Smonk

Начало книги

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She weepeth sore in the night.

—LAMENTATIONS 1:1–2

“Magnifique!” ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath.

—EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS,

The Return of Tarzan

1 THE TRIAL

IT WAS THE EVE OF THE EVE OF HIS DEATH BY MURDER AND THERE was harmonica music on the air when E. O. Smonk rode the disputed mule over the railroad tracks and up the hill to the hotel where his trial would be. It was October the first of that year. It had been dry and dusty for six weeks and five days. The crops were dead. It was Saturday. Ten after three o’clock in the afternoon according to the shadows of the bottles on the bottle tree.

Amid the row of long nickering horsefaces at the rail Smonk slid off the mule into the sand and spat away his cigar stub and stood glaring among the animal shoulders at his full height of five and a quarter foot. He told a filthy blond boy holding a balloon to watch the mule, which had an English saddle on its back and an embroidered blanket from Bruges Belgium underneath. In a sheath stitched to the saddle stood the polished butt of the Winchester rifle with which, not half an hour earlier, Smonk had dispatched four of an Irishman’s goats in their pen because the only thing he abhorred more than an Irish was an Irish goat. By way of brand the mule had a fresh .22 bullet hole through its left ear, same as Smonk’s cows and pigs and hound dog did, even his cat.

Читать дальше →