Lonesome Land by B. M. Bower (life changing books to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: B. M. Bower
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He crossed the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up at Kent.
“Wife 'sall righ',” he informed him solemnly. “Knew she would be—fine guards's got out there. 'Sall righ'—somebody shaid sho. Have a drink.”
Kent glowered down at him, made a swift, mental decision, and pipped him by the shoulder. “You come with me,” he commanded. “I've got something important I want to tell you. Come on—if you can walk.”
“'Course I c'n walk all righ'. Shertainly I can walk. Wha's makes you think I can't walk? Want to inshult me? 'Sall my friends here—no secrets from my friends. Wha's want tell me? Shay it here.”
Kent was a big man; that is to say, he was tall, well-muscled and active. But so was Manley. Kent tried the power of persuasion, leaving force as a last, doubtful result. In fifteen minutes or thereabouts he had succeeded in getting Manley outside the door, and there he balked.
“Wha's matter wish you?” he complained, pulling back. “C'm on back 'n' have drink. Wha's wanna tell me?”
“You wait. I'll tell you all about it in a minute. I've got something to show you, and I don't want the bunch to get next. Savvy?”
He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a five-year-old child, but it was accepted without question.
He led Manley stumbling up the street, evading a direct statement as to his destination, pulled him off the board walk, and took him across a vacant lot well sprinkled with old shoes and tin cans. Here Manley fell down, and Kent's patience was well tested before he got him up and going again.
“Where y' goin'?” Manley inquired pettishly, as often as he could bring his tongue to the labor of articulation.
“You wait and I'll show you,” was Kent's unvaried reply.
At last he pushed open a door and led his victim into the darkness of a small, windowless building. “It's in here—back against the wall, there,” he said, pulling Manley after him. By feeling, and by a good sense of location, he arrived at a rough bunk built against the farther wall, with a blanket or two upon it.
“There you are,” he announced grimly. “You'll have a sweet time getting anything to drink here, old boy. When you're sober enough to face your wife and have some show of squaring yourself with her, I'll come and let you out.” He had pushed Manley down upon the bunk, and had reached the door before the other could get up and come at him. He pulled the door shut with a slam, slipped a padlock into the staple, and snapped it just before Manley lurched heavily against it. He was cursing as well as he could—was Manley, and he began kicking like an unruly child shut into a closet.
“Aw, let up,” Kent advised him, through a crack in the wall. “Want to know where you are? Well, you're in Hawley's ice house; you know it's a fine place for drunks to sober up in; it's awful popular for that purpose. Aw, you can't do any business kicking—that's been tried lots of times. This is sure well built, for an ice house. No, I can't let you out. Couldn't possibly, you know. I haven't got the key—old lady Hawley has got it, and she's gone to bed hours ago. You go to sleep and forget about it. I'll talk to you in the morning. Good night, and pleasant dreams!”
The last thing Kent heard as he walked away was Manley's profane promise to cut Kent's heart out very early the next day.
“The darned fool,” Kent commented, as he stopped in the first patch of lamplight to roll a cigarette. “He ain't got another friend in town that'd go to the trouble I've gone to for him. He'll realize it, too, when all that whisky quits stewing inside him.”
CHAPTER XII. A LESSON IN FORGIVENESS
“Well, old-timer, how you coming? You sure do sleep sound—this is the third time I've come to tell you breakfast is ready and then some. You'll get the bottom of the coffeepot, for fair, if you don't hustle.” Kent left the door of the ice house wide open behind him, so that the warmth of mid-morning swept in to do battle with the chill and damp of wet sawdust and buried ice.
Manley rolled over so that he faced his visitor, and his reply was abusive in the extreme. Kent waited, with an air of impersonal interest, until he was done and had turned his face away as though the subject was quite exhausted.
“Well, now you've got that load off your mind, come on over and get a cup of coffee. But while you're thinking about whether you want anything but my heart's blood, I'm going to speak right up and tell you a few things that commonly ain't none of my business.
“Do you know your wife came within an ace of burning to death yesterday?” Manley sat up with a jerk and glared at him. “Do you know you're burned out, slick and clean—all except the shack? Hay, stables, corral, wagons, chickens—” Kent spread his hands in a gesture including all minor details. “I rode over there when I saw the fire coming, and it's lucky I did, old-timer. I back-fired and saved the house—and your wife—from going up in smoke. But everything else went. Let that sink into your system, will you? And just see if you can draw a picture of what woulda happened if nobody had showed up—if that fire had hit the coulee with nobody there but your wife. Why, I run onto her half-way up the bluff, packing a wet sack, to fight it at the fire guards I Now, Man, it ain't any credit to, you that the worst didn't happen. I'd sure like to tell you what I think of a fellow that will leave a woman out there, twenty miles from town and ten from the nearest neighbor—and them not at home—to take a chance on a thing like that; but I can't. I never learned words enough.
“There's another thing. Old lady Hawley took more interest in her than you did; she drove out there to see how about it, as soon as the fire had burned on past and left the trail safe. And it didn't look good to her—that little woman stuck out there all by herself. She made her pack up some clothes, and brought her to town with her. She didn't want to come; she had an idea that she ought to stay with it till you showed up. But the only original Hawley is sure all right! She talked your wife plumb outa the house and into the rig, and brought her to town. She's
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