little sack of money suspended about his neck beneath his shirt. The long breath strangled in his throat. The bag was gone.

The shock of the loss turned Andy physically sick for a moment. He groped for a pile head and supported himself against it. The noisy wharf had gone black in a reeling world. Gone! When? How?

Dimly he became aware that somebody was speaking his name. With difficulty he brought his mind to a focus. The captain of the steamboat stood before him. He was made to understand that the captain had a letter for him. How could a letter reach him in this crowd? More trouble, probably. He wanted to get away as quickly as possible. He took the letter mechanically.

“You sure this is mine?” he asked wondering. “How did you know——”

The captain grinned in his beard.

“There are not many boys of just your description carrying one of those things.” He indicated the long rifle. “The letter was sent to the company’s office at Pittsburg, and as soon as you took passage with my ship, it was handed to me.”

“Why did you not give it to me before, then?”

“Instructions. It was to be given only when you debarked.” Nodding acknowledgment to Andy’s thanks, he strolled away.

Andy stared at his grandmother’s fine angular handwriting, and thrust the letter unopened into his pocket. In this crash of all the plans they had made together he could not bear to read it. He shouldered his entire earthly possessions and left the wharves.

For an hour or more he walked about, dark in the misery of his loss. Up the Rue Royale—business places, board sidewalk, mud; back down the Rue de l’Eglise, ditto ditto without the sidewalk; double again, one block nearer the limestone bluffs; on the Rue de Granges to the French quarter, derisively called Vide Poche. The Rue Royale was crowded; the others nearly empty. He was as though living a double exposure on a negative. His impressions were fragmentary, snatched in his brief emergences from his inner trouble: the mud; the numbers of Creoles speaking French; an occasional strikingly picturesque figure of trapper, trader, or boatman; the wild rolling eyes of the otherwise stolid Indians; an overnote of truculent rowdyism; the prevalence of arms; Negroes. He was only partially aware of them. He found himself gazing fixedly at things which he did not see until slowly they seeped down to his attention. Thus the feet of a barefoot Negro in profile, grotesque, and the gradual clarifying of the picture in Andy’s attention until he realized that never before had he seen heels extending back so curiously in excrescence. And with this realization a long rifle barrel thrust past Andy’s shoulder; and a shattering discharge and cloud of powder smoke; and a wild yell from the Negro as he rolled about clasping his heel creased by the bullet. Shaken completely from the somnolence of his misery Andy found himself in the center of a whooping instantly gathered crowd. A tall quiet man in black thrust through and laid his hand on the shoulder of the drunken trapper with the smoking rifle. The latter protested, aggrieved.

“God a’mighty, man,” explained he, “I jist aimed to trim him up so he could wear a genteel boot!”

“Kyant do no shootin’ in the streets,” said the tall man firmly.

He shook the drunken man, faced him about, gave him a shove in the broad of the back. He staggered away. The crowd howled with laughter. Several clapped him on the shoulder, admiring his accuracy, inviting him to “liquorize.” They scattered slowly. Andy was alone again. Nobody paid any attention to the Negro, hippity-hopping away as fast as he could go.

But Andy was now shaken awake. The thing was done and over, and to be faced. Andy faced it squarely. The money entrusted to him to buy the farm was gone. He must get some more money. The only way he could think of to do that was to take up the Mountain Man’s offer. What was it Crane had said? A thousand plew. What was a plew? He must find out. Having made this decision Andy instantly set about acting on it. Thus already he displayed two of the qualities that later were often to stand him in stead. And having come to his resolution Andy was ashamed to find, beneath the chagrin suitable to the occasion, a sudden leap of exultation. It was positively indecent! He sternly made it down-charge, turned his inner eye away from it. Nevertheless it glowed away down inside, awaiting its chance to burst out. But he was going west! Couldn’t take that away, what ever the austere reasons!

He enquired the way to the Rocky Mountain House, and had turned in that direction when he remembered the letter in his pocket. He could read it now; albeit with still a bit of dread and shrinking. He drew one side for the purpose.

“Dear Boy:” it began, “You will wish the news of the farm, and the situation here; so I will say at once that your stepfather has instigated no pursuit, as I suspected, due to his great stinginess. Nor has he been disagreeable to myself, due I think to his idea that I have money to dispose, not knowing that it is already disposed. So your mind may be easy on these accounts, and you may think of me as quite happy with my Book and my memories and my thoughts of you at last doing what your blood calls you to do and which I had planned for you.

“You will be wondering why you get this letter only now and not at Pitt’s town whither it was sent. I arranged that in order that you might not be tempted to turn back. By now, I think, you must know that you are not meant to be a farmer. I have known that for a long time. The knowledge of it has been the joy of my old age. I never intended you to make a place for me out there, but otherwise you might not have gone. I would be very unhappy watching you grubbing at a farm. I could never stand half that journey, now. But don’t you worry about that. You’ll write me of your great doings, and I’ll be very happy here in my old rocking chair, for remember this, it is only through you that all that I have loved and cherish lives on. So do your part, boy, like a man. Make your mark on your time, like your grandfather before you. Let others make the farms—after you have found the country and made it safe for them.” She signed her full name with the painstaking flourish of the period. But there was more. “I had not thought to touch upon it,” she had added, “but the thought must occur to you, and I would not have it weaken your resolution. We may not see one another again. I am eighty-seven years old, and I know too well the dangers of the life you must lead. But we shall not be snuffed out when our bodies go. Our sort goes marching on.”