"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

prospered and grew as his family grew. Except for his stint as an unsuccessful Indian
fighter, the Missouri farm was almost all that Doc knew of the world. He had been to St.
Louis a few times, and his experiences in that metropolis did not leave him looking
forward to coping with San Francisco and Seattle. I promised to help them negotiate with
merchants in putting together their "kits."
(Doc got his name by virtue of having taken a mail-order course of instruction in
veterinary medicine. It was what we'd call a "degree mill" now, but I was to find out that
he had a way with animals, and was intelligent, and knew his limits.)
 We returned to our sleepers, but the coffee and excitement kept me awake for a
long time. The last quarter moon rose into the clear night, and gave the snowy
mountaintops an ethereal blue glow. I realized that hours had passed without my having
thought about Edward or his Pinkerton men.
We had planned to get off the train as widely separated as possible, since the
Pinkerton men would be looking for a young man in the company of his mother. It was
possible they would have photographs.
I was thinking of how to explain this odd separation to the Colemans, and came to
an obvious solution: we would get off with them, instead; a rustic family of four. I would
let down my hair, and wear my plainest dress, with no corset. Daniel had jeans and a
disreputable work shirt.
We played cards with them the next day, and chatted, as the train worked its way
down the western slope of the Rockies, across a stretch of desert, and then through the
riot of green that irrigation had brought to the California desert. Before we even got to
Berkeley, Doc suggested we ought to get all our luggage in one place and try to stay
together.
We had no idea what to expect. Wagons would transfer us and our baggage to a
San Francisco ferry, where anything could happen. Assuming Daniel and I even made it
off the platform.
The train squealed to a stop in a cloud of dust and smoke and steam, and if any of
Edward's agents were looking for us, we gave them the slip. We put our things aboard a
wagon and elected to walk alongside it.
It was a refreshing walk, July in Berkeley like May in Kansas. The streets were
muddy ruts but there were boardwalks and, farther into town, sidewalks of brick and
stone.
The ferry was crowded and slow, its steam engine hissing and clattering so loud
we had to yell to converse.
The San Francisco dock was a crowded bedlam. Doc and I left the boys to stay
with our things while we went to inquire about passage to Seattle.
An interesting thing happened while we were gone. There were lots of soldiers
and sailors in the area. Daniel saw a Kansas flag and left Chuck to go talk to them.
They were headed for the Philippines, following the 20th Kansas, to which Daniel
would have been attached in Topeka, had I signed for him to join underage. So he
wouldn't have gone to follow the Rough Riders to glory in Cuba, after all. The Kansas
troops were shipped overseas to, as the man who talked to Daniel put it, "go kill niggers
in the Philippines."
Thank God Daniel hadn't gone with them. The truth of the Filipino insurrection
was decades in coming, mainly because the truth was too horrible to accept: American
soldiers killed at least 200,000—women and children as well as soldiers—and Kansas
was at the front of the slaughter.
Pressed into my diary at this point is a later article from the Anti-Imperialist
League Journal. Yellow and crumbling, it dropped into two pieces when I unfolded it. It