"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

MORE STORIES BY R.A. LAFFERTY

*153. Bright Coins In Never-Ending Stream
*154. Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen-Seventies
155. Splinters
165. Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope
170. The Only Tune That He Could Play
*175. You Can't Go Back
179. Square and Above Board
180. Ifrit
185. Golden Gate
*186. This Boding Itch
187. Tongues of the Madagora
*188. Make Sure the Eyes Are Big Enough
189. Marsilia V.
*190. One-Eyed Mocking-Bird
214. And Some In Velvet Gowns
215. The Doggone Highly Scientific Door
*216. Oh, Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?
227. Magazine Section
240. Grey Ghost: A Reminiscence
245. Le Hot Sport


BRIGHT COINS IN NEVER-ENDING STREAM

People sometimes became exasperated with Matthew Quoin, that tedious old
shuffler. Sometimes? Well, they were exasperated with him almost all the time.
It isn't that people aren't patient and kind-hearted. All of them in our town
are invariably so. But Matthew could sure ruffle a kind-hearted surface.
"Oh, he is so slow about it!" people said of him. That wasn't true,
Matthew's fingers flew lightninglike when he was involved in a transaction. It
was just that so very many movements were required of him to get anything at
all transacted.
And then the stories that he told about his past, a very far-distant
past according to him, were worn out by repetition.
"Oh, was I ever the cock of the walk!" he would say. "I left a trail of
twenty-dollar gold pieces around the world three times, and that was when
twenty dollars was still worth something. I always paid everything with
twenty-dollar gold pieces, and there was no way that I could ever run out of
them. Ten of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them, I could lay them out
whenever they were needed. I had a cruse of oil that would never be empty, as
the Bible says. I had a pocketbook that would never be without coin. I was the
cock of the walk. Plague take it all, I still am! Has anybody ever seen me
without money?"
No, nobody had. It was just that, of late years, it took Matthew's money
so long to add up. And often people had to wait behind him for a long time
while he counted it out, and they became Sulky and even furious.
When people became weary of listening to Matthew's stories (and of late
years he could feel their weariness for him like a hot blast) he went and