Blue Kingdom by Max Brand Read Free Book Online Page A

stared as he answered: “You? Weld it?”
    â€œI can do all sorts of odd jobs,” she replied, and smiled at him.
    He went with her without a word and found the blacksmith shop quite a spacious shed on the edge of the corral. Around it was the usual junk heap that accumulates on an old ranch—broken wheels, ribs of iron, a rake with a sagging back, a decrepit mowing machine, tangles of wire and barrel hoops of iron, and some fifty more items. Inside, the place seemed thoroughly gone to pieces. The roof was partly gone, and a sheathing of tin insufficiently replaced the shingles in two places. There were a few tools and much junk; everything was very old; the iron curled back from the much-battered faces of the hammers.
    However, she went to work at once on the brake rod. It was a clumsy job because of its length, but Dunmore helped her by handling the weight of the rod while she worked the bellows and attended to the fire. She, too, did the hammering when the glowing iron was brought from the fire—he saw her set her teeth and apply the strokes quickly and with skill. The sparks showered. It seemed to him that he never before had been so little a man as he was now.
    The welding was finished in an amazingly short time, the tempering and cooling accomplished, and then he carried out the rod and helped her refasten it beneath the wagon. It was an old, two-ton, wooden affair, with the wheels sagging in and out in perilous attitudes.
    â€œIs that your best?” he asked her.
    â€œThat’s our best,” she assured him. “Carrick, I know you want to be riding on. Don’t you bother about these odd jobs now. I know you’d like to stay and help, but you have your own life to lead.”
    He took a long breath, then he said: “Elizabeth, there’s not a shadow of doubt that I’m a Dunmore of the old line. That picture was enough to wipe out any such idea. I’ve got to stay here and do my share.”
    â€œIt’s no use, Carrick,” she assured him without bitterness. “The family fortunes have been skidding for so long that it would take ten men digging their heels in to stop them going downhill. Tie yourself to something that’s going up, not down. There’s no use in that, you know.”
    He looked vaguely around him. Everything he saw was sagging. The fence posts stood at odd angles, showing plainly that they were rotted away at the bottom; the barbed wire drooped or hung in festoons; the back of the barn had fallen in, and the eastern end of it, on the nearest side, was quite broken through.
    â€œElizabeth, is that pile of shakes intended for the roof?” he asked.
    â€œYes, for the roof of the barn. When I have a chance to put in a couple of days, before the rains. . . .”
    â€œYou’d climb up there and fix the thing?”
    â€œYes. I’ve done harder things than that, since Rodman left.”
    â€œRodman . . . what sort of a fellow?” he asked tersely.
    â€œRodman . . . is twenty-one,” she said, after a moment of hesitation. “He’s a good boy, too. But youcan’t blame a youngster for growing tired of such a life as this, can you?”
    He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m goin’ to fix that roof,” he said, and he marched straight to the task. As he went, his heart swelled. When he looked about him at the signs of wreck and ruinous age, it no longer made him hopeless, but, instead, it filled him with determination. When he sat on the roof looking over the task to be accomplished, he already, in his mind’s eye, had repaired every flaw, had covered the land of the ranch with cattle, had enlarged its boundaries, and placed a hired man in the garden, a cook in the kitchen, and put Elizabeth at a tea table in the living room in a pleasant summer frock.
    He roused himself from this reverie and took more careful note of the condition of the roof. It was very bad. The shakes had in part worked