Zane Grey (31 page)

"Wal, if y'u reckon y'u can coax him to talk you're shore wrong,"
declared Colter, with that cold timbre of voice that struck like steel
on Ellen's nerves. "I cussed him good an' told him he'd keep his mouth
shut. Talkin' makes him cough an' that fetches up the blood....
Besides, I reckon I'm the one to tell y'u how your dad an' uncle got
killed. Tad didn't see it done, an' he was bad hurt when it happened.
Shore all the fellars left have their idee aboot it. But I've got it
straight."

"Colter—tell me now," cried Ellen.

"Wal, all right. Come over heah," he replied, and drew her away from
the camp fire, out in the shadow of gloom. "Poor kid! I shore feel
bad aboot it." He put a long arm around her waist and drew her against
him. Ellen felt it, yet did not offer any resistance. All her
faculties seemed absorbed in a morbid and sad anticipation.

"Ellen, y'u shore know I always loved y'u—now don't y 'u?" he asked,
with suppressed breath.

"No, Colter. It's news to me—an' not what I want to heah."

"Wal, y'u may as well heah it right now," he said. "It's true. An'
what's more—your dad gave y'u to me before he died."

"What! Colter, y'u must be a liar."

"Ellen, I swear I'm not lyin'," he returned, in eager passion. "I was
with your dad last an' heard him last. He shore knew I'd loved y'u for
years. An' he said he'd rather y'u be left in my care than anybody's."

"My father gave me to y'u in marriage!" ejaculated Ellen, in
bewilderment.

Colter's ready assurance did not carry him over this point. It was
evident that her words somewhat surprised and disconcerted him for the
moment.

"To let me marry a rustler—one of the Hash Knife Gang!" exclaimed
Ellen, with weary incredulity.

"Wal, your dad belonged to Daggs's gang, same as I do," replied Colter,
recovering his cool ardor.

"No!" cried Ellen.

"Yes, he shore did, for years," declared Colter, positively. "Back in
Texas. An' it was your dad that got Daggs to come to Arizona."

Ellen tried to fling herself away. But her strength and her spirit
were ebbing, and Colter increased the pressure of his arm. All at once
she sank limp. Could she escape her fate? Nothing seemed left to
fight with or for.

"All right—don't hold me—so tight," she panted. "Now tell me how dad
was killed ... an' who—who—"

Colter bent over so he could peer into her face. In the darkness Ellen
just caught the gleam of his eyes. She felt the virile force of the
man in the strain of his body as he pressed her close. It all seemed
unreal—a hideous dream—the gloom, the moan of the wind, the weird
solitude, and this rustler with hand and will like cold steel.

"We'd come back to Greaves's store," Colter began. "An' as Greaves was
daid we all got free with his liquor. Shore some of us got drunk.
Bruce was drunk, an' Tad in there—he was drunk. Your dad put away
more 'n I ever seen him. But shore he wasn't exactly drunk. He got
one of them weak an' shaky spells. He cried an' he wanted some of us
to get the Isbels to call off the fightin'.... He shore was ready to
call it quits. I reckon the killin' of Daggs—an' then the awful way
Greaves was cut up by Jean Isbel—took all the fight out of your dad.
He said to me, 'Colter, we'll take Ellen an' leave this heah
country—an' begin life all over again—where no one knows us.'"

"Oh, did he really say that? ... Did he—really mean it?" murmured
Ellen, with a sob.

"I'll swear it by the memory of my daid mother," protested Colter.
"Wal, when night come the Isbels rode down on us in the dark an' began
to shoot. They smashed in the door—tried to burn us out—an' hollered
around for a while. Then they left an' we reckoned there'd be no more
trouble that night. All the same we kept watch. I was the soberest
one an' I bossed the gang. We had some quarrels aboot the drinkin'.
Your dad said if we kept it up it 'd be the end of the Jorths. An' he
planned to send word to the Isbels next mawnin' that he was ready for a
truce. An' I was to go fix it up with Gaston Isbel. Wal, your dad went
to bed in Greaves's room, an' a little while later your uncle Jackson
went in there, too. Some of the men laid down in the store an' went to
sleep. I kept guard till aboot three in the mawnin'. An' I got so
sleepy I couldn't hold my eyes open. So I waked up Wells an' Slater
an' set them on guard, one at each end of the store. Then I laid down
on the counter to take a nap."

Colter's low voice, the strain and breathlessness of him, the agitation
with which he appeared to be laboring, and especially the simple,
matter-of-fact detail of his story, carried absolute conviction to
Ellen Jorth. Her vague doubt of him had been created by his attitude
toward her. Emotion dominated her intelligence. The images, the
scenes called up by Colter's words, were as true as the gloom of the
wild gulch and the loneliness of the night solitude—as true as the
strange fact that she lay passive in the arm of a rustler.

"Wall, after a while I woke up," went on Colter, clearing his throat.
"It was gray dawn. All was as still as death.... An' somethin' shore
was wrong. Wells an' Slater had got to drinkin' again an' now laid
daid drunk or asleep. Anyways, when I kicked them they never moved.
Then I heard a moan. It came from the room where your dad an' uncle
was. I went in. It was just light enough to see. Your uncle Jackson
was layin' on the floor—cut half in two—daid as a door nail.... Your
dad lay on the bed. He was alive, breathin' his last.... He says,
'That half-breed Isbel—knifed us—while we slept!' ... The winder
shutter was open. I seen where Jean Isbel had come in an' gone out. I
seen his moccasin tracks in the dirt outside an' I seen where he'd
stepped in Jackson's blood an' tracked it to the winder. Y'u shore can
see them bloody tracks yourself, if y'u go back to Greaves's store....
Your dad was goin' fast.... He said, 'Colter—take care of Ellen,' an'
I reckon he meant a lot by that. He kept sayin', 'My God! if I'd only
seen Gaston Isbel before it was too late!' an' then he raved a little,
whisperin' out of his haid.... An' after that he died.... I woke up the
men, an' aboot sunup we carried your dad an' uncle out of town an'
buried them.... An' them Isbels shot at us while we were buryin' our
daid! That's where Tad got his hurt.... Then we hit the trail for
Jorth's ranch.... An now, Ellen, that's all my story. Your dad was
ready to bury the hatchet with his old enemy. An' that Nez Perce Jean
Isbel, like the sneakin' savage he is, murdered your uncle an' your
dad.... Cut him horrible—made him suffer tortures of hell—all for
Isbel revenge!"

When Colter's husky voice ceased Ellen whispered through lips as cold
and still as ice, "Let me go ... leave me—heah—alone!"

"Why, shore! I reckon I understand," replied Colter. "I hated to tell
y'u. But y'u had to heah the truth aboot that half-breed.... I'll
carry your pack in the cabin an' unroll your blankets."

Releasing her, Colter strode off in the gloom. Like a dead weight,
Ellen began to slide until she slipped down full length beside the log.
And then she lay in the cool, damp shadow, inert and lifeless so far as
outward physical movement was concerned. She saw nothing and felt
nothing of the night, the wind, the cold, the falling dew. For the
moment or hour she was crushed by despair, and seemed to see herself
sinking down and down into a black, bottomless pit, into an abyss where
murky tides of blood and furious gusts of passion contended between her
body and her soul. Into the stormy blast of hell! In her despair she
longed, she ached for death. Born of infidelity, cursed by a taint of
evil blood, further cursed by higher instinct for good and happy life,
dragged from one lonely and wild and sordid spot to another, never
knowing love or peace or joy or home, left to the companionship of
violent and vile men, driven by a strange fate to love with
unquenchable and insupportable love a' half-breed, a savage, an Isbel,
the hereditary enemy of her people, and at last the ruthless murderer
of her father—what in the name of God had she left to live for?
Revenge! An eye for an eye! A life for a life! But she could not
kill Jean Isbel. Woman's love could turn to hate, but not the love of
Ellen Jorth. He could drag her by the hair in the dust, beat her, and
make her a thing to loathe, and cut her mortally in his savage and
implacable thirst for revenge—but with her last gasp she would whisper
she loved him and that she had lied to him to kill his faith. It was
that—his strange faith in her purity—which had won her love. Of all
men, that he should be the one to recognize the truth of her, the
womanhood yet unsullied—how strange, how terrible, how overpowering!
False, indeed, was she to the Jorths! False as her mother had been to
an Isbel! This agony and destruction of her soul was the bitter Dead
Sea fruit—the sins of her parents visited upon her.

"I'll end it all," she whispered to the night shadows that hovered over
her. No coward was she—no fear of pain or mangled flesh or death or
the mysterious hereafter could ever stay her. It would be easy, it
would be a last thrill, a transport of self-abasement and supreme
self-proof of her love for Jean Isbel to kiss the Rim rock where his
feet had trod and then fling herself down into the depths. She was the
last Jorth. So the wronged Isbels would be avenged.

"But he would never know—never know—I lied to him!" she wailed to the
night wind.

She was lost—lost on earth and to hope of heaven. She had right
neither to live nor to die. She was nothing but a little weed along
the trail of life, trampled upon, buried in the mud. She was nothing
but a single rotten thread in a tangled web of love and hate and
revenge. And she had broken.

Lower and lower she seemed to sink. Was there no end to this gulf of
despair? If Colter had returned he would have found her a rag and a
toy—a creature degraded, fit for his vile embrace. To be thrust
deeper into the mire—to be punished fittingly for her betrayal of a
man's noble love and her own womanhood—to be made an end of, body,
mind, and soul.

But Colter did not return.

The wind mourned, the owls hooted, the leaves rustled, the insects
whispered their melancholy night song, the camp-fire flickered and
faded. Then the wild forestland seemed to close imponderably over
Ellen. All that she wailed in her despair, all that she confessed in
her abasement, was true, and hard as life could be—but she belonged to
nature. If nature had not failed her, had God failed her? It was
there—the lonely land of tree and fern and flower and brook, full of
wild birds and beasts, where the mossy rocks could speak and the
solitude had ears, where she had always felt herself unutterably a part
of creation. Thus a wavering spark of hope quivered through the
blackness of her soul and gathered light.

The gloom of the sky, the shifting clouds of dull shade, split asunder
to show a glimpse of a radiant star, piercingly white, cold, pure, a
steadfast eye of the universe, beyond all understanding and illimitable
with its meaning of the past and the present and the future. Ellen
watched it until the drifting clouds once more hid it from her strained
sight.

What had that star to do with hell? She might be crushed and destroyed
by life, but was there not something beyond? Just to be born, just to
suffer, just to die—could that be all? Despair did not loose its hold
on Ellen, the strife and pang of her breast did not subside. But with
the long hours and the strange closing in of the forest around her and
the fleeting glimpse of that wonderful star, with a subtle divination
of the meaning of her beating heart and throbbing mind, and, lastly,
with a voice thundering at her conscience that a man's faith in a woman
must not be greater, nobler, than her faith in God and eternity—with
these she checked the dark flight of her soul toward destruction.

A chill, gray, somber dawn was breaking when Ellen dragged herself into
the cabin and crept under her blankets, there to sleep the sleep of
exhaustion.

When she awoke the hour appeared to be late afternoon. Sun and sky
shone through the sunken and decayed roof of the old cabin. Her uncle,
Tad Jorth, lay upon a blanket bed upheld by a crude couch of boughs.
The light fell upon his face, pale, lined, cast in a still mold of
suffering. He was not dead, for she heard his respiration.

The floor underneath Ellen's blankets was bare clay. She and Jorth
were alone in this cabin. It contained nothing besides their beds and
a rank growth of weeds along the decayed lower logs. Half of the cabin
had a rude ceiling of rough-hewn boards which formed a kind of loft.
This attic extended through to the adjoining cabin, forming the ceiling
of the porch-like space between the two structures. There was no
partition. A ladder of two aspen saplings, pegged to the logs, and
with braces between for steps, led up to the attic.

Ellen smelled wood smoke and the odor of frying meat, and she heard the
voices of men. She looked out to see that Slater and Somers had joined
their party—an addition that might have strengthened it for defense,
but did not lend her own situation anything favorable. Somers had
always appeared the one best to avoid.

Colter espied her and called her to "Come an' feed your pale face." His
comrades laughed, not loudly, but guardedly, as if noise was something
to avoid. Nevertheless, they awoke Tad Jorth, who began to toss and
moan on the bed.

Ellen hurried to his side and at once ascertained that he had a high
fever and was in a critical condition. Every time he tossed he opened
a wound in his right breast, rather high up. For all she could see,
nothing had been done for him except the binding of a scarf round his
neck and under his arm. This scant bandage had worked loose. Going to
the door, she called out: