Zane Grey (15 page)

"Yes."

"Did he look to you like a real woodsman?"

"Indeed he did. He wore buckskin. He stepped quick and soft. He
acted at home in the woods. He had eyes black as night and sharp as
lightnin'. They shore saw about all there was to see."

Jorth chewed at his mustache and lost himself in brooding thought.

"Dad, tell me, is there goin' to be a war?" asked Ellen, presently.

What a red, strange, rolling flash blazed in his eyes! His body jerked.

"Shore. You might as well know."

"Between sheepmen and cattlemen?"

"Yes."

"With y'u, dad, at the haid of one faction and Gaston Isbel the other?"

"Daughter, you have it correct, so far as you go."

"Oh! ... Dad, can't this fight be avoided?"

"You forget you're from Texas," he replied.

"Cain't it be helped?" she repeated, stubbornly.

"No!" he declared, with deep, hoarse passion.

"Why not?"

"Wal, we sheepmen are goin' to run sheep anywhere we like on the range.
An' cattlemen won't stand for that."

"But, dad, it's so foolish," declared Ellen, earnestly. "Y'u sheepmen
do not have to run sheep over the cattle range."

"I reckon we do."

"Dad, that argument doesn't go with me. I know the country. For years
to come there will be room for both sheep and cattle without
overrunnin'. If some of the range is better in water and grass, then
whoever got there first should have it. That shore is only fair. It's
common sense, too."

"Ellen, I reckon some cattle people have been prejudicin' you," said
Jorth, bitterly.

"Dad!" she cried, hotly.

This had grown to be an ordeal for Jorth. He seemed a victim of
contending tides of feeling. Some will or struggle broke within him
and the change was manifest. Haggard, shifty-eyed, with wabbling chin,
he burst into speech.

"See heah, girl. You listen. There's a clique of ranchers down in the
Basin, all those you named, with Isbel at their haid. They have
resented sheepmen comin' down into the valley. They want it all to
themselves. That's the reason. Shore there's another. All the Isbels
are crooked. They're cattle an' horse thieves—have been for years.
Gaston Isbel always was a maverick rustler. He's gettin' old now an'
rich, so he wants to cover his tracks. He aims to blame this cattle
rustlin' an' horse stealin' on to us sheepmen, an' run us out of the
country."

Gravely Ellen Jorth studied her father's face, and the newly found
truth-seeing power of her eyes did not fail her. In part, perhaps in
all, he was telling lies. She shuddered a little, loyally battling
against the insidious convictions being brought to fruition. Perhaps
in his brooding over his failures and troubles he leaned toward false
judgments. Ellen could not attach dishonor to her father's motives or
speeches. For long, however, something about him had troubled her,
perplexed her. Fearfully she believed she was coming to some
revelation, and, despite her keen determination to know, she found
herself shrinking.

"Dad, mother told me before she died that the Isbels had ruined you,"
said Ellen, very low. It hurt her so to see her father cover his face
that she could hardly go on. "If they ruined you they ruined all of
us. I know what we had once—what we lost again and again—and I see
what we are come to now. Mother hated the Isbels. She taught me to
hate the very name. But I never knew how they ruined you—or why—or
when. And I want to know now."

Then it was not the face of a liar that Jorth disclosed. The present
was forgotten. He lived in the past. He even seemed younger 'in the
revivifying flash of hate that made his face radiant. The lines burned
out. Hate gave him back the spirit of his youth.

"Gaston Isbel an' I were boys together in Weston, Texas," began Jorth,
in swift, passionate voice. "We went to school together. We loved the
same girl—your mother. When the war broke out she was engaged to
Isbel. His family was rich. They influenced her people. But she
loved me. When Isbel went to war she married me. He came back an'
faced us. God! I'll never forget that. Your mother confessed her
unfaithfulness—by Heaven! She taunted him with it. Isbel accused me
of winnin' her by lies. But she took the sting out of that.

"Isbel never forgave her an' he hounded me to ruin. He made me out a
card-sharp, cheatin' my best friends. I was disgraced. Later he
tangled me in the courts—he beat me out of property—an' last by
convictin' me of rustlin' cattle he run me out of Texas."

Black and distorted now, Jorth's face was a spectacle to make Ellen
sick with a terrible passion of despair and hate. The truth of her
father's ruin and her own were enough. What mattered all else? Jorth
beat the table with fluttering, nerveless hands that seemed all the
more significant for their lack of physical force.

"An' so help me God, it's got to be wiped out in blood!" he hissed.

That was his answer to the wavering and nobility of Ellen. And she in
her turn had no answer to make. She crept away into the corner behind
the curtain, and there on her couch in the semidarkness she lay with
strained heart, and a resurging, unconquerable tumult in her mind. And
she lay there from the middle of that afternoon until the next morning.

When she awakened she expected to be unable to rise—she hoped she
could not—but life seemed multiplied in her, and inaction was
impossible. Something young and sweet and hopeful that had been in her
did not greet the sun this morning. In their place was a woman's
passion to learn for herself, to watch events, to meet what must come,
to survive.

After breakfast, at which she sat alone, she decided to put Isbel's
package out of the way, so that it would not be subjecting her to
continual annoyance. The moment she picked it up the old curiosity
assailed her.

"Shore I'll see what it is, anyway," she muttered, and with swift hands
she opened the package. The action disclosed two pairs of fine, soft
shoes, of a style she had never seen, and four pairs of stockings, two
of strong, serviceable wool, and the others of a finer texture. Ellen
looked at them in amaze. Of all things in the world, these would have
been the last she expected to see. And, strangely, they were what she
wanted and needed most. Naturally, then, Ellen made the mistake of
taking them in her hands to feel their softness and warmth.

"Shore! He saw my bare legs! And he brought me these presents he'd
intended for his sister.... He was ashamed for me—sorry for me.... And
I thought he looked at me bold-like, as I'm used to be looked at heah!
Isbel or not, he's shore..."

But Ellen Jorth could not utter aloud the conviction her intelligence
tried to force upon her.

"It'd be a pity to burn them," she mused. "I cain't do it. Sometime I
might send them to Ann Isbel."

Whereupon she wrapped them up again and hid them in the bottom of the
old trunk, and slowly, as she lowered the lid, looking darkly, blankly
at the wall, she whispered: "Jean Isbel! ... I hate him!"

Later when Ellen went outdoors she carried her rifle, which was unusual
for her, unless she intended to go into the woods.

The morning was sunny and warm. A group of shirt-sleeved men lounged
in the hall and before the porch of the double cabin. Her father was
pacing up and down, talking forcibly. Ellen heard his hoarse voice. As
she approached he ceased talking and his listeners relaxed their
attention. Ellen's glance ran over them swiftly—Daggs, with his
superb head, like that of a hawk, uncovered to the sun; Colter with his
lowered, secretive looks, his sand-gray lean face; Jackson Jorth, her
uncle, huge, gaunt, hulking, with white in his black beard and hair,
and the fire of a ghoul in his hollow eyes; Tad Jorth, another brother
of her father's, younger, red of eye and nose, a weak-chinned drinker
of rum. Three other limber-legged Texans lounged there, partners of
Daggs, and they were sun-browned, light-haired, blue-eyed men
singularly alike in appearance, from their dusty high-heeled boots to
their broad black sombreros. They claimed to be sheepmen. All Ellen
could be sure of was that Rock Wells spent most of his time there,
doing nothing but look for a chance to waylay her; Springer was a
gambler; and the third, who answered to the strange name of Queen, was
a silent, lazy, watchful-eyed man who never wore a glove on his right
hand and who never was seen without a gun within easy reach of that
hand.

"Howdy, Ellen. Shore you ain't goin' to say good mawnin' to this heah
bad lot?" drawled Daggs, with good-natured sarcasm.

"Why, shore! Good morning, y'u hard-working industrious MANANA sheep
raisers," replied Ellen, coolly.

Daggs stared. The others appeared taken back by a greeting so foreign
from any to which they were accustomed from her. Jackson Jorth let out
a gruff haw-haw. Some of them doffed their sombreros, and Rock Wells
managed a lazy, polite good morning. Ellen's father seemed most
significantly struck by her greeting, and the least amused.

"Ellen, I'm not likin' your talk," he said, with a frown.

"Dad, when y'u play cards don't y'u call a spade a spade?"

"Why, shore I do."

"Well, I'm calling spades spades."

"Ahuh!" grunted Jorth, furtively dropping his eyes. "Where you goin'
with your gun? I'd rather you hung round heah now."

"Reckon I might as well get used to packing my gun all the time,"
replied Ellen. "Reckon I'll be treated more like a man."

Then the event Ellen had been expecting all morning took place. Simm
Bruce and Lorenzo rode around the slope of the Knoll and trotted toward
the cabin. Interest in Ellen was relegated to the background.

"Shore they're bustin' with news," declared Daggs.

"They been ridin' some, you bet," remarked another.

"Huh!" exclaimed Jorth. "Bruce shore looks queer to me."

"Red liquor," said Tad Jorth, sententiously. "You-all know the brand
Greaves hands out."

"Naw, Simm ain't drunk," said Jackson Jorth. "Look at his bloody
shirt."

The cool, indolent interest of the crowd vanished at the red color
pointed out by Jackson Jorth. Daggs rose in a single springy motion to
his lofty height. The face Bruce turned to Jorth was swollen and
bruised, with unhealed cuts. Where his right eye should have been
showed a puffed dark purple bulge. His other eye, however, gleamed
with hard and sullen light. He stretched a big shaking hand toward
Jorth.

"Thet Nez Perce Isbel beat me half to death," he bellowed.

Jorth stared hard at the tragic, almost grotesque figure, at the
battered face. But speech failed him. It was Daggs who answered Bruce.

"Wal, Simm, I'll be damned if you don't look it."

"Beat you! What with?" burst out Jorth, explosively.

"I thought he was swingin' an ax, but Greaves swore it was his fists,"
bawled Bruce, in misery and fury.

"Where was your gun?" queried Jorth, sharply.

"Gun? Hell!" exclaimed Bruce, flinging wide his arms. "Ask Lorenzo. He
had a gun. An' he got a biff in the jaw before my turn come. Ask him?"

Attention thus directed to the Mexican showed a heavy discolored
swelling upon the side of his olive-skinned face. Lorenzo looked only
serious.

"Hah! Speak up," shouted Jorth, impatiently.

"Senor Isbel heet me ver quick," replied Lorenzo, with expressive
gesture. "I see thousand stars—then moocho black—all like night."

At that some of Daggs's men lolled back with dry crisp laughter.
Daggs's hard face rippled with a smile. But there was no humor in
anything for Colonel Jorth.

"Tell us what come off. Quick!" he ordered. "Where did it happen?
Why? Who saw it? What did you do?"

Bruce lapsed into a sullen impressiveness. "Wal, I happened in
Greaves's store an' run into Jean Isbel. Shore was lookin' fer him. I
had my mind made up what to do, but I got to shootin' off my gab
instead of my gun. I called him Nez Perce—an' I throwed all thet talk
in his face about old Gass Isbel sendin' fer him—an' I told him he'd
git run out of the Tonto. Reckon I was jest warmin' up.... But then it
all happened. He slugged Lorenzo jest one. An' Lorenzo slid
peaceful-like to bed behind the counter. I hadn't time to think of
throwin' a gun before he whaled into me. He knocked out two of my
teeth. An' I swallered one of them."

Ellen stood in the background behind three of the men and in the
shadow. She did not join in the laugh that followed Bruce's remarks.
She had known that he would lie. Uncertain yet of her reaction to
this, but more bitter and furious as he revealed his utter baseness,
she waited for more to be said.

"Wal, I'll be doggoned," drawled Daggs.

"What do you make of this kind of fightin'?" queried Jorth,

"Darn if I know," replied Daggs in perplexity. "Shore an' sartin it's
not the way of a Texan. Mebbe this young Isbel really is what old Gass
swears he is. Shore Bruce ain't nothin' to give an edge to a real gun
fighter. Looks to me like Isbel bluffed Greaves an' his gang an'
licked your men without throwin' a gun."

"Maybe Isbel doesn't want the name of drawin' first blood," suggested
Jorth.

"That 'd be like Gass," spoke up Rock Wells, quietly. "I onct rode fer
Gass in Texas."

"Say, Bruce," said Daggs, "was this heah palaverin' of yours an' Jean
Isbel's aboot the old stock dispute? Aboot his father's range an'
water? An' partickler aboot, sheep?"

"Wal—I—I yelled a heap," declared Bruce, haltingly, "but I don't
recollect all I said—I was riled.... Shore, though it was the same old
argyment thet's been fetchin' us closer an' closer to trouble."

Daggs removed his keen hawklike gaze from Bruce. "Wal, Jorth, all I'll
say is this. If Bruce is tellin' the truth we ain't got a hell of a
lot to fear from this young Isbel. I've known a heap of gun fighters
in my day. An' Jean Isbel don't ran true to class. Shore there never
was a gunman who'd risk cripplin' his right hand by sluggin' anybody."