Читать книгу The Land of Strong Men (Western Novel) - Western Novel - Страница 10

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That spring Angus kept three teams going steadily on plows and disks while the high winds dried the soil to a powder, raising dust clouds that choked and blinded, so that they came in black and gritty to a shower bath of Angus' invention. He had accomplished this by a primitive water wheel operated by the swift water of the irrigation ditch back of the house. The water was always cold, and invigorated accordingly. But it was icy in the morning. Rennie tried it once and gave it up, while big Gus scornfully refused to experiment with a morning bath.

"It'll brace you up," Turkey urged.

"Vatter ent brace nobody," Gus replied with contempt. "Dees all-over vash by mornin' ban no good. Ay ent need him. It ent make me dirty to sleep."

But the dust vanished with the spring rains, and the grain sprouted in the drills. One day the fields lay bare and bald and blank; and the next, as it seemed, they were covered with a film of tender green. Then all hands began to clear and repair the irrigation ditches, so that when dry weather came the fields should have water in plenty.

So the early summer came and with it Jean's holidays. Her return, Angus recognized, necessitated some preparation.

"She'll have a fit when she sees the house," he told Turkey.

"What's the matter with it?" that young man asked.

"She'll find plenty the matter with it," Angus predicted apprehensively. "We'd better clean up a little."

"Well, maybe we had," Turkey admitted.

They gave the house what they considered a thorough cleaning, which consisted in sweeping where it seemed necessary, and removing some of the pot-black from kitchen utensils which Jean had never set down on the fire. Angus eyed the rusty-red kitchen range, which Jean had kept black and shining.

"I wonder if we hadn't better give that a touch of polish," he said. "Where is the polish, anyway?"

"Search me," Turkey replied. "I've never seen any. What's the use? It cooks all right."

They could not find Jean's polish, and experimented with black harness dressing. But the smoke when the fire was lit drove them out of the house, and they let it go.

Angus drove into town to meet Jean behind a pair of slashing, upstanding, bright-bay three-year-olds, of which he was very proud. Jean had never seen them in harness—indeed they had been harnessed less than a dozen times—and he anticipated her pleasure in them, for she loved horses. He put up and fed the colts at the livery stable, had his dinner, made some purchases, and as it was nearly time for the river steamer on which Jean would arrive, turned toward the stable to hitch up.

As he turned a corner he met Garland, Blake French, and several other young men. Apparently they were out on a time, for none of them were entirely steady upon their legs. Blake French, however, was much the worst.

In the years that had passed the French family had not changed their habits. The ranch was still a hang-out for every waster in the country. But the young men were away a great deal in the summer and fall, following the various local races. They had two or three good horses, and seemed to find the sport profitable. Also they had achieved a rather unenviable notoriety. They had all been mixed up more or less in various rows, but somehow these matters had been hushed up. Nobody desired to incur the enmity of a family which was supposed to have money, and one way and another a good deal of influence.

Angus would have passed, but Garland stopped him, asking him to come and have a drink. Angus refused civilly, and Blake sneered.

"It won't cost you anything," he said thickly.

"I don't drink," Angus said shortly.

"Do you do anything?" Blake sneered. "Do you have any fun at all?"

"What I have is my own business," Angus returned, his temper beginning to ruffle.

Blake French, his brow lowering, caught him by the lapel of the coat. "Are you telling me to mind my own business?" he demanded.

"That will be plenty of that sort of thing," Angus told him. "Let go, now, and don't pull me about."

But Blake, being surly and quarrelsome even when sober, gave the lapel a savage jerk, and reached out with his other hand. Angus caught his wrist, and brought a stiffened forearm across his throat. At the same moment he stepped forward, crooked his right leg behind Blake's left knee and threw his full weight against him. Blake went down hard, but was up in an instant and made a staggering rush. Angus dodged.

"Take care of him, you!" he said to Garland. "I don't want to hit him."

Blake's friends closed in on him, and Angus made his escape. He was glad to get clear so easily, for he had no mind to be mixed up in a fight on the street. He hooked up the colts and drove down to the landing, hearing as he did so the deep bellow of the river steamer's whistle. When he got the colts tied and went out on the wharf the boat had already docked. Behind a group of passengers a girl was bending over a couple of grips. Her back was toward Angus, and never doubting that it was Jean, he reached down with one hand for a grip, while he slipped his other arm around her waist.

"Hello, old girl!" he said. But to his utter amazement, as she snapped erect in the crook of his arm, it was not Jean at all. This girl was taller, black of hair and blue of eye. For a moment he did not recognize her, and then he knew her for Kathleen French, whom he had not seen for more than a year. "Oh," he said blankly, "it's you!"

"I think so," she said dryly. "I can stand without being held, thanks."

Angus dropped his arm from her waist, blushing.

"I thought you were Jean. I'm awfully sorry."

Kathleen French's dark blue eyes looked him up and down, and to his relief she seemed more amused than angry.

"But your sister wasn't on the boat. It's nice to be welcomed by somebody." She frowned, glancing down the wharf. "Have you seen any of my brothers? Somebody should be here to meet me."

"Blake is in town. I haven't seen any of the other boys."

"Then why isn't Blake here?" she demanded.

"I don't know," Angus returned. "It's not my fault, is it?"

"No, of course not. He was to be here—or somebody was—and drive me out. I suppose I'll have to go somewhere and wait his pleasure. Where is he, do you know?"

"Why—" Angus began doubtfully, and stopped.

"Look here," said Kathleen French, "has Blake been drinking?"

"I think he could drive all right."

"Pig! Brute!" Blake's sister ejaculated viciously. "He couldn't keep sober, even to meet me. Didn't think I mattered, I suppose. I'll show him. Able to drive, is he? Well, he isn't able to drive me. I'll get a livery rig."

"I will drive you out."

"That's good of you. But it's out of your way."

"It will do the colts good—take the edge off them. But I don't know what to do about Jean. She was to have come on this boat."

"She must have missed it. Likely she will be on the next."

This seemed probable. As there was nothing to be done about it, Angus went for Kathleen's trunk. He wheeled it on a truck to the rig, picked it up and deposited it in the wagon back of the seat without apparent effort. As the trunk went up Kathleen French's eyes widened a little. He turned to her.

"The step is broken and if you climb in the mud will get on your dress," he said. "I had better lift you over the wheel, if you don't mind."

"Of course I don't mind."

He lifted her up as one holds a child aloft to see a passing parade, until her feet set on top of the wheel. As she seated herself she glanced at him with a queer expression of puzzlement. He unhitched the colts, gathered up the lines and came up over the wheel beside her. As he dropped into the seat the team got away with a plunge and they went townward with slack tugs, the reins and Angus' arms pulling the load.

"They're a little frisky," he said. "They'll be all right when they get out of town."

"You don't think I'm afraid, do you?" she said.

"No, I guess you are not nervous of horses."

Angus hoped they would see nothing of Blake. But as they clattered up the main street, the colts dancing and fighting the bits and Angus holding them with a double wrap and talking to them steadily to quiet them, Blake and his companions were crossing from one side to the other. He recognized Angus and his sister, and probably remembered that he was to meet her. With the memory of his recent encounter surging in his fogged brain he lurched out into the roadway and called on Angus to stop; and as the latter did not do so, he made an unsteady rush for the colts' heads.

Just then Angus could not have stopped the colts if he had wished to, and he did not wish it. He knew that if Blake got hold of them it meant a wrangle on the street, and so he loosed a wrap and clicked a sharp command. The colts went into their collars with a bound.

As they did so Kathleen French reached swiftly across and plucked the whip from its socket on the dash. Angus had time for just one glance. The nigh forewheel was just grazing Blake, so that he jumped back. His flushed, scowling face was upturned, his mouth open in imprecation. Then with a vicious swish and crack the lash of the blacksnake curled down over his head and shoulders, and he went out of sight.

Angus was too fully occupied with the colts to look back. They missed a wagon and a buggy by inches merely, and were a mile out of town before he was able to pull them down to an ordinary gait; and he was in no sweet temper at them, at Blake, and even at Blake's sister; for that young lady's swishing cut with the whip had put the finishing touch to the colts' nerves.

Kathleen herself had not uttered a word, nor had she grasped the seat rail, even when in danger of collision. Now she sat upright, an angry color in her cheeks, her mouth set in a straight line, and the whip still in her hand. She met Angus' eyes with a defiant stare.

"Well?" she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're thinking a lot, though."

"Am I?"

"Yes, you are! And don't you say a word of it to me. I can't stand it."

"I am not going to say anything," Angus told her, and stared ahead over the colts' ears, in which companionable fashion they drove for nearly two miles. Then he felt her hand on his arm.

"I'm sorry, Angus. I was utterly rude. Let it go, won't you?"

"Of course," he assented. "I wasn't any too polite myself. The team nearly got away from me."

"And then you think I shouldn't have taken the whip to Blake."

"You might have taken an ax to him for all I'd care," Angus admitted.

"Hello!" she said. "Have you had any trouble with Blake?"

"No real trouble." He told her what had occurred.

"Well, I'm glad I used the whip," she commented. "He won't be proud of it—before his friends. Wait till I see the boys! A nice lot, sending Blake—Blake!—to meet me." Her teeth clicked over the words. "I suppose," she went on bitterly after a pause, "there's a black sheep in every family. But in some families—What do you think of our family?"

Angus stared at her. He had never thought much about the Frenches, who were outside his orbit. Being young, one side of him had at times envied their easy life; but another side of him held for them the grim, bitter scorn of the worker for the idler and waster. These things, however, were far below the surface.

"I don't know your family very well," he said.

She did not press the question.

"That is so. Angus—I hope you don't mind being called that, any more than I mind being called by my first name—we've known each other for years, but not very well. Perhaps we'll know each other better. I'm home for good. I'm supposed to be a young lady, now."

"Are you?" said Angus. She laughed.

"My education—polite and otherwise—is finished. That is what I mean. I am now prepared to settle down to the serious business of life—of a young woman's life."

"And what is that?"

"If you don't know I won't tell you. Never mind about me. Tell me about yourself."

"Myself? Oh, I've just been living on the ranch."

She considered him gravely, and he stared back. Whatever she saw, he found her decidedly good to look upon, not only because of her eyes and hair and clear, satiny skin, but because of the lithe, clean-run shape of her, which he admired as he would that of a horse, or an athlete's in training. She broke the silence abruptly.

"Do you know what my trunk weighs?"

He glanced back at it, shaking his head. "No. It's riding all right there."

"Do you know what I weigh?"

"Perhaps a hundred and thirty."

"Ten pounds more. And the trunk weighs more than two hundred."

"Well, what about it?" Angus asked, puzzled.

"What about it? Are you in the habit of picking up trunks like that as if they were meat platters, and girls as if they were babies? I was watching you, and you didn't even breathe hard."

"Oh, is that it?" Angus laughed. "That's nothing. Any of your brothers could handle that trunk."

"Gavin could, of course. But he's very strong."

"Well?" said Angus, smiling at her.

"Why, yes, you must be. But I've always thought of you as a boy. And I suppose you've thought of me as a gawky, long-legged girl."

"I haven't thought of you at all," Angus told her.

"Now I know I'm going to like you," she laughed. "I don't know a man—except my brothers, who of course don't count—who would have told me that."

Angus flushed, but stuck to his guns.

"Well, why should I think of you?"

"No reason. You don't know much about girls, do you?"

"Not a thing. I have had no time for them."

"And no use for them!"

"I did not say that."

"But you looked it, Angus. I'll never forget the look of relief on your face years ago when we appeared to take poor, little lost Faith Winton off your hands—and off your pony. And yet she liked you. She speaks still of how good and kind you were to her, though you frightened her at first."

"She must be thinking of Jean's doughnuts," Angus grinned. "I had forgotten all about it. Where is she now?"

"I don't know. She and her father were in Italy when I heard from her last."

"She would be grown up," Angus deduced. "I wonder if I would know her?"

But the French ranch hove in sight, its big two-story house and maze of stables in a setting of uncared-for fields, which Angus never saw without something akin to pain. A chorus of dogs greeted the sound of wheels, and half a dozen of them shot around the corner of the house.

Angus liked dogs, but not when he was driving colts. But just as they began to dance and the nigh bay had lashed out with a vicious hoof, Gavin French came around the corner, and at his command the dogs shrank as if he had laid a whip across them. Just then Gavin was wearing riding breeches, moccasins, and a flannel shirt wide open at the throat and stagged off at the sleeves, so that the bronzed column of his neck and the full sweep of his long, splendidly muscled arms were revealed. He strode softly, cat-footed, gripping with his toes, and the smoke of the short pipe which was his inseparable companion, drifted behind him.

"Hello, Kit!" he said, and nodded to Angus. "Where is Blake? He went for you."

"Blake's drunk," Kathleen replied.

"Drunk, is he?" Gavin said without surprise.

"And you're a nice bunch of brothers to send him! Couldn't one of you have come?"

"Oh, well, he was going, anyway," said Gavin carelessly. "Did you see him?"

"Yes, I saw him. He tried to stop Angus' team on the main street, and I slashed him back with the whip."

"You little devil!" said her brother, but with a certain admiration in his voice. "But that's pretty hard medicine, Kit!"

"And what sort of medicine is it for me to have a drunken blackguard of a brother run out on the street to hold up the rig I'm driving in?" she flared. "I'm entitled to ordinary respect; even if I am a sister, and Blake and all of you had better understand it now."

"Pshaw!" said Gavin. "The trouble with you, Kit, is that you've got a wire edge. You're set on a hair-trigger."

"And the trouble with Blake and the whole lot of you is that you've run wild," she retorted. "You've got so that you don't care for anything or anybody. You're practically savages. But I can tell you, you'll remember some of the ordinary usages of civilization now I'm home."

"And a sweet temper you've come back in!" said Gavin. He lifted his sister down over the wheel and reached for the trunk.

"It's heavy, Gan," she said, with a glance at Angus.

"Is it?" said Gavin, gripping the handles. He lifted it without apparent effort, and set it on his right shoulder. "I may be able to stagger along with it," he told her ironically. "Would you like me to carry you, too?"

"You can't!"

"Can't I?" laughed the blond giant. "Have you any money left to bet on that?"

"Five dollars that you can't carry me and the trunk—upstairs and to my room."

"My five," said her brother. "Come here." With the trunk on his shoulder he bent his knees till he squatted low on the balls of his feet. "Now sit on my shoulder and put your right arm around my neck. Give me your left hand. All set?"

"All set."

Angus watched with interest, doubtful if he could do it. But slowly, steadily, without shake or tremor the knees of the big man began to straighten, and his shoulders topped by girl and trunk to rise, until he stood upright. Upright he hitched to get a better balance, and strode off for the house as easily as Angus himself would have carried a sack of oats. Kathleen looked back at him and laughed.

"Good-by, Angus. Thank you ever so much—and come and see me."

The last thing Angus saw as he wheeled the colts for home, was the burdened bulk of Gavin French stooping for the doorway.