"Children's Books - Steinbeck, John - The Red Pony" - читать интересную книгу автора (Children's Books)

THE RED PONY
by John Steinbeck

*END*

I THE GIFT
II THE GREAT MOUNTAINS
III THE PROMISE
IV THE LEADER OF THE PEOPLE


THE RED PONY

I. THE GIFT

AT DAYBREAK Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse
and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the
sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a wal-
rus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on
the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery grey
and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat
was spiky and weathered Billy was still stuffing his shirt
into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He un-
buckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed,
by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual
increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When
he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by
holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing
fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn, rubbing his
hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle
horses in the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time;
and he had hardly finished when the iron triangle started
ringing at the ranch house. Billy stuck the brush and
currycomb together and laid them on the rail, and went
up to breakfast. His action had been so deliberate and
yet so wasteless of time that he came to the house while
Mrs. Tiflin was still ringing the triangle. She nodded her
grey head to him and withdrew into the kitchen. Billy
Buck sat down on the steps, because he was a cow hand,
and it wouldn't be fitting that he should go first into the
3
John Steinbeck
dining-room. He heard Mr. Tiflin in the house, stamping
his feet into his boots.
The high jangling note of the triangle put the boy
Jody in motion. He was only a little boy, ten years old,
with hair like dusty yellow grass and with shy polite grey
eyes, and with a mouth that worked when he thought.
The triangle picked him up out of sleep. It didn't occur