Zane Grey (36 page)

The shade of wall and foliage above, and another jumble of ruined
cliff, hindered his survey of the ground ahead, and he almost stumbled
upon a cabin, hidden on three sides, with a small, bare clearing in
front. It was an old, ramshackle structure like others he had run
across in the canons. Cautiously he approached and peeped around the
corner. At first swift glance it had all the appearance of long disuse.
But Jean had no time for another look. A clip-clop of trotting horses
on hard ground brought the same pell-mell rush of sensations that had
driven him to wild flight scarcely an hour past. His body jerked with
its instinctive impulse, then quivered with his restraint. To turn
back would be risky, to run ahead would be fatal, to hide was his one
hope. No covert behind! And the clip-clop of hoofs sounded closer.
One moment longer Jean held mastery over his instincts of
self-preservation. To keep from running was almost impossible. It was
the sheer primitive animal sense to escape. He drove it back and
glided along the front of the cabin.

Here he saw that the cabin adjoined another. Reaching the door, he was
about to peep in when the thud of hoofs and voices close at hand
transfixed him with a grim certainty that he had not an instant to
lose. Through the thin, black-streaked line of trees he saw moving red
objects. Horses! He must run. Passing the door, his keen nose caught
a musty, woody odor and the tail of his eye saw bare dirt floor. This
cabin was unused. He halted-gave a quick look back. And the first
thing his eye fell upon was a ladder, right inside the door, against
the wall. He looked up. It led to a loft that, dark and gloomy,
stretched halfway across the cabin. An irresistible impulse drove
Jean. Slipping inside, he climbed up the ladder to the loft. It was
like night up there. But he crawled on the rough-hewn rafters and,
turning with his head toward the opening, he stretched out and lay
still.

What seemed an interminable moment ended with a trample of hoofs
outside the cabin. It ceased. Jean's vibrating ears caught the jingle
of spurs and a thud of boots striking the ground.

"Wal, sweetheart, heah we are home again," drawled a slow, cool,
mocking Texas voice.

"Home! I wonder, Colter—did y'u ever have a home—a mother—a
sister—much less a sweetheart?" was the reply, bitter and caustic.

Jean's palpitating, hot body suddenly stretched still and cold with
intensity of shock. His very bones seemed to quiver and stiffen into
ice. During the instant of realization his heart stopped. And a slow,
contracting pressure enveloped his breast and moved up to constrict his
throat. That woman's voice belonged to Ellen Jorth. The sound of it
had lingered in his dreams. He had stumbled upon the rendezvous of the
Jorth faction. Hard indeed had been the fates meted out to those of
the Isbels and Jorths who had passed to their deaths. But, no ordeal,
not even Queen's, could compare with this desperate one Jean must
endure. He had loved Ellen Jorth, strangely, wonderfully, and he had
scorned repute to believe her good. He had spared her father and her
uncle. He had weakened or lost the cause of the Isbels. He loved her
now, desperately, deathlessly, knowing from her own lips that she was
worthless—loved her the more because he had felt her terrible shame.
And to him—the last of the Isbels—had come the cruelest of dooms—to
be caught like a crippled rat in a trap; to be compelled to lie
helpless, wounded, without a gun; to listen, and perhaps to see Ellen
Jorth enact the very truth of her mocking insinuation. His will, his
promise, his creed, his blood must hold him to the stem decree that he
should be the last man of the Jorth-Isbel war. But could he lie there
to hear—to see—when he had a knife and an arm?

Then followed the leathery flop of saddles to the soft turf and the
stamp, of loosened horses.

Jean heard a noise at the cabin door, a rustle, and then a knock of
something hard against wood. Silently he moved his head to look down
through a crack between the rafters. He saw the glint of a rifle
leaning against the sill. Then the doorstep was darkened. Ellen Jorth
sat down with a long, tired sigh. She took off her sombrero and the
light shone on the rippling, dark-brown hair, hanging in a tangled
braid. The curved nape of her neck showed a warm tint of golden tan.
She wore a gray blouse, soiled and torn, that clung to her lissome
shoulders.

"Colter, what are y'u goin' to do?" she asked, suddenly. Her voice
carried something Jean did not remember. It thrilled into the icy
fixity of his senses.

"We'll stay heah," was the response, and it was followed by a clinking
step of spurred boot.

"Shore I won't stay heah," declared Ellen. "It makes me sick when I
think of how Uncle Tad died in there alone—helpless—sufferin'. The
place seems haunted."

"Wal, I'll agree that it's tough on y'u. But what the hell CAN we do?"

A long silence ensued which Ellen did not break.

"Somethin' has come off round heah since early mawnin'," declared
Colter. "Somers an' Springer haven't got back. An' Antonio's gone....
Now, honest, Ellen, didn't y'u heah rifle shots off somewhere?"

"I reckon I did," she responded, gloomily.

"An' which way?"

"Sounded to me up on the bluff, back pretty far."

"Wal, shore that's my idee. An' it makes me think hard. Y'u know
Somers come across the last camp of the Isbels. An' he dug into a
grave to find the bodies of Jim Gordon an' another man he didn't know.
Queen kept good his brag. He braced that Isbel gang an' killed those
fellars. But either him or Jean Isbel went off leavin' bloody tracks.
If it was Queen's y'u can bet Isbel was after him. An' if it was
Isbel's tracks, why shore Queen would stick to them. Somers an'
Springer couldn't follow the trail. They're shore not much good at
trackin'. But for days they've been ridin' the woods, hopin' to run
across Queen.... Wal now, mebbe they run across Isbel instead. An' if
they did an' got away from him they'll be heah sooner or later. If
Isbel was too many for them he'd hunt for my trail. I'm gamblin' that
either Queen or Jean Isbel is daid. I'm hopin' it's Isbel. Because if
he ain't daid he's the last of the Isbels, an' mebbe I'm the last of
Jorth's gang.... Shore I'm not hankerin' to meet the half-breed. That's
why I say we'll stay heah. This is as good a hidin' place as there is
in the country. We've grub. There's water an' grass."

"Me—stay heah with y'u—alone!"

The tone seemed a contradiction to the apparently accepted sense of her
words. Jean held his breath. But he could not still the slowly
mounting and accelerating faculties within that were involuntarily
rising to meet some strange, nameless import. He felt it. He imagined
it would be the catastrophe of Ellen Jorth's calm acceptance of
Colter's proposition. But down in Jean's miserable heart lived
something that would not die. No mere words could kill it. How
poignant that moment of her silence! How terribly he realized that if
his intelligence and his emotion had believed her betraying words, his
soul had not!

But Ellen Jorth did not speak. Her brown head hung thoughtfully. Her
supple shoulders sagged a little.

"Ellen, what's happened to y'u?" went on Colter.

"All the misery possible to a woman," she replied, dejectedly.

"Shore I don't mean that way," he continued, persuasively. "I ain't
gainsayin' the hard facts of your life. It's been bad. Your dad was
no good.... But I mean I can't figger the change in y'u."

"No, I reckon y'u cain't," she said. "Whoever was responsible for your
make-up left out a mind—not to say feeling."

Colter drawled a low laugh.

"Wal, have that your own way. But how much longer are yu goin' to be
like this heah?"

"Like what?" she rejoined, sharply.

"Wal, this stand-offishness of yours?"

"Colter, I told y'u to let me alone," she said, sullenly.

"Shore. An' y'u did that before. But this time y'u're different....
An' wal, I'm gettin' tired of it."

Here the cool, slow voice of the Texan sounded an inflexibility before
absent, a timber that hinted of illimitable power.

Ellen Jorth shrugged her lithe shoulders and, slowly rising, she picked
up the little rifle and turned to step into the cabin.

"Colter," she said, "fetch my pack an' my blankets in heah."

"Shore," he returned, with good nature.

Jean saw Ellen Jorth lay the rifle lengthwise in a chink between two
logs and then slowly turn, back to the wall. Jean knew her then, yet
did not know her. The brown flash of her face seemed that of an older,
graver woman. His strained gaze, like his waiting mind, had expected
something, he knew not what—a hardened face, a ghost of beauty, a
recklessness, a distorted, bitter, lost expression in keeping with her
fortunes. But he had reckoned falsely. She did not look like that.
There was incalculable change, but the beauty remained, somehow
different. Her red lips were parted. Her brooding eyes, looking out
straight from under the level, dark brows, seemed sloe black and
wonderful with their steady, passionate light.

Jean, in his eager, hungry devouring of the beloved face, did not on
the first instant grasp the significance of its expression. He was
seeing the features that had haunted him. But quickly he interpreted
her expression as the somber, hunted look of a woman who would bear no
more. Under the torn blouse her full breast heaved. She held her
hands clenched at her sides. She was' listening, waiting for that
jangling, slow step. It came, and with the sound she subtly changed.
She was a woman hiding her true feelings. She relaxed, and that
strong, dark look of fury seemed to fade back into her eyes.

Colter appeared at the door, carrying a roll of blankets and a pack.

"Throw them heah," she said. "I reckon y'u needn't bother coming in."

That angered the man. With one long stride he stepped over the
doorsill, down into the cabin, and flung the blankets at her feet and
then the pack after it. Whereupon he deliberately sat down in the
door, facing her. With one hand he slid off his sombrero, which fell
outside, and with the other he reached in his upper vest pocket for the
little bag of tobacco that showed there. All the time he looked at
her. By the light now unobstructed Jean descried Colter's face; and
sight of it then sounded the roll and drum of his passions.

"Wal, Ellen, I reckon we'll have it out right now an' heah," he said,
and with tobacco in one hand, paper in the other he began the
operations of making a cigarette. However, he scarcely removed his
glance from her.

"Yes?" queried Ellen Jorth.

"I'm goin' to have things the way they were before—an' more," he
declared. The cigarette paper shook in his fingers.

"What do y'u mean?" she demanded.

"Y'u know what I mean," he retorted. Voice and action were subtly
unhinging this man's control over himself.

"Maybe I don't. I reckon y'u'd better talk plain."

The rustler had clear gray-yellow eyes, flawless, like, crystal, and
suddenly they danced with little fiery flecks.

"The last time I laid my hand on y'u I got hit for my pains. An' shore
that's been ranklin'."

"Colter, y'u'll get hit again if y'u put your hands on me," she said,
dark, straight glance on him. A frown wrinkled the level brows.

"Y'u mean that?" he asked, thickly.

"I shore, do."

Manifestly he accepted her assertion. Something of incredulity and
bewilderment, that had vied with his resentment, utterly disappeared
from his face.

"Heah I've been waitin' for y'u to love me," he declared, with a
gesture not without dignified emotion. "Your givin' in without that
wasn't so much to me."

And at these words of the rustler's Jean Isbel felt an icy, sickening
shudder creep into his soul. He shut his eyes. The end of his dream
had been long in coming, but at last it had arrived. A mocking voice,
like a hollow wind, echoed through that region—that lonely and
ghost-like hall of his heart which had harbored faith.

She burst into speech, louder and sharper, the first words of which
Jean's strangely throbbing ears did not distinguish.

"— — you! ... I never gave in to y'u an' I never will."

"But, girl—I kissed y'u—hugged y'u—handled y'u—" he expostulated,
and the making of the cigarette ceased.

"Yes, y'u did—y'u brute—when I was so downhearted and weak I couldn't
lift my hand," she flashed.

"Ahuh! Y'u mean I couldn't do that now?"

"I should smile I do, Jim Colter!" she replied.

"Wal, mebbe—I'll see—presently," he went on, straining with words.
"But I'm shore curious.... Daggs, then—he was nothin' to y'u?"

"No more than y'u," she said, morbidly. "He used to run after me—long
ago, it seems..... I was only a girl then—innocent—an' I'd not known
any but rough men. I couldn't all the time—every day, every
hour—keep him at arm's length. Sometimes before I knew—I didn't
care. I was a child. A kiss meant nothing to me. But after I knew—"

Ellen dropped her head in brooding silence.

"Say, do y'u expect me to believe that?" he queried, with a derisive
leer.

"Bah! What do I care what y'u believe?" she cried, with lifting head.

"How aboot Simm Brace?"

"That coyote! ... He lied aboot me, Jim Colter. And any man half a man
would have known he lied."

"Wal, Simm always bragged aboot y'u bein' his girl," asserted Colter.
"An' he wasn't over—particular aboot details of your love-makin'."

Ellen gazed out of the door, over Colter's head, as if the forest out
there was a refuge. She evidently sensed more about the man than
appeared in his slow talk, in his slouching position. Her lips shut in
a firm line, as if to hide their trembling and to still her passionate
tongue. Jean, in his absorption, magnified his perceptions. Not yet
was Ellen Jorth afraid of this man, but she feared the situation.
Jean's heart was at bursting pitch. All within him seemed chaos—a
wreck of beliefs and convictions. Nothing was true. He would wake
presently out of a nightmare. Yet, as surely as he quivered there, he
felt the imminence of a great moment—a lightning flash—a
thunderbolt—a balance struck.