"Walter Jon Williams - The Last Ride of German Freddie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

wretched land to make a profit—thus they are dependent on the rustlers and smugglers for their livelihood.
The population came because of greed or ambition, and if the silver ever runs out, Tombstone will fly away
with the dust.
So why, when I perceive these Cowboys in their huge sombreros, their gaudy kerchiefs and doeskin
trousers, do I see instead the old Romans in their ringing bronze?
From such as these did Romulus spring! For who was Romulus? A tyrant, a bandit, a man who harbored
runaways and stole the cattle— and the daughters—of his neighbors. Yet he was noble, yet a hero, yet he
spawned a great Empire. History trembles before his memory.
And now the Romans have come again! Riding into Tombstone with their rifles in the scabbards!
All the old Roman virtues I see among them. They are frank, truthful, loyal, and above all healthy. They
hold the lives of men— their own included—in contempt/Nothing is more refreshing and wholesome
than this lack of pity, this disdain for the so-called civilized virtues. They are from the American South, of
course, that defeated country now sunk in ruin and oppression. They are too young to have fought in
the Civil War, but not so young they did not see its horrors. This exposure to life's cruelties, when they were
still at a tender age, must have hardened them against pieties and hypocrisies of the world. Not for them
the mad egotism of the ascetic, the persistent morbidity—the sickness—of the civilized man. These heroes
abandoned their defeated country and came West— West, where the new Rome will be born!

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 If only they can be brought to treasure their virtues as I do. But they treat themselves as carelessly as
they treat everything. They possess all virtues but one: the will to power. They have it in themselves to
dominate, to rule—not through these petty maneuverings at the polls with which Brocius is so unwisely
intoxicated, but through themselves, their desires, their guns. . . . They can create an empire here, and
must, if their virtues are to survive. It is not enough to avoid the law, avoid civilization—they must wish to
destroy the inverted virtues that oppose them.
Who shall win? Tottering, hypnotized, sunken Civilization, or this new Rome? Ridiculous, when we
consider numbers, when we consider mere guns and iron. Yet what was Romulus? A bandit, crouched on
his Palatine Hill. Yet nothing could stand in his way. His will was greater than that of the whole rotten
world.
And—as these classical allusions now seem irresistible—what are we to make of the appearance of Helen
of Troy? Who better to signal the end of an empire? Familiar with Goethe's superior work, I forgot that
Helen does not speak in Marlowe's Faustus. She simply parades along and inspires poetry. But when she
looked at our good German metaphysician, that eye of hers spoke mischief that had nothing to do with
verse—and the actor knew it, for he stammered. Such a sexual being as this Helen was not envisioned by
the good British Marlowe, whom we are led to believe did not with women.
I do not see such a girl cleaving to Behan for long—his blood is too thin for the likes of her.
And when she tires of him—beware, Behan! Beware, Faustus! Beware, Troy!

Freddie met Sheriff Behan's girl at the victory party following the election. Brocius's election strategy
had borne fruit, of a sort—but Johnny Behan was rotten fruit, Freddie thought, and would fall to the
ground ere long.
The Occidental Saloon was filled with celebration and a hundred drunken Cowboys. Even Wyatt Earp
turned up, glooming in his black coat and drooping mustaches, still secure in the illusion that Behan
would hire him as a deputy; but at the sight of the company his face wrinkled as if he'd just bit on a lemon,
and he did not stay long.
Amid all this roistering inebriation, Freddie saw Behan's girl perched on the long bar, surrounded by a
crowd of men and kicking her heels in the air in a white froth of petticoats. Freddie was surprised—he had
rarely in his life met a woman who would enter a saloon, let alone behave so freely in one, and among a
crowd of rowdy drunks. Behan—a natty Irishman in a derby—stood nearby and accepted congratulations
and bumper after bumper of the finest French champagne.