"Louis L'amour - sackett06 - The Daybreakers" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

Higgins looking at you when you fetched him?"
"Right in the eye."
"Take the dapple," Ma said, "he's the runningest horse on the mountain. You go
west, and when you find a place with deep, rich soil and a mite of game in the
hills, you get somebody to write a letter and we'll come down there, the boys
an' me."
She looked around at the place, which was mighty rundown. Work as we would, and
us Sacketts were workers, we still hadn't anything extra, and scarcely a poor
living, so Ma had been talking up the west ever since Pa died.
Most of it she got from Pa, for he was a wandering and a knowing man, never to
home long, but Ma loved him for all of that, and so did we young 'uns. He had a
Welshman's tongue, Pa did, a tongue that could twist a fine sound from a word
and he could bring a singing to your blood so you could just see that far land
yonder, waiting for folks to come and crop it.
Those old blue eyes of Ma's were harder to face than was Long Higgins, and him
with a gun to hand. "Tye, do you reckon you could kill Ollie?"
To nobody else would I have said it, but to Ma I told the truth. "I'd never want
to, Ma, because we're kin but I could fetch him. I think maybe I can draw a gun
faster and shoot straighter than anybody, anywhere."
She took the pipe from her lips. "Eighteen years now I've seen you growing up,
Tyrel Sackett, and for twelve of them you've been drawing and shooting. Pa told
me when you was fifteen that he'd never seen the like. Ride with the law, Tye,
never against it." She drew the shawl tighter about her knees. "If the Lord
wills we will meet again in the western lands."

The way I took led across the state line and south, then west. Ollie Shaddock
would not follow beyond the line of the state, so I put Tennessee behind me
before the hills had a shadow.
It was wild land through which the trail led, west out of Tennessee, into
Arkansas, the Ozarks, and by lonely trails into Kansas. When I rode at last into
the street at Baxter Springs folks figured me for one more mountain renegade
coming to help keep tick-infected Texas cattle out of the country, but I was of
no such mind.
It was eight miles to where the Texas men held their cattle, so there I rode,
expecting no warm welcome for a stranger. Riding clear of the circling riders I
rode up to the fire, the smell of grub turning my insides over. Two days I'd
been without eating, with no money left, and too proud to ask for that for which
I could not pay.
A short, square man with a square face and a mustache called out to me. "You
there! On the gray! What do you want?"
"A job if one's to be had, and a meal if you've grub to spare. My name is Tyrel
Sackett and I'm bound westward from Tennessee toward the Rockies, but if there's
a job I'll ride straight up to it."
He looked me over, mighty sharp, and then he said, "Get down, man, and come to
the fire. No man was ever turned from my fire without a meal inside him. I'm
Belden."
When I'd tied Dapple I walked up to the fire, and there was a big, handsome man
lying on the ground by the fire, a man with a golden beard like one of those
Vikings Pa used to tell of. "Hell," he said agreeably, "it's a farmer!"
"What's wrong with farming?" I asked him. "You wouldn't have your belly full of