Dwellers in the Hills , livre ebook

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87 pages

English

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I sat on the ground with my youthful legs tucked under me, and the bridle rein of El Mahdi over my arm, while I hammered a copper rivet into my broken stirrup strap. A little farther down the ridge Jud was idly swinging his great driving whip in long, snaky coils, flicking now a dry branch, and now a red autumn leaf from the clay road. The slim buckskin lash would dart out hissing, writhe an instant on the hammered road-bed, and snap back with a sharp, clear report.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	23 octobre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819907695
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CHAPTER I
THE OCTOBER LAND
I sat on the ground with my youthful legs tuckedunder me, and the bridle rein of El Mahdi over my arm, while Ihammered a copper rivet into my broken stirrup strap. A littlefarther down the ridge Jud was idly swinging his great driving whipin long, snaky coils, flicking now a dry branch, and now a redautumn leaf from the clay road. The slim buckskin lash would dartout hissing, writhe an instant on the hammered road-bed, and snapback with a sharp, clear report.
The great sorrel was oblivious of this pastime ofhis master. The lash whistled narrowly by his red ears, but itnever touched them. In the evening sunlight the Cardinal was ahorse of bronze.
Opposite me in the shadow of the tall hickory timberthe man Ump, doubled like a finger, was feeling tenderly over thecoffin joints and the steel blue hoofs of the Bay Eagle, blowingaway the dust from the clinch of each shoe-nail and pressing theflat calks with his thumb. No mother ever explored with more lovingcare the mouth of her child for evidence of a coming tooth. Ump wason his never-ending quest for the loose shoe-nail. It was theserious business of his life.
I think he loved this trim, nervous mare better thanany other thing in the world. When he rode, perched like a monkey,with his thin legs held close to her sides, and his short, humpedback doubled over, and his head with its long hair bobbing about asthough his neck were loose-coupled somehow, he was eternallycaressing her mighty withers, or feeling for the play of each irontendon under her satin skin. And when we stopped, he glided down tofinger her shoe-nails.
Then he talked to the mare sometimes, as he wasdoing now. "There is a little ridge in the hoof, girl, but it won'tcrack; I know it won't crack." And, "This nail is too high. It ismy fault. I was gabbin' when old Hornick drove it."
On his feet, he looked like a clothes-pin with theface of the strangest old child. He might have been one left fromthe race of Dwarfs who, tradition said, lived in the Hills beforewe came.
His mare was the mother of El Mahdi. I remember howUmp cried when the colt was born, and how he sat out in the rain, amiserable drenched rat, because his dear Bay Eagle was in themysterious troubles of maternity, and because she must be veryunhappy at being on the north side of the hill among the blackhawthorn bushes, for that was a bad sign – the worst sign in theworld – showing the devil would have his day with the colt now andthen.
I used, when I was little, to hear talk once in awhile of some very wonderful person whom men called a "genius," andof what it was to be a genius. The word puzzled me a good deal,because I could not understand what was meant when it was explainedto me. I used to ponder over it, and hope that some day I might seeone, which would be quite as wonderful, I had no doubt, as seeingthe man out of the moon. Then, when El Mahdi came into his horseestate and our lives began to run together, I would lie awake atnight trying to study out what sort of horse it was thatdeliberately walked off the high banks along the road, or pitchedme out into the deep blue-grass, or over into the sedge bushes,when it occurred to him that life was monotonous, tumbling meupside down like a girl, although I could stick in my brother's bigsaddle when the Black Abbot was having a bad day, – and everybodyknew the Black Abbot was the worst horse in the Hills.
Wondering about it, the suggestion came that perhapsEl Mahdi was a "genius." Then I pressed the elders for further dataon the word, and studied the horse in the light of what they toldme. He fitted snug to the formula. He neither feared God, norregarded man, so far as I could tell. He knew how to do thingswithout learning, and he had no conscience. The explanation hadarrived. El Mahdi was a genius. After that we got on better; heyielded a sort of constructive obedience, and I lorded it over him,swaggering like a king's governor. But deep down in my youthfulbosom, I knew that this obedience was only pretended, and that heobeyed merely because he was indifferent.
He stood by while I hammered the stirrup, with hisiron grey head held high in the air, looking away over the hickoryridge across the blue hills, to the dim wavering face of themountains. He was almost seventeen hands high, with deep shoulders,and flat legs trim at the pastern as a woman's ankle, and a coatdark grey, giving one the idea of good blue steel. He was entirely,I may say he was abominably, indifferent, except when it came intohis broad head to wipe out my swaggering arrogance, or when hestood as now, staring at the far-off smoky wall of the Hills, asthough he hoped to find there, some day farther on, a wonderfulmessage awaiting him, or some friend whom he had lost when he swamLethe, or some ancient enemy.
I finished with the stirrup, buckled it back intoits leather and climbed into the saddle. It was one of the bitterthings that my young legs were not long enough to permit me todrive my foot deep into the wide, wooden stirrup and swing into thesaddle as Jud did with the Cardinal, or as my brother did when theBlack Abbot was in a hurry and he was not. I explained it away,however, by pointing out, like a boy, not that my legs were short,but that El Mahdi, the False Prophet, was a very high horse.
Jud had not dismounted, and Ump was on the Bay Eaglelike a squirrel, by the time I had fairly got into the saddle. Thenwe started again in a long, swinging trot, El Mahdi leading, theCardinal next, and behind him the Bay Eagle. The road trailed alongthe high ridge beside the tall shell-bark hickories, now thegranary of the grey squirrel, and the sumach bushes where thecatbirds quarrelled, and the dry old poplars away in the blue sky,where the woodpecker and the great Indian hen hammered likecarpenters.
The sun was slipping through his door, and from farbelow us came a trail of blue smoke and a smell of wood ashes wheresome driver's wife had started a fire, prepared her skillet, andmoved out her scrubbed table, – signs that the supper was on itsway, streaked bacon, potatoes, sliced and yellow, and the blackestcoffee in the world. Now and then on the hillside, in some littleclearing, the fodder stood in loose, bulging shocks bound withgreen withes, while some old man or half-grown lad plied hishusking-peg in the corn spread out before him, working with theswiftness and the dexterity of a machine, ripping the husk with onestroke of the wooden peg bound to his middle finger, and snappingthe ear at its socket, and tossing it into the air, where itgleamed like a piece of gold.
Below was the great, blue cattle land, rising inhigher and higher hills to the foot of the mountains. The roadswept around the nose of the ridge and plunged into the woods,winding in and out as it crawled down into the grass hills. Theflat curve at the summit of the ridge was bare, and, looking down,one could see each twist of the road where it crept out on the boneof the hill to make its turn back into the woods.
As I passed over the brow of the ridge, I heard Judcall, and, turning my head, saw that both he and Ump were on theground, looking down at the road below. Jud stood with his broadshoulders bent forward, and Ump squatted, peering down under thepalm of his hand. I rode back just in time to catch the flash ofwheels sweeping into the wood from one of the bare turns of theroad. Yet even in that swift glimpse, I thought I knew who wasbelow, and so I did not ask, but waited until they should come intothe open space again farther down. I sat with the bridle rein looseon El Mahdi's neck and my hands resting idly on the horn of thesaddle. I think I must have been smiling, for when Ump looked up atme, his wizened face was so serious that I burst out into a loudlaugh. "Well," I said, "it's Cynthia, isn't it? At half a mile sheoughtn't to be so very terrible." And I opened my mouth to laughagain. But that laugh never came into the world. Just then a bighorse with a man's saddle on him and the reins tied to the horntrotted out into the open, and behind him Cynthia's bay cob and herhigh, trim cart, and beside Cynthia on the seat was a man.
I saw the red spokes of the wheel, the silver on theharness, the flash of the grey feather in Cynthia's hat, and eventhe bit of ribbon half-way out the long whip-staff. Then theyvanished again, while up the wind came a peal of laughter and therumble of wheels, and the faint hammering of horses in the ironroad. On the instant, my heart gave a great thump, and grew verybitter, and my face hardened and clouded. "Who was it, Jud?" Isaid. And my jaws felt stiff. "It was surely Miss Cynthia," hebegan, "an' it was surely a Woodford cattle-horse." Then he stoppedwith his mouth open, and began to rub his chin. I turned to Ump."What Woodford?" I asked.
The hunchback twisted his shaggy head around in hiscollar like a man who wishes to have a little more air in histhroat. Then he said: "He was a big, brown horse with a bald face,an' he struck out with his knees when he trotted. Them's theWoodford horses. The saddle was black with long skirts, an' it hadonly one girth. Them's the Woodford saddles. An' the stirrups wasiron, an' there are only one Woodford who rides with his feet iniron."
I looked at Jud, searching his face for some traceof doubt on which to hang a little hoping, but it was all bronzeand very greatly troubled. Then he saw what I wanted, and began tostammer. "May be the horse was tender, an' that was the reason."But Ump piped in, scattering the little cloud, "That horse ain'tlame. He trots square as a dog."
Jud looked away and swung up in his saddle. "Maybe," he stammered, "may be the horse throwed him, an' that was thereason." Again Ump, the destroyer of little hopes, answered fromthe back of the Bay Eagle, "No horse ever throwed Hawk Rufe."
I sucked in the air over my bit lips when Ump namedhim. Rufe Woodford with Cynthia! I thought for an instant that Ishould cho