ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Judith of the Plains. Marie Manning
Читать онлайн.Название Judith of the Plains
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066498993
Автор произведения Marie Manning
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
The men broke into shouts of laughter, loud and ringing, then doubled up and had it out all over again. And their noisy merriment was as clear an indication of the suddenly lifted strain, at the averted shooting, as it was of their enjoyment of the farce. Simpson, relieved of the fear of sudden death, now sought to put a better face on his cowardice. Now that his enemy was well out of sight, Simpson handled his revolver with easy assurance.
“Put ut up,” shouted Costigan, above the general uproar. “’Tis toime to fear a revolver in the hands av Simpson whin he’s no intinsions av shootin’.”
Simpson still attempted to harangue the crowd, but his voice was lost in the general thigh-slapping and the shouts and roars that showed no signs of abating. But when he caught a man by the coat lapel in his efforts to secure a hearing, that was another matter, and the man shook him off as if his touch were contagion. Simpson, craving mercy on account of petticoats, evading a meeting that was “up to him,” they were willing to stand as a laughing-stock, but Simpson as an equal, grasping the lapels of their coats, they would have none of.
He slunk away from them to a corner of the eating-house, feeling the stigma of their contempt, yet afraid to go out into the street where his enemy might be waiting for him. Much of death and blood and recklessness “Town” had seen and condoned, but cowardice was the unforgivable sin. It balked the rude justice of these frontiersmen and tampered with their code, and Simpson knew that the game had gone against him.
“What was it all about? Were they in earnest, or was it only their way of amusing themselves?” inquired Mary Carmichael, who had slipped into Mrs. Clark’s kitchen after the men at the table had taken things in hand.
“Jim Rodney was in earnest, an’ he had reason to be. That man Simpson was paid by a cattle outfit—now, mind, I ain’t sayin’ which—to get Jim Rodney’s sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the throats of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on grazin’ ’em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well, I’m told they up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep. Jim has over five thousand, an’ it’s just before lambing, and them pore ewes, all heavy, is being druv’ down to Watson’s shearing-pens, that Jim always shears at. Jim an’ two herders and a couple of dawgs—least, this is the way I heard it—is drivin’ ’em easy, ’cause, as I said before, it’s just before lambing. It does now seem awful cruel to me to shear just before lambing, but that’s their way out here.
“Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain’t more’n two hours from the pens an’ he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top of a cañon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an’ dashes into the herd and drives the wether that’s leading right over the cliff. The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right over the cliff like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried to drive ’em back, they tell me, an’ he an’ the dawg were shot at from the clump of willows by some one else who was there. Three hundred sheep had gone over the cliff before Jim knew what was happening. He rode like mad right through the herd to try and head ’em off; but you know what sheep is like—they’re like lost souls headin’ for damnation. Nothing can stop ’em when they’re once started. And Jim lost every head—started for the shearing-pens a rich man—rich for Jim—an’ seen everything he had swept away before his eyes, his wife an’ children made paupers. My son he come by and found him. He said that Jim was sittin’ huddled up in a heap, his knees drawed up under his chin, starin’ straight up into the noonday sky, same as if he was askin’ God how He could be so cruel. His dead dawg, that they had shot, was by the side of him. The herder that was with Jim had taken the one that was shot into Watson’s, so when my son found Jim he was alone, sittin’ on the edge of the cliff with his dead dawg, an’ the sky about was black with buzzards; an’ Jim he just sat an’ stared up at ’em, and when my son spoke to him he never answered any more than a dead man. He shuck him by the arm, but Jim just sat there, watchin’ the sun, the buzzards, and the dead sheep.”
“Was nothing done to this man Simpson?”
“The cattle outfit that he done the dirty work for swore an alibi for him. Jim has been in hard luck ever since. He’s been rustlin’ cattle right along; but Lord, who can blame him? He got into some trouble down to Rawlins—shot a man he thought was with Simpson, but who wasn’t—and he’s been in jail ever since. Course now that he’s out Simpson’s bound to get peppered. Glad it didn’t happen here, though. ’Twould be a kind of unpleasant thing to have connected with a eating-house, don’t you think so?” she inquired, with the grim philosophy of the country.
The eating-house patrons had gone their several ways, and the quiet of the dining-room was oppressive by contrast with its late boisterousness. Mrs. Clark, her hands imprisoned in bread-dough, begged Mary to look over the screen door and see if anything was happening. “I’m always suspicious when it’s quiet. I know they’re in deviltry of some sort.”
Mary tiptoed to the door and peeped over, but the room was deserted, save for Simpson, huddled in a corner, biting his finger-nails. “The nasty thing!” exploded Mrs. Clark, when she had received the bulletin. “I’d turn him out if it wasn’t for the notoriety he might bring my place in gettin’ killed in front of it.”
“I dare say I’d better go and see after my trunk; it’s still on the station platform.” Mary wondered what her prim aunts would think of her for sitting in Mrs. Clark’s kitchen, but it had seemed so much more of a refuge than the sordid streets of the hideous little town, with its droves of men and never a glimpse of a woman that she had been only too glad to avail herself of the invitation of the proprietress to “make herself at home till the stage left.”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Mrs. Clark, wiping her hand only partially free from dough and presenting it to Miss Carmichael. She had not inquired where the girl was going, nor even hinted to discover where she came from, but she gave her the godspeed that the West knows how to give, and the girl felt better for it.
At the station, where Mary shortly presented herself, in the interest of that old man of the sea of all travellers, luggage, she learned that the stage did not leave town for some three-quarters of an hour yet. A young man, manipulating many sheets of flimsy, yellow paper covered with large, flourishing handwriting, looked up in answer to her inquiries about Lost Trail. This young man, whose accent, clothes, and manner proclaimed him “from the East,” whither, in all probability, he would shortly return if he did not mend his ways, disclaimed all knowledge of the place as if it were an undesirable acquaintance. But before he could deny it thrice, a man who had heard the cabalistic name was making his way towards the desk, the pride of the traveller radiating from every feature.
The cosmopolite who knew Lost Trail was the type of man who is born to be a Kentucky colonel, and perhaps may have achieved his destiny before coming to this “No Man’s Land,” for reasons into which no one inquired, and which were obviously no one’s business. They knew him here by the name of “Lone Tooth Hank,” and he wore what had been, in the days of his colonelcy—or its equivalent—a frock-coat, restrained by the lower button, and thus establishing a waist-line long after nature had had the last word to say on the subject. With this he wore the sombrero of the country, and the combination carried a rakish effect that was positively sinister.
The scornful clerk introduced Mary as a young lady inquiring about some place in the bad-lands. Off came the sombrero with a sweep, and Lone Tooth smiled in a way that accented the dental solitaire to which he owed his name. Miss Carmichael, concealing her terror of this casual cavalier, inquired if he could tell her the distance to Lost Trail.
“I sho’ly can, and with, consid’able pleasure.” The sombrero completed a semicircular sweep and arrived in the neighborhood of Mr. Hank’s heart in significance of his vassalage to the fair sex. He proceeded:
“Lost Trail sutney is right lonesome. A friend of mine gets a little too playful fo’ the evah-increasin’ meetropolitan spirit of this yere camp, and tries a little tahget practice on the main