The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 26
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He was white-faced and shaking with anger. "You are ill mannered and silly little girls." "Oh Jordan," Vicky wailed and seized his hands. "Don't be cross. We love you so." "Oh yes, we do. Both of us." Elizabeth took his other hand, but he pulled away from them.
"You do not have any idea in those giddy little heads how dangerous a game you are playing, not only for yourselves." He strode away from them, but paused for a moment in front of Ralph. "Nor do you, Ralph." His expression softened, and he placed his hand on Ralph's shoulder. "Please be more careful for my sake, if not for your own."
Then he followed his master from the stockade.
Ralph pulled the gold hunter from the inner pocket of his waistcoat and made a show of inspecting it.
"Well," he announced to the twins, "sixteen minutes to clear the camp. That must be a new record even for you two." He returned the watch to his pocket and put one arm around Cathy's shoulders. "There you are, Katie my love, there is your home again without a single stranger." "That is not quite the case," murmured a soft Kentucky accent, and Harry Mellow rose from the log he had been using as a seat and removed the slouch hat from his curly head. The twins stared at him for a startled instant, then -flashed each other a look of complete accord and a remarkable transformation came over them. Liza smoothed her skirts and Vicky pushed back the dense dangling tresses from her face and their expressions became grave and their comportment ladylike.
"You may, present the young gentleman. cousin Ralph," said Vicky in accents so refined as to make Ralph glance at her to confirm it was the same girl speaking.
When the mule coach drove through the outer gates of the stockade, there was one member of Mr. Rhodes" party who was not aboard.
"What did- you tell Mr. Rhodes?" Cathy asked, hanging onto Ralph's arm as they watched the coach rolling away, a dark shadow on the moon-silver road.
"I told him that I needed Harry for a day or two more to help me lay out the development for the Harkness." Ralph lit his last cheroot of the day and they began the leisurely stroll around the camp that was a little ritual of their life together. It was their time of contentment and delicious anticipation, the time when they talked over the events of the day just past and planned for the one ahead, at the same time touching each other as they walked, her hand in the crook of his arm, their hips sliding against each other, a closeness which would soon lead naturally and sweetly to the wide soft cot in the bell tent.
"Was that true?" Cathy asked.
"Semi-true," he admitted. "I need him for longer than a day or two, more like ten or twenty years." "If you succeed, you will be one of the few men to get the better of Mr. Rhodes, and he will not like it." Ralph stopped her and commanded. "Listen!" From the inner stockade there was the orange glow of the fire and the sound of a banjo being played with such rare skill that the limpid notes shimmered and ran into each other, like some exotic birdsong, it rose to an impossible crescendo and then ceased so abruptly that the utter stillness trembled in the air for many seconds before the night chorus of the cicadas in the trees,) which had been shamed to silence by the vaunting instrument, hesitantly recommenced. With it mingled the patter of soft palms and the twins" unfeigned exclamations of delight.
"He is a man of many talents, your Harry Mellow." "The chief of them is that he can spot gold in a filled tooth across a polo field.
However, I have no doubt your little sisters will come to cherish others of his accomplishments." "I should send them to bed," Cathy murmured.
"Don't be the wicked elder sister," Ralph admonished, and the music started again, but this time Harry Mellow's soaring baritone led and the twins picked up the refrain in their true clear voices.
"Leave the poor creatures alone, they have enough of that at home." Ralph led her away.
"It's my duty," Cathy protested halfheartedly.
"If it's duty you are after," Ralph chuckled, "then, by God, woman, I have another more pressing duty for you to perform!" He lay stretched out on his back on the cot, and watched her prepare for bed in the lamplight. It had taken her a long time to forget her upbringing as the child of Christian missionaries and to allow him to watch her, but now she had- come to enjoy it, and she had flaunted a little before him, until he grinned and leaned out of the cot to crush out the cheroot, then lifted both hands towards her.
"Come here, Katie!" he ordered, but she hung back provocatively.
"Do you know what I want?" "No, but I know what I want." "I want a home-" "You have a home." "With thatch and brick walls, and a real garden." "You have a garden, the most beautiful garden in the world, and it stretches from the Limpopo to the Zambezi." "A garden with roses and geraniums." She came to him, and he lifted the sheet. "Will you build me a home, Ralph?" "Yes." "When?" "When the railroad is finished." She sighed softly. He had made the same promise while he was laying the telegraph line, and that was before Jonathan was born, but she knew better than to remind him. Instead, she slipped under the sheet, and strangely his arms, as they closed around her, became home for that moment.
In the southern springtime on the shores of one of the great lakes that lie in the hot depths of the Rift Valley, that mighty geological fault that splits the shield of the African continent like the stroke of an axe, there occurred at that time a bizarre hatching.
The egg masses of Schistocerca greg aria the desert locust, that were buried in the loose earth along the edge of the lake, released their flightless nymphs. The eggs had been laid in unusually propitious conditions of weather and environment. The swarms of breeding insects had been concentrated by unseasonable winds upon the papyrus banks of the lake, a vast food supply that heightened their fecundity. When the time came for them to spawn, another chance wind pushed them en masse onto a dry friable terrain of the correct acidity to protect the egg masses from fungus infection while the mild humidity drifting up from the lake ensured perfectly elastic egg-casings from which the hatching nymphs were able to escape readily.
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