Acres of Unrest by Max Brand Read Free Book Online Page B

he had a most extraordinary skill in supporting himself with his hands when there was anything for him to press against—as, for instance, the walls of a hall. Then he would swing the ironbraced leg beneath him and so progress with great, awkward, and unhuman strides.
    In his own room, he went over everything with an equal care—not a detail was missing. All was as it had been when he left. All was in good order, too. There was no sense of sticky mold and damp about the chamber, as there usually is in a room which has not been lived in for a long time. Instead, there was a sweetness in the atmosphere that proved this room had been cleaned and aired with some regularity. It told Peter everything that he could have asked.
    Still he made a slow round of the rest of the old ranch house. It was like moving through the bare ribs of a building that has been wrecked by fire. He could remember this house in the old days as a veritable bower of coolness in summer and of warmth in winter, but this was now all changed, for the trees that had once shaded and beautified the old house were all gone, and he did not need to be told where the bodies of them had gone.
    They had been transmuted into textbooks and tuition fees and all the other items that he had piled up so freely. Other men sent their sons to college. He had almost forgotten that he was being supportedfrom so small a ranch and by so untalented a money-maker as Ross Hale.
    The first suspicion had entered his mind when he saw the tumble-down span of horses that waited for him at the station and the faded old coat that his father wore. The sight of the house and the falling barn had been eloquent additional touches. However, all that he saw in the house itself was needed to sink the thought to his heart of hearts.
    An axe began to ring behind the house. He went out and found his father busily engaged in cutting up some wood. But it was tough and time-seasoned oak, and the axe was dull, and the arms of Ross Hale seemed strangely weak on this day. Peter took the axe from him without a word.

Chapter Nine
    “Can you swing an axe, too?” asked Ross Hale.
    “Watch me!”
    It was a novel sight to see Peter support himself, driving the iron end of his brace into the ground to anchor him, and then wielding the axe in both hands. From that tough wood the tool had been rebounding impotently while Ross Hale swung it. But now that Peter stood to the work, all was changed. The very first blow fleshed the axe by half the depth of its blade; the second brought out a chip as big as the joined hands of a man. And the ringing of every stroke echoed far off, like the rhythmic explosions of a long rifle.
    Ross Hale, watching with wonder, looked up and down, following the flash of the axe, thinking: If this giant had not been maimed…
    “Is that enough?” asked Peter.
    The butt of the big log had been chopped into stove-wood sizes, and here was Peter, resting lightly on the haft of the axe and smiling. He looked at his father, but there was too much pride and pain combined in the features of Ross Hale. His son was compelled to stare past him.
    Through the soft light of the dusk, a twelve-mule team plodded up the road, their heads nodding in a beautifully regular rhythm. Behind them a great wagon lumbered and creaked.
    “The quarry wagon!” Peter cried. Suddenly he began to laugh with pleasure. “Don’t tell me that that’s the quarry wagon, Dad?”
    “It’s the same,” said Ross Hale. “What about it?”
    “Why, it’s eleven years since I saw the last one. I’d almost forgotten that there was such a thing in the world as the quarries.”
    “Don’t you forget it no more,” said his father. “They’re busier than they’ve ever been before. Only the difference now is that they’re getting something better than rock out of them. A lot better. They’ve struck silver down there. And it’s paying them pretty good.”
    “Silver!” cried Peter. “Up at the old