Название: Virginian, The The
Автор: Owen Wister
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Классическая проза
isbn: 9781974999576
isbn:
The heat went out of the air, and in the canyon the violet light began to show. Many hours had gone, but Em’ly never ceased. Now she suddenly flew up in a tree and sat there with her noise still going; but it had risen lately several notes into a slim, acute level of terror, and was not like machinery any more, nor like any sound I ever heard before or since. Below the tree stood the bewildered little chicken, cheeping, and making tiny jumps to reach its mother.
“Yes,” said the Virginian, “it’s comical. Even her aigg acted different from anybody else’s.” He paused, and looked across the wide, mellowing plain with the expression of easy-going gravity so common with him. Then he looked at Em’ly in the tree and the yellow chicken.
“It ain’t so damned funny,” said he.
We went in to supper, and I came out to find the hen lying on the ground, dead. I took the chicken to the family in the hen-house.
No, it was not altogether funny any more. And I did not think less of the Virginian when I came upon him surreptitiously digging a little hole in the field for her.
“I have buried some citizens here and there,” said he, “that I have respected less.”
And when the time came for me to leave Sunk Creek, my last word to the Virginian was, “Don’t forget Em’ly.”
“I ain’t likely to,” responded the cow-puncher. “She is just one o’ them parables.”
Save when he fell into his native idioms (which, they told me, his wanderings had well-nigh obliterated until that year’s visit to his home again revived them in his speech), he had now for a long while dropped the “seh,” and all other barriers between us. We were thorough friends, and had exchanged many confidences both of the flesh and of the spirit. He even went the length of saying that he would write me the Sunk Creek news if I would send him a line now and then. I have many letters from him now. Their spelling came to be faultless, and in the beginning was little worse than George Washington’s.
The Judge himself drove me to the railroad by another way—across the Bow Leg Mountains, and south through Balaam’s Ranch and Drybone to Rock Creek.
“I’ll be very homesick,” I told him.
“Come and pull the latch-string whenever you please,” he bade me. I wished that I might! No lotus land ever cast its spell upon man’s heart more than Wyoming had enchanted mine.
VII.
THROUGH TWO SNOWS
“Dear Friend [thus in the spring the Virginian wrote me], Yours received. It must be a poor thing to be sick. That time I was shot at Caada de Oro would have made me sick if it had been a littel lower or if I was much of a drinking man. You will be well if you give over city life and take a hunt with me about August or say September for then the elk will be out of the velvett.
“Things do not please me here just now and I am going to settel it by vamosing. But I would be glad to see you. It would be pleasure not business for me to show you plenty elk and get you strong. I am not crybabying to the Judge or making any kick about things. He will want me back after he has swallowed a litter tincture of time. It is the best dose I know.
“Now to answer your questions. Yes the Emmily hen might have ate loco weed if hens do. I never saw anything but stock and horses get poisoned with loco weed. No the school is not built yet. They are always big talkers on Bear Creek. No I have not seen Steve. He is around but I am sorry for him. Yes I have been to Medicine Bow. I had the welcom I wanted. Do you remember a man I played poker and he did not like it? He is working on the upper ranch near Ten Sleep. He does not amount to a thing except with weaklings. Uncle Hewie has twins. The boys got him vexed some about it, but I think they are his. Now that is all I know to-day and I would like to see you poco presently as they say at Los Cruces. There’s no sense in you being sick.”
The rest of this letter discussed the best meeting point for us should I decide to join him for a hunt.
That hunt was made, and during the weeks of its duration something was said to explain a little more fully the Virginian’s difficulty at the Sunk Creek Ranch, and his reason for leaving his excellent employer the Judge. Not much was said, to be sure; the Virginian seldom spent many words upon his own troubles. But it appeared that owing to some jealousy of him on the part of the foreman, or the assistant foreman, he found himself continually doing another man’s work, but under circumstances so skilfully arranged that he got neither credit nor pay for it. He would not stoop to telling tales out of school. Therefore his ready and prophetic mind devised the simple expedient of going away altogether. He calculated that Judge Henry would gradually perceive there was a connection between his departure and the cessation of the satisfactory work. After a judicious interval it was his plan to appear again in the neighborhood of Sunk Creek and await results.
Concerning Steve he would say no more than he had written. But it was plain that for some cause this friendship had ceased.
Money for his services during the hunt he positively declined to accept, asserting that he had not worked enough to earn his board. And the expedition ended in an untravelled corner of the Yellowstone Park, near Pitchstone Canyon, where he and young Lin McLean and others were witnesses of a sad and terrible drama that has been elsewhere chronicled.
His prophetic mind had foreseen correctly the shape of events at Sunk Creek. The only thing that it had not foreseen was the impression to be made upon the Judge’s mind by his conduct.
Toward the close of that winter, Judge and Mrs. Henry visited the East. Through them a number of things became revealed. The Virginian was back at Sunk Creek.
“And,” said Mrs. Henry, “he would never have left you if I had had my way, Judge H.!”
“No, Madam Judge,” retorted her husband; “I am aware of that. For you have always appreciated a fine appearance in a man.”
“I certainly have,” confessed the lady, mirthfully. “And the way he used to come bringing my horse, with the ridges of his black hair so carefully brushed and that blue spotted handkerchief tied so effectively round his throat, was something that I missed a great deal after he went away.”
“Thank you, my dear, for this warning. I have plans that will keep him absent quite constantly for the future.”
And then they spoke less flightily. “I always knew,” said the lady, “that you had found a treasure when that man came.”
The Judge laughed. “When it dawned on me,” he said, “how cleverly he caused me to learn the value of his services by depriving me of them, I doubted whether it was safe to take him back.”
“Safe!” cried Mrs. Henry.
“Safe, my dear. Because I’m afraid he is pretty nearly as shrewd as I am. And that’s rather dangerous in a subordinate.” The Judge laughed again. “But his action regarding the man they call Steve has made me feel easy.”
And then it came out that the Virginian was supposed to СКАЧАТЬ