"Louis L'amour - sackett06 - The Daybreakers" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

"Tye," Mr. Belden asked, "what did those men want?"
"They figured to cut your herd."
"What happened?"
"They decided not to."
He looked at me, mighty sharp. Kneeing Dapple around I started back to the herd.
"Now what do you make of that?" I could hear Belden saying. "I'd have sworn that
was Back Rand."
"It was," Rountree commented dryly, "but that there's quite a boy."
When Orrin asked me about it at fire that night, I just said, "Aiken was there.
From Turkey Flat."
Carney was listening. "Aiken who? Who's Aiken?"
"He's from the mountains," Orrin said, "he knows the kid."
Reed Carney said nothing more but a couple of times I noticed him sizing me up
like he hadn't seen me before. There would be trouble enough, but man is born to
trouble, and it is best to meet it when it comes and not lose sleep until it
does. Only there was more than trouble, for beyond the long grass plains were
the mountains, the high and lonely mountains where someday I would ride, and
where someday, the Good Lord willing, I would find a home.
How many trails? How much dust and loneliness? How long a time until then?
Chapter II
There was nothing but prairie and sky, the sun by day and the stars by night,
and the cattle moving westward. If I live to be a thousand years old I shall not
forget the wonder and the beauty of those big longhorns, the sun glinting on
their horns; most of them six or seven feet from tip to tip. Some there were
like Old Brindle, our lead steer, whose horns measured a fair nine feet from
point to point, and who stood near to seventeen hands high.
It was a sea of horns above the red, brown, brindle, and white-splashed backs of
the steers. They were big, wild, and fierce, ready to fight anything that walked
the earth, and we who rode their flanks or the drag, we loved them and we hated
them, we cussed and reviled them, but we moved them westward toward what
destination we knew not.
Sometimes at night when my horse walked a slow circle around the bedded herd,
I'd look at the stars and think of Ma and wonder how things were at home. And
sometimes I'd dream great dreams of a girl I'd know someday.
Suddenly something had happened to me, and it happened to Orrin too. The world
had burst wide open, and where our narrow valleys had been, our hog-backed
ridges, our huddled towns and villages, there was now a world without end or
limit. Where our world had been one of a few mountain valleys, it was now as
wide as the earth itself, and wider, for where the land ended there was sky, and
no end at all to that.
We saw no one. The plains were empty. No cattle had been before us, only the
buffalo and war parties of Indians crossing. No trees, only the far and endless
grass, always whispering its own soft stories. Here ran the antelope, and by
night the coyotes called their plaintive songs to the silent stars.
Mostly a man rode by himself, but sometimes I'd ride along with Tom Sunday or
Cap Rountree, and I learned about cattle from them. Sunday knew cows, all right,
but he was a sight better educated than the rest of us, although not one for
showing it.
Sometimes when we rode along he would recite poetry or tell me stories from the
history of ancient times, and it was mighty rich stuff. Those old Greeks he was