Читать книгу The Long Rifle - Stewart Edward White - Страница 7

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It was first blackbird time, when the snow water is not all drained away but when the grass beneath the surface of its little pools waves green. A young man was journeying steadily afoot alongside the deep wheel ruts of a crude country road. It was a mere track, winding across the country’s face; turning to avoid high stark stumps, twisting away from bog hole of too great steepness of hills; innocent of flanking fence or ditch. For a mile, sometimes, it ran in the dim coolness of the old forest, where red tanagers flamed in green shadows, and the wild pigeons beat like distant surf. For another mile, perhaps, it threaded a marsh where poles had been laid in corduroy and soft-winged bitterns slanted aloft in erratic flight and trim small peoples swayed on limber reed ends with chucklings. But soon it shook free from these petty wildnesses, again to emerge into cleared stumpy uplands and wide fields, fenced in rail, and Pennsylvania farmhouses of a civilization by now over a hundred years old.

The youth was a tall young man, standing well over six feet, lean with the slenderness of whalebone, his face golden brown with sun, his somewhat aquiline features cast in that brooding yet watchful repose characteristic of the backwoodsman and the Indian. His blue-gray eyes too would, to the competent observer, have identified him with the wilderness, for while their quality was mild, peaceable, and serene, they were never still, turning from right to left and from left to right again, ceaselessly, in a tireless vigilance so habitual that it had become subliminal. The traveler knew he had nothing to apprehend in this peaceful countryside; indeed his thoughts were busied far from the actual scene: nevertheless no smallest stir of leaf or feather escaped the mechanics of his attention, which held its report of those matters only just below the surface of his consciousness. His basic sense of security was further evidenced by the fact that he bore his rifle carelessly across his shoulder, and had attached to it for convenience of carriage against his back a leather portmanteau. He was dressed in plain garments of homespun and wore on his head the stiff felt hat of the period.

Though the sun was already past mid-afternoon, and he had been afoot since its rising, he swung unweariedly along in the bent-kneed woodsman’s slouch, which is apparently so deliberate but in reality is so swift that one unaccustomed can with difficulty keep pace, and that for a short distance only. No inequality of footing or steepness of hill broke the rhythm; nor did he pause for breath or contemplation until the road broke over a crest to disclose below him a scattering settlement amongst noble trees in the bend of a great river. Here he stopped for a moment, surveying the scene gravely, then plunged down the slope to the village street.

The place was of the ordinary type and kind—many frame and a few brick homes, wide scattered at first, clustering more thickly as one approached the main street where stood the hotel, or tavern, two or three shops, and a court or meeting house. Old forest trees and planted elms new-spangled with spring overspread the roadways and later would almost completely submerge the roofs of the town. To one side swept the bend in the river; and here along a canal were stone and frame buildings with sputtering mill wheels. At the time of week and the time of day, one would expect to find such a place moving in only a feeble current of external life: perhaps a horse or so dozing along the hitching rails; possibly a loafer or two chair-tilted before the tavern; mayhap a housewife picking her way on wooden clogs through the soft earth toward the one sidewalk of the shops. Such a normal condition of somnolence was evidently anticipated by our young traveler; for he paused in grave and puzzled observation of what he saw.

The street was aswarm with men of all ages and conditions in life. They sauntered back and forth; they stood in talkative groups beneath the elms; they sat in rows on the edge of the high sidewalk. But principally they milled in and out of the wide hospitable doors of the tavern, whence arose such a clatter mingled of talk, argument, song, shouts, laughter, and the clinking undertone of mugs, glasses, and dishes slammed about, that the combined noise seemed to burst forth like a palpable flood gone aleak. No women were to be seen; but numerous small boys and dogs were engaged in attaching themselves to the situation with as convincing an air as they could manage.

Our traveler was obviously puzzled and interested. His long free stride slowed to a saunter: his eyes, heretofore roving in the mechanics of an automatic vigilance, now brimmed with the keenest of intelligent observation. He moved forward with every sense awake to catch the smallest indicatives that would synthesize into an estimate of the situation; precisely as it might be imagined he would move in the shadows of an unknown forest. Indeed he made a slight instinctive shrug as though to bring forward his rifle to his hand. It was with him an integral part of alertness, but he caught back the movement with a flicker of a smile at the corners of his grave lips. It would have been a simple matter to resolve his curiosity by an appeal for information to the nearest group; but such a procedure would have written him down as no woodsman, for it is a curious fact that those who live by observation rarely ask.

Moving thus, the young man gradually drew nearer the focus of the tavern. There men jostled in a throng, and the opened doors crowded and eddied as those who went in made their way with difficulty against those who came out. Everybody talked or shouted or sang, for obviously the spirit was of a holiday. Many were more or less drunk. Across the bobbing heads one might glimpse in the dim interior the red round faces of waiters moving here and there, clusters of tankards held aloft. A swirl of many emotions caught at the poise of stabilities, swept men loose from grave accustomedness into the exhilaration of temporary irresponsibilities. A certain recklessness was in the air, a loosening inconstancy into which men plunged gratefully from the aridities of their daily lives. Though his outward appearance differed in no marked degree from the many who composed the throng, the gravity of the stranger’s unbroken aloofness seemed to set him apart, an individual from the herd, and this very separateness drew to him men’s notice as though he had carried some blazon of distinction. Heads turned; men exchanged inquiries; some few of the drunker or more reckless even threw in his direction good-naturedly jeering remarks. He seemed quite unaware.

Before the tavern veranda he came to a halt, his attention at last seizing upon a definite point of considered examination. This was a long poster of coarse paper that had been tacked into the bark of an elm by means of sharpened wooden pegs. Before it the young man took his stand, unslinging his rifle from his back, resting its butt against the ground before him, clasping his palms across its muzzle, settling himself easily and gracefully to the interpretation of the message. To the task he gave all his serene concentration, his lips moving slowly, spelling out the words. So evidently unaccustomed and difficult was this task, that the men nearest hushed their noise to watch him in amusement. One young chap in the broadcloth of the cities, a youth with a weak reckless face, who had evidently been drinking heavily, lurched alongside.

“Want me to read it for you?” he asked, his derision thinly veiled by a mock politeness.

The stranger turned his eyes from the printed words to contemplate his interlocutor. For perhaps ten seconds he held silence.

“No, suh,” he then replied, and returned tranquilly to his perusal. That was all; but the other stuttered and fell back, and a low chuckle of appreciation rippled among the bystanders. The proclamation announced:

“God save the King! Hunters and others look this way. A great shooting match will take place on April 30 at the place by the Big Bend. The first prize will be a great fat ox and the second a snap haunce gun with a long barl. To the maker of the winning piece, the Gunsmith’s Medal. Distance 15 rods. A charge of four shillings for each man. Only one shot for each four shillings. There will be more prizes for lesser amounts. Lead, powder and flints to be sold. Plenty to eat and drink for all that come. Bear and wolf traps to be sold. Tell any man to come to the match. God save the King!”

Having finished his painful deciphering of this document the young man swung his rifle into the crook of his arm, and had turned to enter the tavern, when his steps were again arrested. A little girl of eight or nine years was threading her way sedately between the lounging groups on the sidewalk. She was a personable little girl, but her mere prettiness of feature would probably not have sufficed to rivet the stranger’s attention. It was her get-up, which was in the latest and daintiest style of the cities. It is to be conceived that our young backwoodsman, if such he were, had never seen anything quite like it before. His eye lighted with an intense interest, and the contained gravity of his face was broken.

The child was accompanied by a medium-sized woolly dog of a species also strange to our young man’s knowledge. She was quite composed, a dainty, incongruous, unbelievable creature from a story book. So wholly did this apparition lie outside his experience that for the first time he abandoned his self-containment, turning to the man next him for enlightenment.

“Some rich man’s darter, must be,” he surmised.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said the other, with a short laugh. “Well, she ain’t. She’s the granddaughter of old man Farrell—the gunsmith. But he’s crazy anyhow.”

“He must be right fond of that little gal,” surmised the stranger, surveying her keenly. “Granddarter, you say? Just her and the old man, I reckon.”

“How’d you guess that?” asked the other.

“He must be right lonesome,” continued the younger man, pursuing his train of thought unheeding. Then, having come to his conclusion as to this unfamiliar phenomenon, he almost visibly abandoned it. “I am obleeged to you, suh,” said he, and again lifted his rifle and portmanteau. But the other man did not so readily relinquish this opening for his own curiosity.

“You in town for the shootin’ match?” he enquired as a preliminary to an inquisition.

“No, suh,” replied the young man politely, but with finality, “Just travelin’ through.”