Читать книгу Timber-Wolf онлайн

71 страница из 95

"I got word for you, Bruce Standing!" he cried excitedly.

"Clear out, you fool...."

"I won't clear out! This is the real thing. Listen: A man, and it was a man paid by Young Gallup, has just went down the road with a double-barrel shotgun, and the dirty skunk has shot your horse, good old Sunlight ... dead!" By now Billy Winch was whimpering; tears, whether of rage or grief, filled his bright eyes and streamed down his face. And all the while, to maintain his balance, he was hopping unsteadily about, his outflung hand groping for the wall.

And now at last Timber-Wolf's anger, a devastating, all-engulfing rage which mastered him utterly, was unleashed. And with its release came inevitably that one condition of which he was so terribly ashamed. He cried out aloud, in a great, roaring voice ... and in the fierce grip of his wrath his utterance was so affected that his speech came enunciated in the most incongruous of fashions. For it was Timber-Wolf's burning mortification that he, the strongest man of these mountains, when in the clutch of his mightiest passions ... lisped like an affected school-girl!