OLD NATHAN David Drake
OLD NATHAN David Drake
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Among the people who made this book possible are my wife Jo; my parents, Earle and Maxine Drake; Janet Morris; and Manly himself. My thanks to all of them.
THE BULL
The cat slunk in the door with angry grace and snarled to Old Nathan, “Somebody’s coming, and he’s bringing a great blond bitch-dog with ‘im.” Then he sprang up the wall, using a chink in the logs at the height of a man’s head to boost himself the last of the way to the roof trestle.
“She comes close t’ me, I’ll claw’er eyes out,” muttered the hunching cat. “See if I don’t.”
“Just keep your britches on,” snapped Old Nathan as he rose from the table at which he breakfasted on milk and mush.
Despite the chill of the morning, he wore only trousers tucked into his boot-tops and held up by galluses. The hair of his head and bare chest was white with a yellow tinge, but his raggedly cropped beard was so black that he could pass for a man of thirty when he wore a slouch hat against the sun.
There was nothing greatly unusual about an old man’s beard growing in dark; but because he was Old Nathan the Cunning Man—the man who claimed the Devil was loose in the world but that he was the Devil’s master—that, too, was a matter for fear and whispering.
Even as Nathan stepped to the door, he heard the clop of shod hooves carefully negotiating his trail. The cat hadn’t mentioned the visitor was mounted; but the cat made nothing of the difference between someone on foot who hoped to barter for knowledge, and a horseman in whose purse might jingle silver.
Spanish King smelled the visitors and snorted in the pasture behind Old Nathan’s cabin. A man or a dog was beneath the notice of the huge bull, save on those days when the motion of even a sparrow was sufficient to draw his fury. A horse, though, was of a size to be considered a potential challenger. King wasn’t afraid of challenge, or of anything walking the earth. The blat of sound from his nostrils simply staked his claim to lordship over all who heard him.
The horse, a well-groomed bay gelding, stutter-stepped sideways, almost unseating his rider, and whickered, “No, I’m not goin’ close to that. D’ye hear how mean he is?”
“Damn ye, Virgil!” shouted the rider as he hauled on the reins. The gelding’s head came around, but his body continued to slide away from the cabin.
“Now jist calm down!” Nathan snapped as he stepped onto the porch. “That bull, he’s fenced, and he wouldn’t trifle with you noways if he got a look. Set quiet and I might could find a handful uv oats t’ feed you.”
“Hmph!” snorted the horse. “And what’d you know?” But he settled enough to let his rider dismount and loop the reins around the hitching rail pegged to the porch supports.
“I find speakin’ with ’em helps the beasts behave, sometimes,” said Old Nathan, truthfully enough, to the man who watched him in some puzzlement and more pure fear. He didn’t know the fellow, not truly, but from his store-bought clothes and the lines of his smooth-shaven face he had to be kin to Newt Boardman. “Reckon you’re a Boardman?” the cunning man prompted.
“There’s a cat here, too,” said the shaggy, blond-haired dog who had ambled out of the woods to intersect with the more deliberate horse at the porch rail. The dog sniffed the edge of the puncheon step to the porch and wagged her tail.
“I’m John Boardman, that’s a fact,” said the visitor with a hardening of his face muscles that made him look even younger. “But I’m here on my own account, not my daddy’s.”
Old Nathan knelt and held out the clenched knuckles of his right hand for the dog to sniff. “You leave the cat alone and we’ll be fine, hear me?” he said to the bitch firmly.