Listen to me, Laura Inmando, that priest is not the spokesman of the emperor. No one is going to sleep now. When you wake up early, you will find that I am just a big dream for you, a priest who urges you to get rid of his dream. You must remember that the priest is hostile to you.
He stretched out two fingers to close the girl’s eyes like a dead man closing his eyelids. They saw evil, like Inman had seen people do. The girl fell asleep when he felt relaxed.
Inman left the girl and went back outside. The priest was still tied to Inman in the tree. At this time, he really wanted to chop the man with a knife, but in the end, he reached into his backpack and tossed with paper, pen and ink. He found a piece of poplar in a moonlight place, and he wrote it with blue brightness. He didn’t think twice about his words, but he told him about an attempted murder. After writing it, he pinned the paper on a branch where it was flush so that the priest could not reach it.
The priest looked at Inman. When he missed Inman’s eyes, the horse became nervous. He tried to twist his body but struggled to get rid of his neck by strangling it. He stretched out his foot to pedal Inman, who had guessed what Inman had written.
He had a handkerchief stuck in his mouth and tied with wire, and he could make a squeak as hard as he could.
Do you want to confess? Inman said
hiccup
Inman pulled a pistol against the priest’s ear. He moved the hammer to the back and aimed the switching lever at the firing pin against the barrel. If you say one word, your head will be gone. Inman said that he untied the wire and the priest spit out his handkerchief.
You ruined my life.
Don’t blame me. Inman said I don’t want to mind my own business, but I don’t want to worry about it. I don’t know if you will take her back to that dark canyon on horseback in a night or two.
Then shoot me now and hang me from a tree.
No, your suggestion is unattractive.
You’re going to hell for hurting me like this.
Inman picked up the wet handkerchief from the ground and forced it back into the priest’s mouth. Then he tied it with wire and strode behind the road, whining and moaning became weaker and weaker. It was blocked in his mouth and cursed.
In the rest of the night, Inman tried his best to speed up his steps and get away from the unknown place as soon as possible. When the morning light finally lit up behind him like a yellow pus, he had already entered a rolling hilly area. He was so tired that he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t know that he had only walked a mile because he felt like a hundred miles.
He stopped walking, walked into the Woods, piled up a floor, and then sat down with his back against a big tree to eat tortillas and fat pork from that woman’s house. He lay on the ground and slept for most of the afternoon.
Inman woke up and looked at the blue sky above his head through the pine branches. He took a pistol cloth to wipe and check the ammunition, and then held it in his hand as a companion. Inman owned a Lematte revolver, which was not made in Belgium in the early stage. Its barrel was marked with Burham’s mark. That was at the Battle of Petersburg. Inman just picked it up from the ground and was injured when he didn’t get into his belt. Since then, Inman has been carrying a gun on the way to the state capital by a train full of wounded soldiers in chaos. Although the shape is strange and the proportion of parts is too large, it is the most modern gun. Terrible carry-on weapon, its rotating chamber is as big as a fist loaded with nine-shot four-caliber bullets, but its main feature is that the pistol style is unique and new. It is characterized by the main barrel, another thick and large shotgun barrel, and a deer-hunting large lead shot or heavy shotgun. A shot of a life-saving killer in melee is like shooting a piece of lead duck egg at the enemy. Although it is very big, the Lematte revolver is quite balanced, and it is like a big iron block. Holding a gun in your hand and thinking that it can do things, it will naturally give birth.
Inman stroking the barrel of a loaded gun, recalling that the three men in the village struggled to cross the river, they met the priest and wondered if he could do everything differently. He hoped to make less trouble and not get mixed up in other people’s rotten things. He wanted to hide in the Woods and stay away from the road, like an owl or a ghost moving in the dark, and at the same time, he had another impulse to hang a big pistol on his ass and put up a black flag to kill and forgive. He rushed on in broad daylight and treated others with courtesy. Whoever wanted to make trouble, he would fight with him to the end and let anger serve as a guide to repel all obstacles.
Inman was never a combative man before the war, but once he joined the army, he easily adapted to the war. He believed that these other things were a gift, like people carving birds out of wood, people playing banjo, and priests were good at rhetoric. It matters whether everything is nerve structure, which can make you agile and calm in battle without becoming dull and making all kinds of wrong judgments, regardless of whether they are fatal or not. In addition, you can kill the enemy in close combat and win a strong body.
At the end of the day, Inman tried to get as far away from the shade as possible, but after walking for an hour, he was so tired that he almost couldn’t walk. Every foot lift had to go through all kinds of hardships. At this time, he saw that the path ahead was cut off by the river. There were two people, although they were far apart, they could see that they were two slaves, so Inman was too lazy to hide in the Woods any more, but he continued to walk forward. One of them was holding a big bean pole by Hejin, and the other one kicked hard and rolled in the mud. But the pig’s root was indifferent. He was
Inman was very weak for a moment, but he was a red pig lying in the mud and rolling until someone poked him with a beanstalk pole, but he took off his boots and waded to the other side and then swam away from the road to the river to find a hidden place to cook some corn porridge, but then the wind changed and the aroma of real food came from somewhere.
He looked up like a bear, blinked his eyes, and sniffed and followed the smell of meat in the air. Soon at the bend of the river, he saw a camp, a caravan, several horses and some peaked gray canvas tents in the birch forest. Inman hid behind the bushes and looked at the people in the camp. These people were busy, and they almost had different skin colors. Inman guessed that they were also fugitives from military service. Irish gypsy horse dealers all gathered together and ate trees and grass around. Full-bodied, but not far from death, but bathed in the golden sunshine in the afternoon behind him, these horses look beautiful to Inman. Their necks droop to form an elegant arc, and the thin skin from Mauritius highlights the tibia. Inman guessed that they were hidden by horse dealers. Too many horses died in the battlefield, and now it is very rare and the price is staggering. The military sent people to ride horses everywhere, but almost none of them gave Inman a little incentive, hoping that he could afford to buy a long-legged horse to ride and bid farewell to his walking status, but he didn’t have the money to say another horse around.
Maybe these waves will make him feel that he is in the same boat. Inman thought of this, so he went into the camp and let his hands hang down at his side at a glance. Gypsies were generous to this uninvited guest, but Inman knew the opportunity and they would steal everything from him. They cooked a pot of soup with a small fire, and rabbits and squirrels stole chickens, and all kinds of vegetables, mainly cabbage soup, were very dark. Large chunks of pumpkin coated with molasses were baked in an iron stove with charcoal fire, and a woman was dressed as colorful as a quilt cover. To scoop the food into Inman’s iron plate, and then she was busy frying tortillas in a pan. When she scooped up the hot oil, the tortillas crackled like guns coming from a distant battlefield.
Inman leans on a tree to eat and looks around. The rippling river rises over the stones. A birch tree takes the lead in autumn. The yellow leaves are rustling in the breeze. The smoke from the camp is curled into bundles of sunshine logs. A man sits with a cigarette case and a piano playing Gigerian dance. The children are playing in the shallow water by the river. Other gypsies are busy preparing horses. A boy’s corn cob dipped in a bucket of potash plant ash water and wiped an old horse to cover her gray hair. Then he took a thin mouse tail file to help it. Cleaning teeth Inman watched it get much younger. A woman tied a tall mare to a birch tree, then sprinkled lamp oil on its hoof wedge to burn it, otherwise it would limp when it walked. The problems of hock, stomach myiasis and emphysema were all treated or covered up one by one.
Inman once said that gypsies felt that these human beings were plundering a rare honesty, and they frankly admitted that they would never let go if they could drill. But in this quiet ravine, on the surface, they were fighting for a world war, and no matter which side won, the horse always wanted this contest. For them, it was only a temporary hindrance to business.
For the rest of the day, Riinman stayed with gypsies. When he was hungry, he took a spoonful of soup from the pot and drank it. He slept for a while and listened to Sogeum and went to see a woman, herb tea Ye, to tell her fortune. But when she wanted to help Inman calculate the future, he declined, thinking that there were enough things to frustrate himself.
At the end of the afternoon, he saw a dark-haired woman walking among the horses and putting a bridle on a taupe mare. She was young, wearing a long black dress and a man’s sweater. I don’t know if it was her black hair or her manners or her slender fingers. Inman thought of Ada for a moment. He sat on the ground and followed her. She grabbed the long skirt and put a petticoat on her mouth, showing her white thighs. She turned over and rode across the river. The water was deep. By the middle of the day, the horse had been unstable and slipped in the water several times. After that, her hips struggled to land, The woman’s clothes were wet all the way to her hips. She leaned forward to keep her balance. Her face was almost attached to the horse’s neck, and her black hair hung down. It was difficult to tell each other apart from each other. She slammed her heels on the horse’s belly and galloped away in the broad forest. This was a picture that excited Inman. He was grateful to see this scene.
In the evening, some gypsy boys cut birch branches into shuttle guns and went to a bubble to fork frogs. They caught a bucket full of frogs. They cut frog legs and strung them together to barbecue on walnut charcoal fire. At this moment, a man asked Inman, who was holding a bottle of Moet champagne. He said that he had switched to someone else, but he didn’t know what kind of wine it was, but Inman wanted to sell it at a high price. He counted some money to buy it, drank champagne and ate a plate of frog legs for dinner. The two things tasted good together, but it was a drop in the bucket for a hungry person like him.
He wandered around the camp, groping for something to eat, and finally walked to the caravan of entertainers. This was a trick-and-treating performance group. A white man sitting next to the tent saw Inman and came forward to ask him what he was doing. This man was thin and tall. He seemed to be the boss here. Inman asked if he could spend money to buy a meal. The man said it was not a problem, but it would take a long time to eat, because they had to practice kung fu before it was dark. Inman might as well sit and watch.
A moment later, he had seen the dark-haired woman come from the tent earlier, and Inman couldn’t move her eyes. He carefully observed her attitude towards the man and tried to guess that they were husband and wife. Later, she didn’t feel like they were putting up a board. The woman set the man in front of the board and threw a flying knife at her, and the blade was nailed to the board trembling. Inman wanted to attract a large group of people to watch the scene, but they also made another stunt. A tall Ethiopian lived with a gray beard and wore a purple robe. The emperor claimed to be the king of Africa when he was young. He played a banjo-like instrument, which could make the dead get up and dance, even though his piano was made of a gourd and a string. In addition, there were several Indians from different nationalities in the troupe, a Florida West Minor, a Crick, an Aikotacherokee and a Yamasi woman. In their performance, they were responsible for telling jokes, drumming, dancing and singing. The caravan was full of colorful medicine bottles, and each medicine was specially used to treat a certain disease, cancer, tuberculosis, neuralgia, malaria, cachexia, stroke, convulsion
After dark, they invited Inman to have dinner together. Everyone sat on the floor by the fire and ate a large piece of bloody steak, bacon, fried potatoes, which were used to mix wild vegetables before the potatoes sucked up the oil juice. Ethiopians and Indians also ate together as if everyone was the same color and equal. You talked about everyone if you wanted to talk, so you didn’t have to show it and no one stopped you.
After eating, they all squatted down to the river with plates. After the sand in the river was scrubbed clean, the old white man was cooking charcoal and adding dead branches. He didn’t think about saving firewood and burning the fire to shoulder height. A wine bottle came and went in everyone’s hands. Everyone sat around and told Inman all kinds of stories that happened during the long journey. They said that the road of wave life was a separate country, which was not under the jurisdiction of the government. Its only feature was that their stories were full of poverty and misery, and they were surprised by playing cards, gambling and selling. The Jockey Club was excited by the number of fools in the sky. They talked about how to get away from the law and how various disasters passed by. When they were doing business, they were fooled by fools and met by chance. They often had contradictory wisdom. Where were people easy to be deceived? Where were people sinister and vicious? They woke up and camped in a certain camp and ate something there. Everyone agreed that it was best to stay in a place a few years ago. A considerable river camped from them and poured directly from the cliff. They also agreed that they had never eaten fried chicken better than cooking in the shadow of that cliff.