Читать книгу Bonanza (A Story of the Gold Trail) - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 14
ОглавлениеVICKY TELLS SECRETS
After what had just taken place at the Crystal Palace the bright sunshine of Nevada was welcome to both brothers. Inside the gambling house had been unwholesome excitement, passion, the dregs of cruel murder lust, and the shadow of death. In the open street were friendly faces, a sane world going about its business, and God’s sun in the heavens. The McClintocks had probably snuffed out a life. It had been one horribly distorted by evil. None the less, it shook their composure to have sent even such a soul to its last account. They wanted, if possible, to forget completely the look on the face of that huge figure collapsing upon the table.
A little girl stood squarely in front of them on the broken sidewalk. To the casual eye she appeared all patches, flying hair, and knobby legs. There was the shy wildness of a captured forest creature in her manner, but in her small body the McClintocks sensed, too, a dauntless spirit.
“Mister Goodmans,” she said, addressing them both, “don’t you ’member me?”
“Of course. You’re Vicky,” Scot told her.
She came directly to business. “Rob, he’s ’most always drunk ’n we ain’t got nothin’ to eat. Mollie ’n me’s jist awful hungry.”
“Hungry? Good Lord!” cried Hugh.
His brother took charge of the situation. “Go in to Groton’s with Vicky and get her a good dinner. I’ll see what supplies I can pick up and go down to the wagon with them.”
In front of the Delta saloon Scot met a Washoe Indian. He was carrying a half a sack of wild onions he had brought to town to trade. McClintock did business with him on the spot. At Lyman Jones’s store the faro dealer bought some rice and coffee. He also induced the merchant to let him have the last five pounds of flour he had in stock. With these supplies he tramped to the edge of town to the place where the Dodsons had moved their camp.
He ploughed through heavy sand, up a steep slope of shale and loose rubble, to a narrow flat where the prairie schooner stood. Mollie Dodson must have heard him coming, for as he reached the wagon she called from within:
“Did you find Rob, Vicky?”
Perhaps the firmness of his tread told her at once of her mistake. She leaned out of the open flap and caught sight of Scot. Into her white face the colour beat in waves. Startled eyes held to his with a surprised question in them.
“I—I was looking for Vicky,” she said.
“Yes. I met Vicky.” His white teeth flashed in a smile that sought to win her confidence. “That young lady has a lot of sense. She wanted to know why the trustees of the Virginia Dodson Fund were not attending to business. So I’m here.”
“Oh! Vicky oughtn’t to have done that.” Another surge of colour, born of shame, swept into the cheeks.
For the first time Scot realized how very pretty she was. He found her diffidence charming, for he lived in a world where the women he knew could not afford to be shy.
“Vicky did just right,” he protested while he was opening his sack. “Our baby must be well fed. It’s my business to see to that, and I’m going to do it from now.”
He built a fire while she watched him, the baby in her arms. Mollie was acutely uncomfortable. The gambler had taken off his coat in order that his movements might be freer. In his figured waistcoat, frilled cambric shirt, close-fitting trousers, and varnished boots he looked too exquisite for menial labour. She was acutely conscious of her patched and faded gingham. It was Cophetua and the beggar maid brought down to date, except that she was a wife and not a girl.
“I wish—you wouldn’t,” she stammered.
He stood up, masterful and dominant. His glance swept round and found a battered water bucket. “Where’s the spring, Mrs. Dodson?” he asked.
“Let me go,” she begged. “It’s—it’s quite a way.”
“I’m feeling better to-day. Maybe I can make it to the spring and back,” he said, smiling. “Which way, please?”
Reluctantly she pointed to the spring. It was in an arroyo nearly a quarter of a mile distant.
“Robert forgot to get water before he left. He’s—away looking for work,” she explained with a slight tremor of the lips.
He liked her better for the little lie. Scot guessed that Dodson had not been at the camp for several days. He had seen the man in town yesterday drunk, and again to-day sleeping under an empty wagon in a vacant lot. It was a safe bet that Mollie Dodson carried the water for the family use.
Scot returned with the water and made a batch of biscuits and some hot coffee. While she ate he put rice on to boil.
When he looked at her he saw tears in her brown eyes. She was choking over the food and trying to prevent him from seeing it. He decided that this was a time for plain talk.
“I reckon I can guess how you feel,” he said gently. “But that’s not the right angle to look at this thing. Back where you come from persons that take help from others are—well, they don’t hold their heads up. But this is the West, a new country. The camp’s short of food. It can’t be bought in the market unless you know the ropes. We share with each other here. In a kind of way we’re all one big family. I’m your big brother, and I’m certainly going to see this baby is fed proper.”
She murmured something he could not catch for the break in her voice. He bustled about the fire cheerfully and let her alone till she had regained control of herself.
By which time Hugh and Vicky arrived, that long-legged young lady skipping on the hilltops, with high-pitched voluble comment.
“Looky. Looky here, Sister Mollie, what I got,” she cried in her eager breathless fashion. “He got it for me, Mister—Mister Santa Claus.” One finger pointed straight at Hugh while she held out for the inspection of her sister a doll with blue eyes and flaxen hair.
“Oh, but you shouldn’t—you ought not,” Mollie protested to the boy. “Did she ask you for it?”
“No, ma’am. I wanted to get it for her. It was the only doll for sale in Virginia, far as I know. I been hankerin’ to buy that doll. Now I feel a heap better.”
Vicky herself was so clearly in a seventh heaven of delight that her sister had not the heart to say anything more about it. But she was uneasy in her mind. She wondered if their obligations to these young men would never end. What would Rob say? How would he make her pay for the charity he had forced her to accept?
In the days that followed she had occasion many times to feel weighted by the kindnesses of Scot McClintock. Hugh had departed to report for duty with the express company, but his brother made it a point to see that the little family in the prairie schooner did not lack for food.
He hunted the cañons and brought back a young buck deer with him. One hind quarter of it went to Mollie Dodson to keep the pot boiling. Fish, rabbits, a prairie hen, three dozen eggs brought by a rancher all the way from Honey Lake Valley; these and other delicacies were forced upon the protesting woman.
Robert Dodson’s attitude was one of sneering suspicion. He was willing that another man should supply his family with the food it needed, but he was mean enough to jeer at his wife and bully her because of it. Even while he ate the meat brought by McClintock his tongue was a whip that lashed Mollie and the man. His whole attitude implied that the two were carrying on a clandestine love affair.
Mollie wept herself to sleep more nights than one. By nature a dependent woman, she did not now know which way to turn. Her husband was a broken reed. He no longer even pretended to be looking for work. Humiliating though it was, she had to accept Scot’s favours. She could not let the family starve. A thousand times Robert Dodson had trampled her pride and affection in the dust. She knew that life with him held nothing for her, but it must go on through the long gray years that stretched ahead till the end of things. She was not the sort of woman to contemplate suicide with any fortitude. Both the courage and the cowardice for it she lacked.
Scot returned from the Dodson camp one day, lips close set and eyes dangerously lit with a smouldering fire. Mollie was nursing a black eye. She had fallen, she told him, against the corner of the wagon. He had not believed her when she told this tremulous lie. But Vicky had settled the matter past doubt. She was waiting for him in a little gulch near the camp, waiting to tell him in a burst of impotent childish passion that Dodson had beaten Mollie because she did not have supper ready for him when he came home hours after the fire was out.
As it chanced, McClintock met the ne’er-do-well a hundred yards farther down the gulch. Dodson was, for a wonder, sober. He had no money of his own and he had been unable to wheedle many free drinks from miners.
At sight of the gambler Dodson scowled. He had plenty of reasons for disliking Scot. He nursed a continuous spleen because he would not let him get at the money collected for the baby. His pride suffered at accepting favours from a man who scorned him. He was jealous of the interest McClintock must have aroused in his “woman,” Mollie Dodson. No matter how he stormed and sneered at her he could not keep her mind from a comparison of the men who just now were most present in her life, and in that silent judgment he knew he must play a sorry part.
The bummer, to use the phrase of the day, would have passed without speaking. A sulky dignity was the rôle he judged the most effective. But Scot caught him by the coat lapel and swung him sharply round.
“I’m going to teach you not to lay a hand on—on a woman,” McClintock said, his voice thick with suppressed passion.
Dodson’s thin mask of offended dignity fell away instantly. He tried to back off, snarling at the man whose steel grip held him.
“She’s been tellin’ lies on me, has she?” he retorted, showing his teeth.
“Mrs. Dodson says she fell against the wagon. I don’t believe it. You struck her, you yellow wolf. Right now I’m going to give you the thrashing of your life.”
The eyes of the loafer flashed fear. “You lemme go,” he panted, trying to break away. “Don’t you dass touch me. Think I don’t know about you an’ her? Think I’m a plumb idjit?”
An open-handed smash across the mouth stopped his words. He made a swift pass with his right hand. Scot’s left shot out and caught the wrist, twisting it back and up. A bullet was flung into the sky; then, under the urge of a pain which leaped from wrist to shoulder of the tortured arm, the revolver dropped harmlessly to the ground.
“Goddlemighty, you’re breakin’ my arm,” Dodson shrieked, sagging at the knees as he gave to the pressure.
Scot sent home a stiff right. “You’ll be nursing a black eye from that to-morrow,” he said evenly.
The craven in Dodson came out at once. He tried to escape punishment by whining and begging. He promised anything the other man might demand of him. He made an attempt to fling himself to the ground and cover up. McClintock set his teeth and went through with the job.
Afterwards to the bully who lay on the sand sobbing with rage and pain, he gave curt orders. “You’ll go back to town and not show up at the wagon to-night. To-morrow you’ll tell Mrs. Dodson you had a fight. You’ll not tell her who with or what it was about. If you ever lay a hand on her again or on Vicky, I’ll break every bone in your body. Understand?”
The beaten man gulped out what might be taken for an assent.
Scot turned away, sick at heart. Already he questioned the wisdom of what he had done.
