"Henry Kuttner - See You Later" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

So I left the wheelbarrow with the eight Tarbell boys in it behind some scrub brush, and I went on up the
slope to where I could see Yancey sitting, airing hisself out in the sun and reading a book. I still hadn't
studied out what to say. I just traipsed along slow-like, whistling "Yankee Doodle." Yancey didn't pay
me no mind for a while.

He's a little, mean, dirty man with chin whiskers. Couldn't be much more'n five feet high. There was
tobacco juice on his whiskers, but I might have done old Yancey wrong in figgering he was only sloppy. I
heard he used to spit in his beard to draw flies, so's he could ketch 'em and pull off their wings.

Without looking, he picked up a stone, and flang it past my head. "Shet up an' go way," he said.

"Just as you say, Mr. Yancey," I told him, mighty relieved, and started to. But then I remembered Maw
would probably whup me if I didn't mind her orders, so I sort of moved around quiet till I was in back of
Yancey and looking over his shoulder at what he was reading. It looked tike a book. Then I moved
around a mite more till I was upwind of him.

He started cackling in his whiskers.

"That's a real purty picture, Mr. Yancey," I said.

He was giggling so hard it must of cheered him up.

"Ain't it, though!" he said, banging his fist on his skinny old rump. "My, my! Makes me feel full o' ginger
just to look at it."

It wasn't a book, though. It was a magazine, the land they sell down at the village, and it was opened at a
picture. The feller that made it could draw real good. Not so good as an artist I knowed once, over in
England. He went by the name of Crookshank or Crookback or something like that, unless I'm mistook.

Anyway, this here that Yancey was looking at was quite a picture. It showed a lot of fellers, all exactly
alike, coming out of a big machine which I could tell right off wouldn't work. But all these fellers was as
like as peas in a pod. Then there was a red critter with bugged-out eyes grabbing a girl, I dunno why. It
was sure purty.

"Wisht something like that could really happen," Yancey said.

"It ain't so hard," I told him. "Only that gadget's all wrong. All you need is a washbasin and some old
scrap iron."

"Hey?"

"That thing there," I said. "The jigger that looks like it's making one feller into a whole lot of fellers. It ain't
built right."

"I s'pose you could do it better?" he snapped, sort of mad.

"We did, once," I said. "I forget what Paw had on his mind, but he owed a man name of Cadmus a little
favor. Cadmus wanted a lot of fighting men in a real hurry, so Paw fixed it so's Cadmus could split hisself
up into a pas-sel of soldiers. Shucks. I could do it myself."