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

piebald bull had done earlier that morning. His bitch gamboled about the man and horse, rushing from
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stump to charred brush pile, yapping enthusiastically at the small birds he put up. When the blond dog
noticed Old Nathan, she trotted over to him a hundred yards in advance of her master. Her head was
thrown back and her tail held high, giving the impression that she was already in flight after a rebuff.

"G'day t' ye," said the bitch, well back from the arc Old Nathan could sweep with the knife he wielded.
She could smell his mood, and she had no way of telling that it was not directed at her or the world of
which she was one of the nearer parts.

"I've knowed better," said the cunning man. He wiped the knife's longer blade on the bull's hide to clean
the steel, then cocked up the sole of his left boot and stropped the edge on it, two strokes to a side with
a metronome's precision. He paused and added with the same lack of anything but a desire to be precise,
"And worse, I reckon. Maybe worse."

"Chased off t'other bull, did he?" the bitch remarked, stretching her muzzle out to snuffle Spanish King.
Her right forepaw began a cautious step forward as she continued, "Wouldn't hev believed it, but he's
gone sure 'nuff. Mean 'un, thet. Too mean t' live nor die, seemed t' me."

"Whoa, Virgil!" John Boardman called to his gelding, who had stopped twenty feet from the carcase
anyway. The odors of blood and death threw the horse into a shivering panic not far short of driving him
off in a mad stampede back up the way he had come. The gelding calmed somewhat when his rider
dismounted, knotted the reins on an upturned tree root, and stepped between him and the scene of
slaughter.

"Well, I reckon ye did it," said Boardman as he approached Old Nathan as cautiously as his dog had
done a moment before. The landowner could not scent fiery rage in the cunning man's sweat, but he
could watch and wonder at the knife and the sinewed, capable hands flaying a strip of hide from the bull's
back.

"I rode all the way from the west boundary cut t' here," the younger man continuedтАФstanding out of
knife range. "And Virgil shied nary onct but when a pigeon flapped up in 'is face. Couldn't hev rid 'im
here this time yestiddy."

"Said I'd do it," Old Nathan muttered, then wrinkled his face in embarrassment. This boy couldn't know
it, but success had never been more doubtful than in the moment it came . . . and the cunning man had no
heart now for bluster, when his hands were red to the elbows with the blood of Spanish King.

Old Nathan did not stand up or even uncross his legs, but he paused in what he was doing to give
Boardman his attention and a full answer. "What wuz here," he said, "hit's gone and won't be back. Ye
kin plow here er pasture, whatever you please."

The cunning man resumed his work. He had already removed a hand's breadth of hide from Spanish
King's nose to his croup. The horns were included by a strip of the poll.

"There's a thing I wonder, though," said Boardman, squatting down on his haunches with care not to let