On Kingdom Mountain by Howard Frank Mosher

Author:Howard Frank Mosher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

27

IT WAS NOT the sheriff of Kingdom County who showed up at the home place that afternoon, but Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers in Eben’s new dark Buick, appearing, through the haze, as spectral as a hearse. In the smoky air the mountaintop seemed to float just above the home place, as it sometimes did on chilly fall mornings when a thick band of fog rising from the river obscured all but the treeless summit. Even Eben found the levitating mountain unsettling. He wondered if the illusion, which was also visible on certain icy winter mornings, might put off prospective investors and skiers.

Miss Jane and Henry met the visitors in the barnyard, Jane carrying Lady Justice. “We’d like a word in private with Mr. Satterfield, cousin,” Eben Kinneson Esquire said.

“Mr. Satterfield had nothing to do with my little skirmish with the mule this morning, cousin,” Miss Jane replied. “That was entirely my doing.”

“We did not come out here about a dead mule,” Eben said. “We wish to consult with Mr. Satterfield on a purely professional matter.”

“Oh, Miss Jane is no stranger to my profession,” Henry said, slightly bemused. “Consult away, gentlemen.”

“It’s this confounded drought, Mr. Satterfield,” George Quinn said. “Last night the Reverend here had a dream.”

“A very foreboding dream,” Prof Chadburn said. “Tell them, Reverend.”

“I was fishing in the Kingdom River,” the Reverend said, though it was well known that he was no fisherman, “when seven kine, fat-fleshed and well-favored, came up out of the pool below the High Falls behind the hotel. And seven other kine came after them, poor and ill-favored and lean-fleshed. And the lean and ill-favored kine did devour the seven fat kine.”

Miss Jane had always regarded the Reverend as a pompous moron. Now she was sure of it.

“Horsefeathers,” she said. “It was that half an angel food cake you packed away for a midnight snack, Reverend. You might better have flung it out the window to your ill-favored kine.”

“I should think that you, Miss Jane, of all people, would appreciate a prophetic dream,” the Reverend said in an injured tone. “The point is, if the drought is to end we need intervention. That’s why we’ve come to consult with Mr. Satterfield. You are a rainmaker, are you not?”

“Oh,” Henry said with a dismissive wave, “I don’t make rain so much as I follow it. I don’t reckon that I ever slap made it rain in my life. Sometimes I have seen wet weather coming and nudged it along, so to speak. Coaxed the clouds this way and that and maybe encouraged an electrical storm to follow my plane. Rainmaking is an uncertain and hazardous enterprise, I’m afraid. Like many another human enterprise.”

George Quinn said, “More of our farmers are going under every day, Mr. Satterfield. The whole county is a blasted dust bowl. We would very much appreciate it if you could nudge some rain our way. We would be prepared to compensate you for whatever hazards may be involved.”

“Sir,” Eben Kinneson

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.