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

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"Чhe lifted his black beard to the cat,
now licking his belly fur on the beam with all his foreclaws
extendedЧ"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 catЧthe 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