"Manly Wade Wellman - The Dead Man's Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

"Nervous, Berna?" demanded Ward Conley.
"No. Just curious."
"It's the sort of yarn that's pinned on some house in every district where history's
old enough, and ghost-believing gawks are plentiful enough. What I heard was that
the farmer owner, the one they called Old Monroe, came here eighty years ago and
took a piece of land that seemed worthless. By working and planning he made it pay
richly. He never got married, never mixed with his neighbors, never spent much of
what he took in, and he lived to be more than a hundred. Knowing so little about
him, the corn-crackers hereabouts made up their own story. That Old Monroe made
a sort of bargain withтАФwellтАФ"
"With the devil?"
"Maybe. Or anyway some old Indian spirit of evil. They said the bargain included
a magic-built house, the richest of crops, and more money than anyone for miles
around. Old Monroe got the last named, anyway. When he died, he died raving.
Most hermits and misers are crazy. Since then nobody goes near the place. A
second cousin up in Richmond inherited, and sold to us for a song."
"A bargain with devils," mused Berna. "It sounds like Hawthorne."
"It sounds like foolishness," snapped Conley. "Any devils come bargaining
around, I'm enough of a businessman to give them the short end of the deal."


In a city to the north, big John Thunstone listened earnestly as he leaned across a
desk.
"You don't mean to tell me, Mr. Thunstone," said the professor opposite, "that
you're really serious about the Shonokin myths?"
"I discount nothing until I know enough to judge," replied Thunstone. "The hint I
picked up today is shadowy. And you're the only man who has made an intelligent
study of the subject."
"Only the better to finish my American folkways encyclopedia," deprecated the
other. "Well the Shonokins are supposed to be a race of magicians that peopled
America before the Red Indians migrated fromтАФwherever they migrated from. One
or two commentators insist that Shonokin wizardry and enmity is the basis for most
of the Indian stories of supernatural evils, everything from the Wendigo to those
nasty little tales about singing snakes and the Pukwitchee dwarfs. All mention we get
of Shonokins todayтАФand it's mighty slimтАФwe get third or fourth hand. From old
Indians to recent ones, through them by way of first settlers to musty students like
me. There's an amusing suggestion that Shonokins, or their descendants, actually
exist today here and there. Notably in the neighborhood ofтАФ"
"I wonder," broke in John Thunstone, rather mannerlessly for him, "if that isn't
the neighborhood I'm so curious about."


In the dusk the Conley car passed the Hanksville turn, gained the sand road and
crossed the stone bridge. Beyond the willows showed a dense-grown hedge of
thorny trees, with a gap closed by a single hewn timber on forked stakes. The timber
bore a signboard, and by the glow of the headlights Berna could read the word
"PRIVATE." Conley got out, unshipped the barrier, then returned to drive them
along a brush-lined road with ruts full of rank, squelchy grass.
A first journey over a strange trail always seems longer than it is. Berna felt that
ages had passed before her father stepped on the brake. "There's our home," he