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Under the Law. Edwina Stanton Babcock
Читать онлайн.Название Under the Law
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4057664575364
Автор произведения Edwina Stanton Babcock
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently. Half ruefully he passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want to play"—tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair—and I'm no plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."
The word play made him think of something; pushing away the dog, Watts rose and went to a table drawer, taking out, with a smile, a little envelope with "Pudge" scrawled on it. The lawyer, still smiling, slid out the contents, two Indian arrow-heads, one white, the other gray flint. Thoughtfully he turned them over in his large palm. "Poor good little Indians," he murmured, "we're still teaching our children that you were devils, aren't we? Aren't we funny? We rather owe you an apology, you strange, mysterious men who never knew fulfilment—who ranged these Hudson River shores and thronged New Jersey and New England and were mighty hunters and happy until you came up against the white man and gunpowder and tobacco and whiskey! Well"—Watts chuckled, "Pudgy shan't be prejudiced. I'll write you a good character for him."
Knocking his pipe out, laying it tenderly on the mantel, the big man sprawled like a schoolboy over the table writing in long hand the letter that was to accompany the arrow-heads.
"Dear Pudge—How are you? What are you doing, helping Mother or raising the roof with noise and destruction. How are the guinea pigs? I often think of them. Well, Pudge, I rather hope you are helping Mother a lot, because she's such a good friend of yours and mine and she looks so pretty and seems so wise, though perhaps you and I are sometimes wiser. I'm sending you two arrow-heads I found in a field up North in Rockland County. I was fishing up near the Ramapo Mountains where the stone walls run like great serpents up and down the hills. There's a lot of history lying around loose near here, Major André and Washington and the Dutch and the Indians. I'll show you these places some day. The Indians, to my way of thinking, were fine fellows. They took long steps when they walked and knew how to set traps and hunt and fish, and they were for the most part real religious men. But men who knew how to make war just to get more money, came and took their land away from them, and then the Indians turned naughty the way you and I do sometimes, Pudge. My! my! how they tore around and howled and took scalps, which were not nice to keep. No gentleman would ever scalp a lady, it is so uncomfortable, and yet these Indians scalped many ladies!
"It's a pity the Indians were bad and forgot their manners, for if they could have remembered to be polite and gentlemanly they could have stayed here and they would have been the real Americans and you and I would have probably tried to imitate them and never used anything but wampum, which means shells; same as money to buy ice-cream cones with. I think it would have been a heap more sensible if the white man had made lasting friends of the Indians and learned a lot of things that the Indians knew but which the white men have since been too stupid to learn. But you see, the white men had a new machine called a 'gun,' and there was nothing to do with it but shoot it at somebody, and that made trouble. And the Indians, eager to learn, got guns too, and thought it was funny to point them at people. And their guns went off all right and there was the dickens to pay. Machines are nice things, Pudgy, but the men who make the machines must be sure to have their minds go ahead of the machines, or some day the machines will just get up and smash the world.
"Good-night, Pudgy, old chap—I wish you could hear all the funny sounds up on this mountain. Friar Tuck smells, besides hearing; he reads the night with his nose, the same way we would read a book—and he smells out such stories! Here are the arrow-heads; I'm sending them to you as if you were my own little boy, for see, Pudge—big man as I am, I have no little boy of my own—and that sometimes happens to big men ..."
Suddenly the man's head dropped. The pen rolled to the floor, and Friar Tuck nosed at it a moment then tucked his head into his folded paws. Watts Shipman sat at the table, his own face buried in his arms.
CHAPTER VIII
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