"David Drake - Old Nathan (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

rumbled in pleasure and anticipation.

***

The track to Big Bone Valley meandered a quarter mile from the public road, through forest which had
remained unaffected by white settlement of the region. Custom and Boardman's deed both gave him the
right to lay out a fifteen-foot cartway through the intervening land, the waterless side of a tilted rockshelf.
Instead, someoneтАФperhaps Bully RansdenтАФhad hacked down so straight a path through the sparse
undergrowth that Old Nathan only with difficulty could walk abreast of his bull.

The work of clearing the newground had not been skimped, however.

The track debouched on the valley head and a scene of devastation which suggested natural disaster
rather than human agency. There was still a tang of smoke in the air, though the fires that devoured the
piled cuttings had been cold a month. Rain had beaten down the ashes and carved long gouges through
the red clay beneath. Though the spring-fed stream in the valley's heart had cleared, the moss and
crevices of its bed were stained by heavier particles of clay that would not wash away until another storm
renewed them.
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Ransden and his oxen had dragged the tree boles together at the far end of the valley, but the stumps
would remain until rot and termites dissolved their roots enough that a team could tug them free. There
was no evident reason the shallow valley should not have been plowed despite the stumps, but the one
straggling attempt at a furrow was shorter than the rain-cut gulleys it intersected.

The sun was by now beneath the horizon and the sky, though bright, cast a diffuse illumination which
softened the scene. Nonetheless, the valley's starkness was so evident that John Boardman muttered,
"Sally Annwould have this and not forty acres uv bottom as good as any land in the county. And we'd
hev lived at the homeplace till our first crop was in the store, besides."

The cunning man looked at the boy who had hired him and said, "Sally Ann Hewitt may be able t' carve
ye into a man yit, but I don't know I think much of what yer daddy's left her t' work with."

"He ain't here, now," said Spanish King, striding deliberately down the slope with his nose high and his
tail vertical. "But he'sbeen here, yes, he's been here."

"Isaid I didn't like this place!" interjected the gelding on a note that rose close to panic. The horse
curvetted with a violence which took his rider unaware.

"Virgil!" cried Boardman, glad enough for an excuse to ignore the insult he had just received. He sawed
the gelding's reins and pounded his boot heel into the outer flank of the rotating horse. "Virgil, I'll flay the
hide offen ye!"

"Steady, ye fool horse," Old Nathan put in, understood but just as likely as Boardman to be ignored.
With animals as with humans, being heard was a far cry from being listened to. "Settle yerself and ye'll be
out uv here in no time, seein's it flusters ye so much."