and watched as a pack of Guard rumbled by, seeking out just such a one as himself to seize and thrash and return to service. When he had climbed down and begun walking again, every tree stump seemed to take on the shape of a lurker in the dark, and he once pulled his pistol on a scraggly myrtle bush that looked like a big-hatted fatman. Crossing a sunken creek long after midnight, he had reached a finger down into the wet clay bank and daubed on the breast of his jacket two concentric circles with a dot at the center and walked on, marked as the butt of the celestial realm, a night traveler, a fugitive, an outlier.
Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.
That long night accomplished, his greatest desire now was to climb over the fence and walk out across that old field into the flatwoods. Den up in the pines and sleep. But having at last reached open country, he needed to move on, so he took his foot off the fence rail and addressed himself anew to his travels.
The sun climbed the sky and turned hot, and all the insect world seemed to find Inman's bodily fluids fascinating. Striped mosquitoes hummed around his ears and bit his back through his shirt. Ticks dropped from trailside brush and attached themselves to him at hairline and pant waist and grew fat.
Gnats sought out the water in his eyes. A horsefly followed him for a while, troubling his neck. It was a big black glob of buzzing matter the size of the end joint to his thumb, and he longed to kill it but could not, no matter how he jerked and beat at himself as it landed to bite out gouts of flesh and blood. The blows rang out in the still air. From a distance he would have seemed one of a musical temper experimenting with a new method of percussion, or a loosed bedlamite, at odds with his better nature and striking out flat-palmed with self-loathing.
He stopped and pissed in the dirt. Before he was hardly done, spring azure butterflies alit on it to drink, the color of their wings in the sun like blued metal. They seemed to him things too beautiful to be drinking piss. It was, though, apparently the nature of the place.
In the afternoon, he came to a crossroads settlement. He stopped at the edge of town and surveyed the scene. There was but a store, a few houses, a lean-to where a smith pedaled at a wheel, file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...
2004-3-6
页码，36/232
sharpening the long blade of a scythe. Grinding it wrongly, Inman noted, for the smith was sharpening away from the cutting edge rather than toward, and holding the blade at right angles to the wheel rather than diagonal. There were no other people moving about the town. Inman decided to risk going to the whitewashed store to buy food. He stuck his pistol in the folds of the blanket roll so as to look harmless and not draw attention.
Two men sitting on the porch to the store hardly looked up as he mounted the steps. One man was hatless, his hair sticking up on one side as if he had just risen from bed and not even run his fingers across his head. He was deeply engaged in cleaning his fingernails with the nipple pick to a rifle musket. All his faculties were so fully brought to bear on the task that the tip of his tongue, grey as the foot of a goose, was stuck out at the corner of his mouth. The other man was studying a newspaper. He wore leavings from a uniform, but the bill to his forage cap had been torn off so that the crown alone topped his head like a grey tarboosh. It was cocked off to the side at a sharp angle, and Inman supposed the man styled himself as a rounder. Propped up against the wall behind the man was a fine Whitworth rifle, an elaborate brass-scoped artifact, with many complex little wheels and screws to adjust for windage and elevation. The hexagonal barrel was plugged with a tompion of maple wood to keep out dirt. Inman had seen but a few Whitworths before. They were favorites of snipers. Imported from England, as were their scarce
Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.
That long night accomplished, his greatest desire now was to climb over the fence and walk out across that old field into the flatwoods. Den up in the pines and sleep. But having at last reached open country, he needed to move on, so he took his foot off the fence rail and addressed himself anew to his travels.
The sun climbed the sky and turned hot, and all the insect world seemed to find Inman's bodily fluids fascinating. Striped mosquitoes hummed around his ears and bit his back through his shirt. Ticks dropped from trailside brush and attached themselves to him at hairline and pant waist and grew fat.
Gnats sought out the water in his eyes. A horsefly followed him for a while, troubling his neck. It was a big black glob of buzzing matter the size of the end joint to his thumb, and he longed to kill it but could not, no matter how he jerked and beat at himself as it landed to bite out gouts of flesh and blood. The blows rang out in the still air. From a distance he would have seemed one of a musical temper experimenting with a new method of percussion, or a loosed bedlamite, at odds with his better nature and striking out flat-palmed with self-loathing.
He stopped and pissed in the dirt. Before he was hardly done, spring azure butterflies alit on it to drink, the color of their wings in the sun like blued metal. They seemed to him things too beautiful to be drinking piss. It was, though, apparently the nature of the place.
In the afternoon, he came to a crossroads settlement. He stopped at the edge of town and surveyed the scene. There was but a store, a few houses, a lean-to where a smith pedaled at a wheel, file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...
2004-3-6
页码，36/232
sharpening the long blade of a scythe. Grinding it wrongly, Inman noted, for the smith was sharpening away from the cutting edge rather than toward, and holding the blade at right angles to the wheel rather than diagonal. There were no other people moving about the town. Inman decided to risk going to the whitewashed store to buy food. He stuck his pistol in the folds of the blanket roll so as to look harmless and not draw attention.
Two men sitting on the porch to the store hardly looked up as he mounted the steps. One man was hatless, his hair sticking up on one side as if he had just risen from bed and not even run his fingers across his head. He was deeply engaged in cleaning his fingernails with the nipple pick to a rifle musket. All his faculties were so fully brought to bear on the task that the tip of his tongue, grey as the foot of a goose, was stuck out at the corner of his mouth. The other man was studying a newspaper. He wore leavings from a uniform, but the bill to his forage cap had been torn off so that the crown alone topped his head like a grey tarboosh. It was cocked off to the side at a sharp angle, and Inman supposed the man styled himself as a rounder. Propped up against the wall behind the man was a fine Whitworth rifle, an elaborate brass-scoped artifact, with many complex little wheels and screws to adjust for windage and elevation. The hexagonal barrel was plugged with a tompion of maple wood to keep out dirt. Inman had seen but a few Whitworths before. They were favorites of snipers. Imported from England, as were their scarce
Similar Books
