"Paine, Lauran - Blue Basin Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Paine Lauran)

Holtville, which served the Blue Basin country, was a community with
such a heritage. In some ways vestiges of those rough earlier days
still showed, in other ways the change was complete in the middle of
miles of open grassland Holtville's Main Street was lined on both sides
with large, handsome sycamore trees.

Unlike a number of communities with similar beginnings, Holtville made
each required transition without the wrenching adjustments that
commonly troubled other towns. And because changes appeared to answer
pressing needs, not even the old hide hunters and packers did much
complaining. For example, since there was an overabundance of
grassland no one used anyway, no one objected when cattlemen drove big
herds into Blue Basin. As the cattle ranches needed

Holtville as their base for supplies, inevitably the economy grew and
stabilized; the arrival of the stock men was viewed as a godsend, not
as a cause for resentment or grumbling.

In the Blue Basin country manifest destiny meant that people were
there; the land was there; it was free, abundant, available for
whatever people wanted to do with it or make of it. Therefore, with
winter fading and woodsheds low, it was the right in fact the
obligation of people to head for the mountains for firewood logs with
wagons stripped to their running gear.

Springtime was supposed to arrive in late March or April. But some
years there were black frost, frozen troughs, and snow flurries right
on up into late May.

It was that kind of a year when Abel Morrison and two other men set out
to cut some wood. Abel, the Holtville saddle and harness maker, had
something called vaguely 'heart trouble." Alexander Smith who only had
one eye and hid the adjoining empty socket behind a white patch, was
owner of the Holtville Gun Works. The third man was Foster Bullard,
who was irrepressible, defiantly good-natured and had a bad lower
back.

They loaded Abel's old wagon bed with tools, grub, and a tent of rotten
canvas with dozens of patches, put Alex Smith's two
eighteen-hundred-pound draft horses on the pole, and headed northeast
toward a high prairie which was surrounded by huge fir trees, sprinkled
throughout with snags. They went for the snags, those standing dead
trees. Snags were dry wood. If people needed wood to burn, green fir
was as useless as teats on a man. It wouldn't burn, and sometimes it
wouldn't even smoulder or smoke; it simply filled a stove or woodshed
with something no one could use until it had dried out.

The three knew where the snags were. It was a daylong drive to get up
there, so the old men had left town well ahead of sunrise, when it was
cold, as well as dark. They were almost to the old military road