30,000 On the Hoof. Zane Grey

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      Lucinda failed completely to share his enthusiasm, although she was glad to find that a really momentous occasion could pierce his practicality. She was left alone on that high driver’s seat, too high to leap off without risking life and limb. Coyote regarded her with intelligent eyes, as if she understood Lucinda’s predicament. Lucinda held the whip with nerveless hand. The wagging beasts plodded on unmindful of her tightly oppressed breast and staring eyes. Ahead the road followed the lake shore for miles, as far as she could see. Her ponderous steeds could not turn to the left, but suppose they turned to the right? The wagon and she, with her trunks of pretty clothes and her chest full of even more precious and perishable belongings, and Logan’s utensils and supplies for his great enterprise—these must all go toppling down into the lake. But while Lucinda watched with uncertain breath the oxen traveled along, slowly and steadily, ponderously, as they had done the day before. Probably they were not even aware that a woman-driver now held the whip. Lucinda hugged that comforting thought to her heart. She determined not to yell “gee,” “haw,” or “whoa” until necessity compelled it; and gradually her fears subsided. She could look at the slope and out upon the lake, and far ahead with a growing sense of something beside the risk of the situation. She was doing an unprecedented thing. Driving a prairie-schooner drawn by oxen! Here was an amazing fact that should have indulged her primitive side to the full. But that part of her seemed in abeyance.

      “I had an idea school teaching was hard,” she soliloquized. “But this pioneer game! . . . Oh, I do love Logan!”

      The sun came up glaringly hot. Lucinda removed her heavy coat. When she looked back she thought she saw the dust-obscured cattle running the other way, and before she realized disloyalty to Logan she hoped they were.

      The time came, however, when she realized her mistake. A breeze from behind brought a smell of dust, then the sound of hoofs. Peering back Lucinda saw that Logan’s stock was not far behind. Then through the dust she espied him, and on the moment he appeared to be throwing stones with a violence that suggested impotent fury. Lucinda had it in her to laugh. “Serves him right—the cowboy cattleman husband who does not have time even for a honeymoon!”

      Almost before she realized it she had reached the end of the lake, where the road turned across a bare flat to enter the forest. The oxen apparently saw nothing save the road, and they kept on it, oblivious of the cattle behind. Lucinda also made the surprising discovery that the sun stood nearly overhead. She was hot and thirsty, and she could not find the canteen that Logan had stuck somewhere under the seat.

      As the wagon rolled around a bend in the road Lucinda looked back. The cattle were strung out. On the moment Logan was chasing some wild heifers that had swerved far off the course. The cows looked dusty and tired. Then Lucinda saw the bull. In fact he bellowed on the instant. She had to see him. So close behind that he had driven the haltered horse right on the wheels of the wagon! A dusty beast with wide horns and a huge head with eyes of green fire and a red tongue hanging out! Lucinda conceived the fearful idea that he would frighten the horse, charge the wagon, and perhaps gore the oxen into a stampede.

      This direful catastrophe failed to materialize. The oxen gained the woods, where the wide canvas top brushed the foliage on each side.

      Meanwhile the hours had been passing. Soon the character of the woods gave way to scaly ground covered with brush and scattered oaks, then a large oval open gray with sage, and centered in a depression which had at one time held water. Lucinda’s quick eyes caught sight of a band of fleet gray-rumped graceful animals fleeing behind a coal black leader. They flashed into the forest on the far side.

      Some time in the afternoon Logan passed her to the left, making a cut off across the sage. He was at full gallop in pursuit of some of his stock. He rounded them up and turned them back with the others. After a while, far in the distance, Lucinda espied an old cabin and a fence. Logan drew far ahead. She saw him drive his stock through the fence or around it.

      Lucinda was half an hour covering the intervening space. She needed all that time to recover her equanimity. But she need not have concerned herself about Logan. It transpired that at sunset when she drove up to the old cabin and yelled, “Whoa!” she came upon Logan sitting on a log, grimy with dust and sweat, red as fire where he wiped the black off, and manifestly possessed by an elation that had just banished a very ignoble rage.

      “How’d you make it—when I wasn’t close?” he asked.

      “Just fine. But that bull gave me a scare.”

      “I reckon. I’ll kill him yet. Of all the damn ornery muddle-headed beasts I ever had to do with—he’s the worst. . . . Wife, I worried myself sick about you, all for nothing.”

      “Yes, you did,” scoffed Lucinda, secretly pleased. She got off with Coyote leaping down after her. The ground felt queer—or else her legs were insensible. “Where do we camp? And where’s the water?”

      “Holbert said there’s a spring behind the cabin. Reckon we’ll camp right here.”

      Lucinda untied the swinging buckets and with two of them started to hunt for water. Disillusion and weariness hung on her like wet blankets; nevertheless some feeling antagonistic to them worked upon her. A few plaintive flowers, primrose and dahlia, growing out of the weeds beside the cabin, eloquently told Lucinda that a woman had tended their parent roots there once upon a time. Perhaps a tenderfoot woman like herself! There was tragedy in the vacant eye-like windows. She was crossing a level grassy place when Coyote sprang back with a bark. Bsszzz! A loud buzzing rattle sent Lucinda’s nerves tingling.

      “That’s a rattler. Look out!” shouted Logan, from behind. He came on a heavy run. “There! See him? A timber rattlesnake.”

      Lucinda saw a thick snake black and yellow, scaly and ugly, glide under the cabin. “That’s all right,” she said to the perturbed Logan. “I’m not afraid of snakes.”

      “Well, don’t go kicking one of those boys in the grass. . . . Here’s a trail.”

      They discovered the clear bubbling spring of cold water, which made the difference, Logan stated, between a good and a poor camp. On the way back Lucinda peeping into the log-cabin became virtually obsessed by wonder and dread. The littered, earthen floor, the blackened fireplace, the rude shelves and the bedstead of poles, told a story that saddened and shocked her. What had happened there? How little eastern people realized the crude living of those who set their faces West! Lucinda did not want Logan to find out how strongly she felt. She asked him if he had seen the beautiful black horned animal leading the white and tan ones across the open.

      “Sure did. Golly, I wanted my rifle. That was a black antelope, king of that herd. Holbert has seen him for years.”

      “Logan, you wouldn’t kill him, would you?” she asked, gazing at him in horror.

      “Reckon I would. Wild animals sort of excite me. I like to hunt. I’ll bet we make the acquaintance of Gray, that black-ruffed lofer.”

      “I hope not, if you must murder everything;” returned Lucinda sharply. Logan stared at her then stomped away with a puzzled frown on his face. Lucinda remembered how she used to fight her brothers and their comrades for chasing chipmunks along the rail-fences. How they would yell and run, wild as any young savages! But she must conquer her disgust at Logan’s passion to kill, she knew, regardless of her own feeling in the matter.

      Supper was soon over and the chores finished. The lonely night clamped down upon the forest. Lucinda was glad СКАЧАТЬ