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

OLD NATHAN
David Drake

THE BULL
The cat slunk in the door with angry grace and snarled to Old Nathan, "Somebody's coming, and he's bringing a great blond bitch-dog with 'im." Then he sprang up the wall, using a chink in the logs at the height of a man's head to boost himself the last of the way to the roof trestle.
"She comes close t' me, I'll claw'er eyes out," muttered the hunching cat. "See if I don't."
"Just keep your britches on," snapped Old Nathan as he rose from the table at which he breakfasted on milk and mush.
Despite the chill of the morning, he wore only trousers tucked into his boot-tops and held up by galluses. The hair of his head and bare chest was white with a yellow tinge, but his raggedly cropped beard was so black that he could pass for a man of thirty when he wore a slouch hat against the sun.
There was nothing greatly unusual about an old man's beard growing in dark; but because he was Old Nathan the Cunning Man-the man who claimed the Devil was loose in the world but that he was the Devil's master-that, too, was a matter for fear and whispering.
Even as Nathan stepped to the door, he heard the clop of shod hooves carefully negotiating his trail. The cat hadn't mentioned the visitor was mounted; but the cat made nothing of the difference between someone on foot who hoped to barter for knowledge, and a horseman in whose purse might jingle silver.
Spanish King smelled the visitors and snorted in the pasture behind Old Nathan's cabin. A man or a dog was beneath the notice of the huge bull, save on those days when the motion of even a sparrow was sufficient to draw his fury. A horse, though, was of a size to be considered a potential challenger. King wasn't afraid of challenge, or of anything walking the earth. The blat of sound from his nostrils simply staked his claim to lordship over all who heard him.
The horse, a well-groomed bay gelding, stutter-stepped sideways, almost unseating his rider, and whickered, "No, I'm not goin' close to that. D'ye hear how mean he is?"
"Damn ye, Virgil!" shouted the rider as he hauled on the reins. The gelding's head came around, but his body continued to slide away from the cabin.
"Now jist calm down!" Nathan snapped as he stepped onto the porch. "That bull, he's fenced, and he wouldn't trifle with you noways if he got a look. Set quiet and I might could find a handful uv oats t' feed you."
"Hmph!" snorted the horse. "And what'd you know?" But he settled enough to let his rider dismount and loop the reins around the hitching rail pegged to the porch supports.
"I find speakin' with 'em helps the beasts behave, sometimes," said Old Nathan, truthfully enough, to the man who watched him in some puzzlement and more pure fear. He didn't know the fellow, not truly, but from his store-bought clothes and the lines of his smooth-shaven face he had to be kin to Newt Boardman. "Reckon you're a Boardman?" the cunning man prompted.
"There's a cat here, too," said the shaggy, blond-haired dog who had ambled out of the woods to intersect with the more deliberate horse at the porch rail. The dog sniffed the edge of the puncheon step to the porch and wagged her tail.
"I'm John Boardman, that's a fact," said the visitor with a hardening of his face muscles that made him look even younger. "But I'm here on my own account, not my daddy's."
Old Nathan knelt and held out the clenched knuckles of his right hand for the dog to sniff. "You leave the cat alone and we'll be fine, hear me?" he said to the bitch firmly.
"Sure, they're not the fun uv squirrels t' chase nohow," the dog agreed.
The old man stared at the visitor. Boardman's ramrod stiffness gilded the fear it tried to conceal.
"Scared to death, that one," said the dog and licked the offered knuckles.
"Come in and set, then, John Boardman," Old Nathan said with enough of a pause that his visitor could see there had been one. "I got coffee."
The coffee boiled on the coals in an enameled iron pot. Old Nathan had roasted the green beans in his frying pan the night before and had ground them at dawn when he rose. He lifted the pot's wire handle with a billet of lightwood while the dog padded in quickly to snuffle the interior of the cabin and the Boardman boy followed more gingerly.
"I will claw yer eyes out!" shrieked the cat from the roofbeam, reaching down with one hooked paw in a pantomime of intention.
"Bag it, now, damn ye!" snarled Old Nathan from the chimney alcove, twisting to face the cat and add the weight of his glare to his tone, as savage as that of the animal itself.
The cat subsided, muttering. Boardman's bitch slurped water from the tub in the corner of the single room and curled herself beside the rocking chair.
Five china cups with a blue pattern about the rim rested upside down on the mantlepiece. Boardman got a hold of himself enough to fetch two of the cups down so that the older man did not have to straighten to get them. They were neither chipped nor cracked, and the visitor said approvingly, "Fine as we have at home," as he watched Old Nathan pour.
"Fine as your daddy has," Old Nathan corrected. He gestured Boardman toward the straight chair, near the table which still held the remains of breakfast. He himself took the rocker and reached down absently to stroke the dog's fur with his long knobby fingers.
Boardman seated himself on the front of the chair like a child preparing for an interrogation with a whipping at the end of it. "I thought you didn't like dogs," he ventured with a doubtful glance at his bitch, lifting to nuzzle the hand that rumpled her fur. "I'd heard that."
"Don't doubt ye heard worse damned nonsense 'n that about me," Old Nathan replied, his green eyes slitting and the coffee cup frozen an inch short of his lips. "I don't choose t' eat red meat nor keep it in the house. That 'un"-he lifted his black beard to the cat, now licking his belly fur on the beam with all his foreclaws extended-"fetches his own, as a dog would not . . . so I don't keep a dog."
All that was the truth, and it concealed the greater truth that Old Nathan would no more have hunted down the animals he talked with than he would have waylaid human travellers and butchered them for his larder. There were fish in good plenty, with milk, grains, and his garden. Enough for him, enough for any man, though others could go their own way and the cat-the cat would go the way of his kind, in grinning slaughter as natural as the fall of rain from heaven.
"Hit may be," the old man continued as he sipped his coffee, hot and bitter and textured with floating grounds, "thet ye've come fer yer curiosity and no business uv mine. In sich case, boy, you'll take yerself off now before the toe t' my boot helps ye."
"I have business with ye," Boardman said, setting his cup on the table so sharply that the fluid sloshed over the rim. "You may hev heard I'm fixin' to be married?"
"I may and I may not," said Old Nathan, rocking slowly. He wasn't as much a part of the casual gossip of the community as most of those settled hereabouts, but when folk came to consult him he heard things from their hearts which a spouse of forty years would never learn. He recalled being told that Sally Ann Hewitt, the storekeeper's daughter from Advance, was being courted by rich Newt Boardman's boy among others. "Say on, say on."
"Sally Ann wouldn't have a piece from my daddy's cleared land," said the boy, confirming the name of the girl-and also confirming the intelligence and strength of character Old Nathan had heard ascribed to Hewitt's daughter. "So I set out to clear newground, the forty acres in Big Bone Valley, and I did that."
"Hired that done," said Old Nathan, rocking and sipping and scratching the dog.
"Hired Bully Ransden and his yoke uv oxen to help me," retorted Boardman, "fer ten good silver dollars-and where's the sin uv thet?"
"Honest pay fer honest work," agreed Old Nathan, turning his hand to knuckle the dog's fur. Ridges of callus bulged at the base of each finger and in the web of his palm. "No sin at all."
"So I fixed to plant a crop afore raisin' the cabin, and in the Fall we'd be wed," the boy continued. "Only my horses, they wouldn't plow. Stood in the traces and shivered, thin they'd bolt."
Boardman tried a sip of his coffee and grimaced unconsciously.
"There's milk," his host offered with a nod toward the pitcher on the table beside the bowl of mush. "If ye need sweetnin', I might could find a comb uv honey."
"This here's fine," the boy lied and swallowed a mouthful of the coffee. He blinked. "Well," he continued, "I hired Bully Ransden t' break the ground, seein's he'd cleared it off. But his oxen, they didn't plow but half a furrow without they wouldn't move neither, lash'em though he did. So he told me he wouldn't draw the plow himself, and best I get another plot uv ground, for what his team wouldn't do there was no other on this earth thet could."
"Did he say thet, now?" said the cunning man softly. "Well, go on, boy. Hev you done thet? Bought another track uv land?"
"Sally Ann told me," said Boardman miserably to his coffee cup, "thet if I wasn't man enough to plow thet forty acres, I wasn't man enough t' marry her. And so I thought I'd come see you, old man, that mayhap there was a curse on the track as you could lift."
Old Nathan said nothing for so long that his visitor finally raised his eyes to see if the cunning man were even listening. Old Nathan wore neither a smile nor a frown, but there was nothing in his sharp green eyes to suggest that he was less than fully alert.
"Well?" Boardman said, flexing back his shoulders.
"There's a dippin' gourd there by the tub," said Old Nathan, nodding toward that corner. "Fetch it back to me full from the stream and I'll see what I kin do."
"There's water in the tub already," said Boardman, glancing from the container to his host.
"Fetch me living water from the stream, boy," the older man snapped, "or find yer own way out uv yer troubles."