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Page 18
`Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?'
`We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.'
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. `It was just luck you had a tool,' he said cautiously. `Gosh! I
wouldn't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane wouldn't more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?'
Antonia broke in: `He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's
boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he
was crazy.'
Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: `Got him in the head
first crack, didn't you? That was just as well.'
We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen, I
found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with a
great deal of colour.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter
was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too
easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there
for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a
sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world doesn't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock
adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many
a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake
was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbours came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me better
from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I
had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.
VIII
WHILE THE AUTUMN COLOUR was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,
things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his troubles
to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first
of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a
mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was
Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name
throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could
give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew
that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then
fifty--that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew
faster than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with
mortgages.
Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers
for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood
from the lungs that his fellow workmen thought he would die on the spot.
They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill
indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the
log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The
Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to put
them out of mind.
One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to get
buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. just
as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said,
and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch
them. When Antonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated
grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I
would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning. My plan
must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about
humouring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment,
and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches and
doughnuts for us.
Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Antonia and I sat in the
straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun sank, a
cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the
weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in
the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of
the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept
sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would
never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew
magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the
world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining
groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps
Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his
land, too, some such belief.
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