Zane Grey (4 page)

He jerked away, as if he expected to be struck. "Girl—I—I"—he gasped
in amaze and sudden-dawning contrition—"I kissed you—but I swear it
wasn't intentional—I never thought...."

The anger that Jean anticipated failed to materialize. He stood,
breathing hard, with a hand held out in unconscious appeal. By the
same magic, perhaps, that had transfigured her a moment past, she was
now invested again by the older character.

"Shore I reckon my callin' y'u a gentleman was a little previous," she
said, with a rather dry bitterness. "But, stranger, yu're sudden."

"You're not insulted?" asked Jean, hurriedly.

"Oh, I've been kissed before. Shore men are all alike."

"They're not," he replied, hotly, with a subtle rush of disillusion, a
dulling of enchantment. "Don't you class me with other men who've
kissed you. I wasn't myself when I did it an' I'd have gone on my
knees to ask your forgiveness.... But now I wouldn't—an' I wouldn't
kiss you again, either—even if you—you wanted it."

Jean read in her strange gaze what seemed to him a vague doubt, as if
she was questioning him.

"Miss, I take that back," added Jean, shortly. "I'm sorry. I didn't
mean to be rude. It was a mean trick for me to kiss you. A girl alone
in the woods who's gone out of her way to be kind to me! I don't know
why I forgot my manners. An' I ask your pardon."

She looked away then, and presently pointed far out and down into the
Basin.

"There's Grass Valley. That long gray spot in the black. It's about
fifteen miles. Ride along the Rim that way till y'u cross a trail.
Shore y'u can't miss it. Then go down."

"I'm much obliged to you," replied Jean, reluctantly accepting what he
regarded as his dismissal. Turning his horse, he put his foot in the
stirrup, then, hesitating, he looked across the saddle at the girl. Her
abstraction, as she gazed away over the purple depths suggested
loneliness and wistfulness. She was not thinking of that scene spread
so wondrously before her. It struck Jean she might be pondering a
subtle change in his feeling and attitude, something he was conscious
of, yet could not define.

"Reckon this is good-by," he said, with hesitation.

"ADIOS, SENOR," she replied, facing him again. She lifted the little
carbine to the hollow of her elbow and, half turning, appeared ready to
depart.

"Adios means good-by?" he queried.

"Yes, good-by till to-morrow or good-by forever. Take it as y'u like."

"Then you'll meet me here day after to-morrow?" How eagerly he spoke,
on impulse, without a consideration of the intangible thing that had
changed him!

"Did I say I wouldn't?"

"No. But I reckoned you'd not care to after—" he replied, breaking
off in some confusion.

"Shore I'll be glad to meet y'u. Day after to-morrow about
mid-afternoon. Right heah. Fetch all the news from Grass Valley."

"All right. Thanks. That'll be—fine," replied Jean, and as he spoke
he experienced a buoyant thrill, a pleasant lightness of enthusiasm,
such as always stirred boyishly in him at a prospect of adventure.
Before it passed he wondered at it and felt unsure of himself. He
needed to think.

"Stranger shore I'm not recollectin' that y'u told me who y'u are," she
said.

"No, reckon I didn't tell," he returned. "What difference does that
make? I said I didn't care who or what you are. Can't you feel the
same about me?"

"Shore—I felt that way," she replied, somewhat non-plussed, with the
level brown gaze steadily on his face. "But now y'u make me think."

"Let's meet without knowin' any more about each other than we do now."

"Shore. I'd like that. In this big wild Arizona a girl—an' I reckon
a man—feels so insignificant. What's a name, anyhow? Still, people
an' things have to be distinguished. I'll call y'u 'Stranger' an' be
satisfied—if y'u say it's fair for y'u not to tell who y'u are."

"Fair! No, it's not," declared Jean, forced to confession. "My name's
Jean—Jean Isbel."

"ISBEL!" she exclaimed, with a violent start. "Shore y'u can't be son
of old Gass Isbel.... I've seen both his sons."

"He has three," replied Jean, with relief, now the secret was out. "I'm
the youngest. I'm twenty-four. Never been out of Oregon till now. On
my way—"

The brown color slowly faded out of her face, leaving her quite pale,
with eyes that began to blaze. The suppleness of her seemed to stiffen.

"My name's Ellen Jorth," she burst out, passionately. "Does it mean
anythin' to y'u?"

"Never heard it in my life," protested Jean. "Sure I reckoned you
belonged to the sheep raisers who 're on the outs with my father.
That's why I had to tell you I'm Jean Isbel.... Ellen Jorth. It's
strange an' pretty.... Reckon I can be just as good a—a friend to
you—"

"No Isbel, can ever be a friend to me," she said, with bitter coldness.
Stripped of her ease and her soft wistfulness, she stood before him one
instant, entirely another girl, a hostile enemy. Then she wheeled and
strode off into the woods.

Jean, in amaze, in consternation, watched her swiftly draw away with
her lithe, free step, wanting to follow her, wanting to call to her;
but the resentment roused by her suddenly avowed hostility held him
mute in his tracks. He watched her disappear, and when the
brown-and-green wall of forest swallowed the slender gray form he
fought against the insistent desire to follow her, and fought in vain.

But Ellen Jorth's moccasined feet did not leave a distinguishable trail
on the springy pine needle covering of the ground, and Jean could not
find any trace of her.

A little futile searching to and fro cooled his impulse and called
pride to his rescue. Returning to his horse, he mounted, rode out
behind the pack mule to start it along, and soon felt the relief of
decision and action. Clumps of small pines grew thickly in spots on
the Rim, making it necessary for him to skirt them; at which times he
lost sight of the purple basin. Every time he came back to an opening
through which he could see the wild ruggedness and colors and
distances, his appreciation of their nature grew on him. Arizona from
Yuma to the Little Colorado had been to him an endless waste of
wind-scoured, sun-blasted barrenness. This black-forested rock-rimmed
land of untrodden ways was a world that in itself would satisfy him.
Some instinct in Jean called for a lonely, wild land, into the
fastnesses of which he could roam at will and be the other strange self
that he had always yearned to be but had never been.

Every few moments there intruded into his flowing consciousness the
flashing face of Ellen Jorth, the way she had looked at him, the things
she had said. "Reckon I was a fool," he soliloquized, with an acute
sense of humiliation. "She never saw how much in earnest I was." And
Jean began to remember the circumstances with a vividness that
disturbed and perplexed him.

The accident of running across such a girl in that lonely place might
be out of the ordinary—but it had happened. Surprise had made him
dull. The charm of her appearance, the appeal of her manner, must have
drawn him at the very first, but he had not recognized that. Only at
her words, "Oh, I've been kissed before," had his feelings been checked
in their heedless progress. And the utterance of them had made a
difference he now sought to analyze. Some personality in him, some
voice, some idea had begun to defend her even before he was conscious
that he had arraigned her before the bar of his judgment. Such defense
seemed clamoring in him now and he forced himself to listen. He
wanted, in his hurt pride, to justify his amazing surrender to a sweet
and sentimental impulse.

He realized now that at first glance he should have recognized in her
look, her poise, her voice the quality he called thoroughbred. Ragged
and stained apparel did not prove her of a common sort. Jean had known
a number of fine and wholesome girls of good family; and he remembered
his sister. This Ellen Jorth was that kind of a girl irrespective of
her present environment. Jean championed her loyally, even after he
had gratified his selfish pride.

It was then—contending with an intangible and stealing glamour, unreal
and fanciful, like the dream of a forbidden enchantment—that Jean
arrived at the part in the little woodland drama where he had kissed
Ellen Jorth and had been unrebuked. Why had she not resented his
action? Dispelled was the illusion he had been dreamily and nobly
constructing. "Oh, I've been kissed before!" The shock to him now
exceeded his first dismay. Half bitterly she had spoken, and wholly
scornful of herself, or of him, or of all men. For she had said all
men were alike. Jean chafed under the smart of that, a taunt every
decent man hated. Naturally every happy and healthy young man would
want to kiss such red, sweet lips. But if those lips had been for
others—never for him! Jean reflected that not since childish games
had he kissed a girl—until this brown-faced Ellen Jorth came his way.
He wondered at it. Moreover, he wondered at the significance he placed
upon it. After all, was it not merely an accident? Why should he
remember? Why should he ponder? What was the faint, deep, growing
thrill that accompanied some of his thoughts?

Riding along with busy mind, Jean almost crossed a well-beaten trail,
leading through a pine thicket and down over the Rim. Jean's pack mule
led the way without being driven. And when Jean reached the edge of
the bluff one look down was enough to fetch him off his horse. That
trail was steep, narrow, clogged with stones, and as full of sharp
corners as a crosscut saw. Once on the descent with a packed mule and
a spirited horse, Jean had no time for mind wanderings and very little
for occasional glimpses out over the cedar tops to the vast blue hollow
asleep under a westering sun.

The stones rattled, the dust rose, the cedar twigs snapped, the little
avalanches of red earth slid down, the iron-shod hoofs rang on the
rocks. This slope had been narrow at the apex in the Rim where the
trail led down a crack, and it widened in fan shape as Jean descended.
He zigzagged down a thousand feet before the slope benched into
dividing ridges. Here the cedars and junipers failed and pines once
more hid the sun. Deep ravines were black with brush. From somewhere
rose a roar of running water, most pleasant to Jean's ears. Fresh deer
and bear tracks covered old ones made in the trail.

Those timbered ridges were but billows of that tremendous slope that
now sheered above Jean, ending in a magnificent yellow wall of rock,
greened in niches, stained by weather rust, carved and cracked and
caverned. As Jean descended farther the hum of bees made melody, the
roar of rapid water and the murmur of a rising breeze filled him with
the content of the wild. Sheepmen like Colter and wild girls like
Ellen Jorth and all that seemed promising or menacing in his father's
letter could never change the Indian in Jean. So he thought. Hard
upon that conclusion rushed another—one which troubled with its
stinging revelation. Surely these influences he had defied were just
the ones to bring out in him the Indian he had sensed but had never
known. The eventful day had brought new and bitter food for Jean to
reflect upon.

The trail landed him in the bowlder-strewn bed of a wide canyon, where
the huge trees stretched a canopy of foliage which denied the sunlight,
and where a beautiful brook rushed and foamed. Here at last Jean
tasted water that rivaled his Oregon springs. "Ah," he cried, "that
sure is good!" Dark and shaded and ferny and mossy was this streamway;
and everywhere were tracks of game, from the giant spread of a grizzly
bear to the tiny, birdlike imprints of a squirrel. Jean heard familiar
sounds of deer crackling the dead twigs; and the chatter of squirrels
was incessant. This fragrant, cool retreat under the Rim brought back
to him the dim recesses of Oregon forests. After all, Jean felt that
he would not miss anything that he had loved in the Cascades. But what
was the vague sense of all not being well with him—the essence of a
faint regret—the insistence of a hovering shadow? And then flashed
again, etched more vividly by the repetition in memory, a picture of
eyes, of lips—of something he had to forget.

Wild and broken as this rolling Basin floor had appeared from the Rim,
the reality of traveling over it made that first impression a deceit of
distance. Down here all was on a big, rough, broken scale. Jean did
not find even a few rods of level ground. Bowlders as huge as houses
obstructed the stream bed; spruce trees eight feet thick tried to lord
it over the brawny pines; the ravine was a veritable canyon from which
occasional glimpses through the foliage showed the Rim as a lofty
red-tipped mountain peak.

Jean's pack mule became frightened at scent of a bear or lion and ran
off down the rough trail, imperiling Jean's outfit. It was not an easy
task to head him off nor, when that was accomplished, to keep him to a
trot. But his fright and succeeding skittishness at least made for
fast traveling. Jean calculated that he covered ten miles under the
Rim before the character of ground and forest began to change.

The trail had turned southeast. Instead of gorge after gorge,
red-walled and choked with forest, there began to be rolling ridges,
some high; others were knolls; and a thick cedar growth made up for a
falling off of pine. The spruce had long disappeared. Juniper
thickets gave way more and more to the beautiful manzanita; and soon on
the south slopes appeared cactus and a scrubby live oak. But for the
well-broken trail, Jean would have fared ill through this tough brush.

Jean espied several deer, and again a coyote, and what he took to be a
small herd of wild horses. No more turkey tracks showed in the dusty
patches. He crossed a number of tiny brooklets, and at length came to
a place where the trail ended or merged in a rough road that showed
evidence of considerable travel. Horses, sheep, and cattle had passed
along there that day. This road turned southward, and Jean began to
have pleasurable expectations.