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

questioned. Some folk 'ud grouse if they wuz hanged with a golden rope. "Now, go mindyer affairs whilst
I mind mine."

***

Nathan's cat reappeared from the brushplot to the west of the cabin, grinning and licking his lips. The old
man walked over to the pasture fence, spinning the water gently to the rim of the shallow bowl to keep it
from spilling, and the cat leaped to a post. "Hethinks he's tough," said the cat, ears back as he watched
King's antics.

"Now, don't come on all high 'n mighty and git yerself hurt," the cunning man said. "Never did know a
tomcat with the sense t' know when to stop provoking things as could swaller'em down in a gulp."

He paused at the fence and closed his eyes with his right hand open in front of him. For a moment he
merely stood there, visualizing a pocketknife. It was a moderate-sized one with two blades, light-colored
scales of jigged bone, and bolsters of German silver. Old Nathan had bought it from a peddler and the
knife, unlike the clock purchased at the same time, had proven to be as fine a tool as a man could wish.

As the cunning man pictured the knife in his mind, his empty hand curled and he reached forward. He
saw his fingers closing over the warm bone and cooler metal mountings . . . and when after a moment he
felt the knife in his hand also, he withdrew it and opened his eyes. There the knife was, just as it should
be.

Old Nathan let out the breath he had been holding unconsciously and set down the soup plate so that he
could open the smaller blade. There was a spot of rust on it, which he polished off on his trousers. No
help for that: good steel rusted, there were no two ways about it.

"King!" the old man called. "Come over here!"
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The bull twisted his forequarters with the speed and grace of a cat taking a mockingbird from the air.
"Says who?" he snorted.

"Mindthis, damn ye, or we'll go nowhere!" the man retorted in exasperation. As bad as the Boardman
boy. Nobody'd let Old Nathan get along with his business without an argument.

Grumbling threats that were directed as much against the world as they were the cunning man
specifically, King strode deliberately to the fence and his master. Flies glittered against his hide, many of
them clumped in chitinous rosettes instead of scattering evenly over the whole expanse. There was a
matting of sweat on the bull's withers from anticipation rather than present exercise, and his tail lashed to
emphasize the swagger of his hindquarters.

"Three hairs from your poll," said Old Nathan, reaching deliberately between the horns of the big animal
whose muzzle bathed him in a hot sweet breath of clover. He kept a wire edge on the knife's shorter
blade, and it severed three of the coarse hairs of King's with no more drag than a razor would have made
on so many whiskers.