Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark Read Online Free PDF Page B

no stock in them either."
She took her hands down from her face and laid one in her lap,
limply, palm up, and lifted her coffee mug with
the other. She blew slowly across the coffee twice, and then sipped
at it twice.
    "If you’re going hunting painters," she
said to Arthur, "even black ones, you’d better get some
breakfast in you." Arthur made four more careful little cuts on
the shoulder of the lion, and then reached around back of him and
slipped it into the pocket of the cowhide parka, with the other two
carvings. He closed the knife and put it in his pants pocket and drew
his chair in. He picked up his fork, but then just held it while he
looked at the mother’s face. She was staring down across the mug
into the center of the shadow on the table.
    "Only coffee again?" Arthur asked gently.
    She turned her head finally, and looked at him and
smiled a little. "I have to get waked up some way," she
said. "You know how it is if you have a bad dream last thing
before you wake up."
    Arthur nodded, and they were quiet for a time, Harold
eating and Arthur picking at his food with the fork and the mother
blowing on her coffee and sipping it. The quick, cheerful
conversation of the two voices went on in the north bedroom.
    The mother put her coffee cup down finally, and
looked into it, and said, "Harold, have you thought any how
you’ll live when you get married?"
    Harold glanced at her, but she kept studying her
coffee, and he looked back at his plate. "It hasn’t gone that
far,"
    "It’s what you want, isn’t it?" the
mother asked. "It’s for sure what them Williams think you
want, all the time you’ve spent sittin’ in their kitchen, with
more’n twenty miles of ridin’ to get there."
    Harold’s neck grew red, and the color rose slowly
into his cheeks. Without looking up, he got himself ready to say
something but then didn’t say it after all, but just closed his
mouth again.
    "Isn’t it what you want?"
    "I guess it is," Harold said slowly. "If
she does."
    "You needn’t to worry too much about that,"
the mother said. "Not with the money this ranch can make, and
that gopher hole the Williams is livin’ in."
    Harold lifted his head quickly and stared at her this
time. Arthur peered at her too, squinting as if he were trying to see
something a long way off, or through a blinding light. The mother
didn’t look up. Harold drew a short breath and worked the muscles
of his jaws three or four times, and then looked down again. "She’s
not that kind," he said.
    "Maybe not," the mother said, "but
whether she is or not, it’s high time you thought what you’re
going to do. Was you expecting to bring her here, into this house?"
    "No," Harold said, "I wouldn’t think
so."
    "No, I wouldn’t think so either." She
looked at him for the first time, and studied him for a moment as he
sat bent over his plate but not eating. "What was you figurin’
on doin’ then?" she asked.
    Arthur said softly, "It doesn’t have to be
settled right now, does it, Mother?"
    "Now’s as good a time as any. I don’t see
there’s anything to be gained puttin’ it off."
    "It’1l work out," Arthur said. "Just
give it time."
    "Things won’t be any different a year from
now, or ten years from now, for that matter. Nothin works out by
itself, that I ever see."
    "They do when they matter enough," Arthur
said.
    "Even if they did, what’s to be hurt talkin’
them over sensible beforehand?"
    "Some times are better than others," Arthur
said.
    "It’s not me that’s hurryin’ things,"
the mother said. "It don’t seem likely to me that Gwen
Williams thinks she’s been asked over just to keep an old maid like
Grace company. I’d be glad enough to let it wait if it would.
Harold’s too young to be gettin’ married. Nineteen’s too young
to get married. And to an older woman at that."
    "You talk as if she was fifty," Harold
said. "She’s not two years older’n I am."
    "She’s a woman, the mother said, "and
that’s as good as ten years