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

always talking about, they reminded me of mountain folk I'd known, and it fair
made me ache to know how to read myself.
Rountree talked mighty little, but whatever he said made a sight of sense. He
knew buffalo ... although there was always something to learn about them. He was
a mighty hard old man, rode as many hours as any of us, although he was a mighty
lot older. I never did know how old he was, but those hard old gray eyes of his
had looked on a sight of strange things.
"Man could make some money," Rountree said one day, "over in the breaks of
western Kansas and Colorado. Lots of cows over there, belongin' to nobody, stuff
drifted up from the Spanish settlements to the south."
When Rountree spoke up it was because there was an idea behind it. Right then I
figured something was stirring in that coot's skull, but nothing more was said
at the time.
Orrin and me, we talked it over. Each of us wanted a place of our own, and we
wanted a place for Ma and the boys. A lot of cattle belonging to no man ... it
sounded good to us.
"It would take an outfit," Orrin said.
Tom Sunday, I was sure, would be for it. From things he'd said on night herd I
knew he was an ambitious man, and he had plans for himself out west. Educated
the way he was, there was no telling how far he would go. Time to time he talked
a good deal about politics ... out west a man could be whatever he was man
enough to be, and Tom Sunday was smart.
"Orrin and me," I said to Rountree, "we've been talking about what you said.
About those wild cows. We discussed the three of us and maybe Tom Sunday, if
you're willing and he wants to come in."
"Why, now. That there's about what I had in mind. Fact is, I talked to Tom. He
likes it."
Mr. Belden drove his herd away from the Kansas-Missouri border, right out into
the grassy plains, he figured he'd let his cows graze until they were good and
fat, then sell them in Abilene; there were cattle buyers buying and shipping
cattle from there because of the railroad.
Anybody expecting Abilene to be a metropolis would have been some put out, but
to Orrin and me, who had never seen anything bigger than Baxter Springs, it
looked right smart of a town. Why, Abilene was quite a place, even if you did
have to look mighty fast to see what there was of it.
Main thing was that railroad. I'd heard tell of railroads before, but had never
come right up to one. Wasn't much to see: just two rails of steel running off
into the distance, bedded down on crossties of hewn logs. There were some stock
pens built there and about a dozen log houses. There was a saloon in a log
house, and across the tracks there was a spanking-new hotel three stories high
with a porch along the side fronting the rails. Folks had told me there were
buildings that tall, but I never figured to see one.
There was another hotel, too. Placed called Bratton's, with six rooms to let.
East of the hotel there was a saloon run by a fat man called Jones. There was a
stage station ... that was two stories ... a blacksmith shop and the Frontier
Store.
At the Drovers' Cottage there was a woman cooking there and some rooms were let,
and there were three, four cattle buyers loafing around.
We bunched our cows on the grass outside of town and Mr. Belden rode in to see
if he could make a deal, although he didn't much like the look of things.