The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories. Уилла Кэсер

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СКАЧАТЬ were the boys who camped with me that summer night upon the sand bar.

      After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he could never be got past the big one.

      “You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the bright one in the middle?” said Otto Hassler; “that's Orion's belt, and the bright one is the clasp.” I crawled behind Otto's shoulder and sighted up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip of his steady forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a good many stars.

      Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands clasped under his head. “I can see the North Star,” he announced, contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. “Anyone might get lost and need to know that.”

      We all looked up at it.

      “How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point north any more?” Tip asked.

      Otto shook his head. “My father says that there was another North Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what would happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?”

      Arthur chuckled. “I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead Indians.”

      We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite different from its cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret.

      “Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams,” remarked Otto. “You could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always look as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune is all written out in the stars, don't they?”

      “They believe so in the old country,” Fritz affirmed.

      But Arthur only laughed at him. “You're thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks.”

      We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before the evening star went down behind the cornfields, when someone cried, “There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!”

      We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as an angry heathen god.

      “When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their prisoners on the temple top,” Percy announced.

      “Go on, Perce. You got that out of Golden Days. Do you believe that, Arthur?” I appealed.

      Arthur answered, quite seriously: “Like as not. The moon was one of their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where they used to sacrifice their prisoners.”

      As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were still conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.

      “Must have been a big cat jumping,” said Fritz. “They do sometimes. They must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!”

      There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.

      “Suppose there ever was any gold hid away in this old river?” Fritz asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire, his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion seriously.

      “Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his men came up to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country once.”

      Percy looked interested. “Was that before the Mormons went through?”

      We all laughed at this.

      “Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came along this very river. They always followed the watercourses.”

      “I wonder where this river really does begin?” Tip mused. That was an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the map the little black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose that ours came from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument. “If us boys had grit enough to try it, it wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St. Joe.”

      We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray himself.

      “Now it's your turn, Tip.”

      Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked shyly out of his queer, tight little face. “My place is awful far away. My Uncle Bill told me about it.”

      Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had drifted out again.

      “Where is it?”

      “Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes.”

      “Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?”

      Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.

      “There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had some sort of queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't fighters, anyhow.

      “One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up—a kind of waterspout—and when they got back to their rock they found their little staircase had СКАЧАТЬ