The Cowboy MEGAPACK ®. Owen Wister

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ delivered in a voice which was all Mattock, enough to awaken by the mere sound all the old resistance in him.

      He nodded at the Lexington road. “There are several thousand men ahead there, ma’am. Hunting Boyd out if he wants to hide from me—and he will—is impossible. He’s big enough to pass a recruiter; they ain’t too particular about age these days. And he’ll stay just as far from me as he can until he is sworn in. He already knows how I feel about his enlistin’.”

      Her gloved hands tightened on the reins. “If I could see John Morgan himself—”

      “If you could get to Lexington and find him—”

      “But Boyd’s just a child. He hasn’t the slightest idea of war except the stories he hears…no idea of what could happen to him, or what this means to Merry. All this criminal nonsense about being a soldier—sabers and spurs, and dashing around behind a flag, the wrong flag, too—” She caught her breath in an unusual betrayal of emotion. And now she studied Drew with some deliberation, noting his thinness, itemizing his shabbiness.

      He smiled tiredly. “No, I ain’t Boyd’s idea of a returnin’ hero, am I?” he agreed with her unspoken comment. “Also, we Rebs don’t use sabers; they ain’t worth much in a real skirmish.”

      She flushed. “Drew, why did you go? Was it all because of Father? I know he made it hard for you.”

      “You know—” Drew regarded a circling bird in the section of sky above her head—“some day I hope I’ll discover just what kind of a no-account Hunt Rennie was, to make his son so unacceptable. Most of the Texans I’ve ridden with in the army haven’t been so bad; some of them are downright respectable.”

      “I don’t know.” Again she flushed. “It was a long time ago when it all happened. I was just a little girl. And Father, well, he has very strong prejudices. But, Drew, for you to go against everything you’d been taught, to turn Rebel—that added to his bitterness. And now Boyd is trying to go the same way. Isn’t there something you can do? I can’t stand to see that look in Merry’s eyes. If we can just get Boyd home again—”

      “Don’t hope too much.” Drew was certain that nothing Marianna Forbes could do was going to lead Boyd Barrett back home again. On the other hand, if the boy had not formally enlisted, perhaps the rigors of one of the General’s usual cross-country scrambles might be disillusioning. But, having tasted the quality of Boyd’s stubbornness in the past, Drew doubted that. For long months he had been able to cut right out of his life Red Springs and all it stood for; now it was trying to put reins on him again. He shifted his weight in the saddle.

      “He’s been restless all spring,” his aunt continued. “We might have known that, given an opportunity like this, the boy would do something wild. Only the waste, the sinful waste! I can’t go back and face Merry without trying something—anything! Can’t you…Drew?”

      “I don’t know.” He couldn’t harden himself to tell her the truth. “I’ll try,” he promised vaguely.

      “Drew—” A change in tone brought his attention back to her. She looked disturbed, almost embarrassed. “Have you had a hard time? You look so…so thin and tired. Is there anything you need?”

      He flinched from any such attack on the shell he had built against the intrusion of Red Springs, for a second or two feeling once more the rasp across raw nerves. “We don’t get much time for sleep when the General’s on the prod. Horse stealin’ and such keeps us a mite busy, accordin’ to your Yankee friends. And we have to pay our respects to them, just to keep them reminded that this is Morgan country. I’ll warn you again, Aunt Marianna, keep Lady Jane out of Lexington today—if you want to keep her.” He gathered up his reins. “Boyd told me about Grandfather,” he added in a rush. “I’m sorry.” And he was, he told himself, sorry for Aunt Marianna, who had to stay at Red Springs now, and even a little in an impersonal way for the old man, who must find inactivity a worse prison than any stone-walled room. But it was being polite about a stranger. “Major Forbes…he’s all right?”

      “Yes. Only, Drew—” Again the urgency in her voice held him against his will, “Boyd.…”

      He was saved further evasion by a carrying whistle from down the road, the signal to pull in pickets. Pursing his own lips, he answered.

      “I have to go. I’ll do what I can.” He set Shawnee pounding along the pike, and he did not look back.

      If he were ever to fulfill his promise to locate Boyd, that would have to come later. Quirk’s horse catch delivered, the scouts were on the move again, on the Georgetown road, riding at a pace which suggested they must keep ahead of a boiling wasp’s nest of Yankees. There was an embarrassment of blue-coat prisoners on the march between two lines of gray uniforms, and pockets of the enemy such as that at Fort Clay were left behind. The strike northward took on a feverish drive.

      Georgetown with its streets full of women and cheering males, too old or too young to be riding with the columns. Mid-afternoon, Friday, and the heat rising from the pavement as only June heat could. Then they reached the Frankfort road, and the main command halted. The scouts ate in the saddle as they fanned out along the Frankfort pike, pushing toward Cynthiana. Sam Croxton strode back from filling his canteen at a farmyard well and scowled at Drew, who had dismounted and loosened cinch to cool Shawnee’s back.

      “Cynthiana, now. I’m beginnin’ to wonder, Rennie, if we know just which way we are goin’.”

      Drew shrugged. “Might be a warm reception waitin’ us there. Drake figures about five hundred Yankees on the spot, and trains comin’ in with more all the time.”

      Sighing, Croxton rubbed his hand across his freckled face, smearing road dust and sweat into a gritty mask. “Me—I could do with four or five hours’ sleep, right down here in the road. Always providin’ no blue belly’d trot along to stir me up. Seems like I ain’t had a ten minutes’ straight nap since we joined up with the main column. Scoutin’ ahead a couple weeks ago you could at least fill your belly and rest up at some farm. Them boys pushin’ the prisoners back there sure has it tough. Bet some of ’em been eatin’ dust most all day—”

      “Be glad you’re not ridin’ in one of the wagons nursin’ a hole in your middle.” Drew wet his handkerchief, or the sad gray rag which served that purpose, and carefully washed out Shawnee’s nostrils, rubbing the horse gently down the nose and around his pricked ears.

      Croxton spat and a splotch of brown tobacco juice pocked the roadside gravel. “Now ain’t you cheerful!” he observed. “No, I’ve no hole in my middle, or my top, or my bottom—and I don’t want none, neither. All I want is about an hour’s sleep without Quirk or Drake breathin’ down my back wantin’ to know why I’m playin’ wagon dog. The which I ain’t gonna have very soon by the looks of it. So.…” He mounted, spat again with accuracy enough to stun a grasshopper off a nodding weed top, which feat seemed to restore a measure of his usual good nature. “Got him! You comin’, Rennie?”

      The hours of Friday afternoon, evening, night, crawled by—leadenly, as far as the men in the straggling column were concerned. That dash which had carried them through from the Virginia border, through the old-time whirling attack on Mount Sterling only days earlier, and which had brought them into and beyond Lexington, was seeping from tired men who slept in the saddle or fell out, too drugged with fatigue to know that they slumped down along country fences, unconscious gifts for the enemy doggedly drawing in from three sides. There was the core of veterans who had seen this before, been a part of such punishing riding in Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky. The signs could be СКАЧАТЬ