Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

24 страница из 67

And so I played a game of draughts with the boss on the first evening in Black Kettle. He was a Michigan man, all bones and joints and elasticity, with a great foot for a double shuffle, a nose like a door-knocker, chunks of cheek-bones, a thin, determined bony chin, and glittering eyes.

I have spoken of getting used to the strange surroundings. The surroundings were—across the railway track—green and silver benches (because of their grass and sand) going up, up, up, in rolls, as if they were for giants to sit on and watch some play going on in Black Kettle. These benches fascinated me. The immense sweep of them, and the way white clouds would look up away beyond the last one, and not as if just behind the last, as if, rather, there was immensity between them and that last roll of hill, charmed me. To lie on the verandah of the Palace Hotel of Black Kettle and watch the clouds go up behind the benches, all to the sound of grasshoppers chirping, seemed all that one could do in Black Kettle. If one had not to work to live, I think it all that one would desire to do also. I am no hobo, but I love to lie on the Palace verandah and listen to the silence.