"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year
two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian
dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who
had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to
lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the
farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he
continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded in getting his
family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared that the story of
the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had ruined his chance for
making a decent living out of his farm.




CHAPTER VI


Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his
native town. The call of the spring wind awoke something in him as in Hugh.
It came up from the south bringing rain followed by warm fair days. Robins
hopped about on the lawns before the houses on the residence streets
of Bidwell, and the air was again sweet with the pregnant sweetness of
new-plowed ground. Like Hugh, Steve walked about alone through the dark,
dimly lighted residence streets during the spring evenings, but he did not
try awkwardly to leap over creeks in the darkness or pull bushes out of
the ground, nor did he waste his time dreaming of being physically young,
clean-limbed and beautiful.

Before the coming of his great achievements in the industrial field, Steve
had not been highly regarded in his home town. He had been a noisy boastful
youth and had been spoiled by his father. When he was twelve years old what
were called safety bicycles first came into use and for a long time he
owned the only one in town. In the evening he rode it up and down Main
Street, frightening the horses and arousing the envy of the town boys. He
learned to ride without putting his hands on the handle-bars and the other
boys began to call him Smarty Hunter and later, because he wore a stiff,
white collar that folded down over his shoulders, they gave him a girl's
name. "Hello, Susan," they shouted, "don't fall and muss your clothes."

In the spring that marked the beginning of his great industrial adventure,
Steve was stirred by the soft spring winds into dreaming his own kind of
dreams. As he walked about through the streets, avoiding the other young
men and women, he remembered Ernestine, the daughter of the Buffalo soap
maker, and thought a great deal about the magnificence of the big stone
house in which she lived with her father. His body ached for her, but that
was a matter he felt could be managed. How he could achieve a financial
position that would make it possible for him to ask for her hand was a more
difficult problem. Since he had come back from the business college to live
in his home town, he had secretly, and at the cost of two new five dollar