"Dean Ing - Wild Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Quantrill, Jim Street's justice reached a long way into lawless regions.

On this day, Quantrill was far into the violent border region claimed by both Mexico and Reconstruction
America. Here, whole families sometimes disappeared during a feud or a border raid from Mexican
cimarrones, wild ones. It was truly no government's land, and it could not be reclaimed without rough
justice. When it had to be, Quantrill's was as rough as it came.

Quantrill could have chosen a shorter route back, but his years in the region had given him Wild Country
wisdom. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the Sinolnd War, Texas ranchers and hoe men had
wrestled chunks of this sun-broiled land into submission. In less than ten years after the war, most of
those chunks had gone wild again, returned to the kind of new-world savagery that Francisco Vasquez
de Coronado had fought in 1541. A few places, chiefly narrow creekbottoms defended by grit and
gunfire, were still cultivated. Quantrill did not relish a mechanical breakdown, not with a deader ripening
under the tarp behind him. and he also went wide of the cultivated areas. Only fools and desperadoes
took chances in the trackless wild regions over soil that, locals claimed, was "hard as a whore's eye."

Was Quantrill too cautious? Item: During the first cattle drive east from the Pecos, Coronado's men were
forced to build pillars of dung and bones to post the way. Not even their herd of cattle could mark the
cactus-dotted hardpan enough to let a man backtrack their path. When those cattle stumbled forward
toward water, usually it was deadly alkali water and those cattle had to be whipped away from it. Now it
was still possible to find a remnant of a buffalo wallow or a dry hole where a Spanish buckle and bones
might gleam, burnished by the dusty winds of five centuries. This was a timeless land, and it would kill
you for the slightest miscalculation.

The most pitiless of that land lay far to Quantrill's left. His route was made interesting by deep,
brush-choked arroyos and hills. Bit by bit. the stupefying violence of Texas weather had whittled those
hills down from mountains to mounds. That weather was thought, by people who had never experienced
it, to be just a part of Wild Country myth; but Quantrill kept an eye on his horizons. He knew that in any
season, a hellbroth storm might fling hailstones the size of his fist so hard they dented the cowls of
hovercycles, with a blazing cadenza of lightning tinted gold and mauve by dust hurled on gale-force
winds.

To outlanders, it was all mythology to be taken in good humor. If it were even half-true, they reasoned.
Wild Country would be peopled exclusively by the insane. To Ted Quantrill, it was taken for
grantedтАФand in good humor. If you lived out here and said you liked it, people figured you'd been too
long in the sun without your sombrero. So Quantrill cursed it as necessary and told no one but Sandra
Grange that he had learned to love it.

He put in a call to Sandy while sliding up into Edwards County but got no reply; expected none, really.
Like as not, she'd be tending her truck garden, and there was no one else to take a call at her soddy.
Nine-year-old Childe might hear the VHP beeper, but never answered. If you weren't standing in front of
her where she could study your face, Childe saw no point in jawing with you.

Quantrill tried again an hour from the soddy, then shrugged and popped open another cold Pearl. He told
himself he wasn't worried about the two sisters; though they lived on the edge of Wild Country, they
were rarely more than a whistle away from a mind-boggling mass of four-hoofed help.

Reminded of Sandy's huge guardian, Quantrill slowed the cycle and began to scan overhangs of stone.
Generally, Texas rattlers grew larger in regions with more rain. Quantrill knew the legend of Sowell's
dragon, the nine-footer killed by mustangs in the old days, and discounted that legend by two feet. He