Zane Grey (13 page)

"Release me? Why, he would have taken me as a wife for himself but for
Mother Mary. She hates me. So he pledged me to Snap."

"Does August Naab love you?"

"Love me? No. Not in the way you mean—perhaps as a daughter. But
Mormons teach duty to church first, and say such love comes—to the
wives—afterward. But it doesn't—not in the women I've seen. There's
Mother Ruth—her heart is broken. She loves me, and I can tell."

"When was this—this marriage to be?"

"I don't know. Father Naab promised me to his son when he came home from
the Navajo range. It would be soon if they found out that you and I—
Jack, Snap Naab would kill you!"

The sudden thought startled the girl. Her eyes betrayed her terror.

"I mightn't be so easy to kill," said Hare, darkly. The words came
unbidden, his first answer to the wild influences about him. "Mescal,
I'm sorry—maybe I've brought you unhappiness.

"No. No. To be with you has been like sitting there on the rim watching
the desert, the greatest happiness I have ever known. I used to love to
be with the children, but Mother Mary forbade. When I am down there,
which is seldom, I'm not allowed to play with the children any more."

"What can I do?" asked Hare, passionately.

"Don't speak to Father Naab. Don't let him guess. Don't leave me here
alone," she answered low. It was not the Navajo speaking in her now.
Love had sounded depths hitherto unplumbed; a quick, soft impulsiveness
made the contrast sharp and vivid.

"How can I help but leave you if he wants me on the cattle ranges?"

"I don't know. You must think. He has been so pleased with what you've
done. He's had Mormons up here, and two men not of his Church, and they
did nothing. You've been ill, besides you're different. He will keep me
with the sheep as long as he can, for two reasons—because I drive them
best, he says, and because Snap Naab's wife must be persuaded to welcome
me in her home."

"I'll stay, if I have to get a relapse and go down on my back again,"
declared Jack. "I hate to deceive him, but Mescal, pledged or not—I
love you, and I won't give up hope."

Her hands flew to her face again and tried to hide the dark blush.

"Mescal, there's one question I wish you'd answer. Does August Naab
think he'll make a Mormon of me? Is that the secret of his wonderful
kindness?"

"Of course he believes he'll make a Mormon of you. That's his religion.
He's felt that way over all the strangers who ever came out here. But
he'd be the same to them without his hopes. I don't know the secret of
his kindness, but I think he loves everybody and everything. And Jack,
he's so good. I owe him all my life. He would not let the Navajos take
me; he raised me, kept me, taught me. I can't break my promise to him.
He's been a father to me, and I love him."

"I think I love him, too," replied Hare, simply.

With an effort he left her at last and mounted the grassy slope and
climbed high up among the tottering yellow crags; and there he battled
with himself. Whatever the charm of Mescal's surrender, and the
insistence of his love, stern hammer-strokes of fairness, duty, honor,
beat into his brain his debt to the man who had saved him. It was a
long-drawn-out battle not to be won merely by saying right was right.
He loved Mescal, she loved him; and something born in him with his new
health, with the breath of this sage and juniper forest, with the sight
of purple canyons and silent beckoning desert, made him fiercely
tenacious of all that life had come to mean for him. He could not give
her up—and yet—

Twilight forced Hare from his lofty retreat, and he trod his way
campward, weary and jaded, but victorious over himself. He thought he
had renounced his hope of Mescal; he returned with a resolve to be true
to August, and to himself; bitterness he would not allow himself to feel.
And yet he feared the rising in him of a new spirit akin to that of the
desert itself, intractable and free.

"Well, Jack, we rode down the last of Silvermane's band," said August, at
supper. "The Navajos came up and helped us out. To-morrow you'll see
some fun, when we start to break Silvermane. As soon as that's done I'll
go, leaving the Indians to bring the horses down when they're broken."

"Are you going to leave Silvermane with me?" asked Jack.

"Surely. Why, in three days, if I don't lose my guess, he'll be like a
lamb. Those desert stallions can be made into the finest kind of
saddle-horses. I've seen one or two. I want you to stay up here with
the sheep. You're getting well, you'll soon be a strapping big fellow.
Then when we drive the sheep down in the fall you can begin life on the
cattle ranges, driving wild steers. There's where you'll grow lean and
hard, like an iron bar. You'll need that horse, too, my lad."

"Why—because he's fast?" queried Jack, quickly answering to the implied
suggestion.

August nodded gloomily. "I haven't the gift of revelation, but I've come
to believe Martin Cole. Holderness is building an outpost for his riders
close to Seeping Springs. He has no water. If he tries to pipe my
water—" The pause was not a threat; it implied the Mormon's doubt of
himself. "Then Dene is on the march this way. He's driven some of
Marshall's cattle from the range next to mine. Dene got away with about
a hundred head. The barefaced robber sold them in Lund to a buying
company from Salt Lake."

"Is he openly an outlaw, a rustler?" inquired Hare.

"Everybody knows it, and he's finding White Sage and vicinity warmer than
it was. Every time he comes in he and his band shoot up things pretty
lively. Now the Mormons are slow to wrath. But they are awakening. All
the way from Salt Lake to the border outlaws have come in. They'll never
get the power on this desert that they had in the places from which
they've been driven. Men of the Holderness type are more to be dreaded.
He's a rancher, greedy, unscrupulous, but hard to corner in dishonesty.
Dene is only a bad man, a gun-fighter. He and all his ilk will get run
out of Utah. Did you ever hear of Plummer, John Slade, Boone Helm, any
of those bad men?"

"No."

"Well, they were men to fear. Plummer was a sheriff in Idaho, a man high
in the estimation of his townspeople, but he was the leader of the most
desperate band of criminals ever known in the West; and he instigated the
murder of, or killed outright, more than one hundred men. Slade was a
bad man, fatal on the draw. Helm was a killing machine. These men all
tried Utah, and had to get out. So will Dene have to get out. But I'm
afraid there'll be warm times before that happens. When you get in the
thick of it you'll appreciate Silvermane."

"I surely will. But I can't see that wild stallion with a saddle and a
bridle, eating oats like any common horse, and being led to water."

"Well, he'll come to your whistle, presently, if I'm not greatly
mistaken. You must make him love you, Jack. It can be done with any
wild creature. Be gentle, but firm. Teach him to obey the slightest
touch of rein, to stand when you throw your bridle on the ground, to come
at your whistle. Always remember this. He's a desert-bred horse; he can
live on scant browse and little water. Never break him of those best
virtues in a horse. Never feed him grain if you can find a little patch
of browse; never give him a drink till he needs it. That's one-tenth as
often as a tame horse. Some day you'll be caught in the desert, and with
these qualities of endurance Silvermane will carry you out."

Silvermane snorted defiance from the cedar corral next morning when the
Naabs, and Indians, and Hare appeared. A half-naked sinewy Navajo with a
face as changeless as a bronze mask sat astride August's blindfolded
roan, Charger. He rode bareback except for a blanket strapped upon the
horse; he carried only a long, thick halter, with a loop and a knot.
When August opened the improvised gate, with its sharp bayonet-like
branches of cedar, the Indian rode into the corral. The watchers climbed
to the knoll. Silvermane snorted a blast of fear and anger. August's
huge roan showed uneasiness; he stamped, and shook his head, as if to rid
himself of the blinders.

Into the farthest corner of densely packed cedar boughs Silvermane
pressed himself and watched. The Indian rode around the corral, circling
closer and closer, yet appearing not to see the stallion. Many rounds he
made; closer he got, and always with the same steady gait. Silvermane
left his corner and tried another. The old unwearying round brought
Charger and the Navajo close by him. Silvermane pranced out of his
thicket of boughs; he whistled; he wheeled with his shiny hoofs lifting.
In an hour the Indian was edging the outer circle of the corral, with the
stallion pivoting in the centre, ears laid back, eyes shooting sparks,
fight in every line of him. And the circle narrowed inward.

Suddenly the Navajo sent the roan at Silvermane and threw his halter. It
spread out like a lasso, and the loop went over the head of the stallion,
slipped to the knot and held fast, while the rope tightened. Silvermane
leaped up, forehoofs pawing the air, and his long shrill cry was neither
whistle, snort, nor screech, but all combined. He came down, missing
Charger with his hoofs, sliding off his haunches. The Indian, his bronze
muscles rippling, close-hauled on the rope, making half hitches round his
bony wrist.

In a whirl of dust the roan drew closer to the gray, and Silvermane began
a mad race around the corral. The roan ran with him nose to nose. When
Silvermane saw he could not shake him, he opened his jaws, rolled back
his lip in an ugly snarl, his white teeth glistening, and tried to bite.
But the Indian's moccasined foot shot up under the stallion's ear and
pressed him back. Then the roan hugged Silvermane so close that half the
time the Navajo virtually rode two horses. But for the rigidity of his
arms, and the play and sudden tension of his leg-muscles, the Indian's
work would have appeared commonplace, so dexterous was he, so perfectly
at home in his dangerous seat. Suddenly he whooped and August Naab
hauled back the gate, and the two horses, neck and neck, thundered out
upon the level stretch.

"Good!" cried August. "Let him rip now, Navvy. All over but the work,
Jack. I feared Silvermane would spear himself on some of those dead
cedar spikes in the corral. He's safe now."

Jack watched the horses plunge at breakneck speed down the stretch,
circle at the forest edge, and come tearing back. Silvermane was pulling
the roan faster than he had ever gone in his life, but the dark Indian
kept his graceful seat. The speed slackened on the second turn, and
decreased as, mile after mile, the imperturbable Indian held roan and
gray side to side and let them run.

The time passed, but Hare's interest in the breaking of the stallion
never flagged. He began to understand the Indian, and to feel what the
restraint and drag must be to the horse. Never for a moment could
Silvermane elude the huge roan, the tight halter, the relentless Navajo.
Gallop fell to trot, and trot to jog, and jog to walk; and hour by hour,
without whip or spur or word, the breaker of desert mustangs drove the
wild stallion. If there were cruelty it was in his implacable slow
patience, his farsighted purpose. Silvermane would have killed himself
in an hour; he would have cut himself to pieces in one headlong dash, but
that steel arm suffered him only to wear himself out. Late that
afternoon the Navajo led a dripping, drooping, foam-lashed stallion into
the corral, tied him with the halter, and left him.

Later Silvermane drank of the water poured into the corral trough, and
had not the strength or spirit to resent the Navajo's caressing hand on
his mane.

Next morning the Indian rode again into the corral on blindfolded
Charger. Again he dragged Silvermane out on the level and drove him up
and down with remorseless, machine-like persistence. At noon he took him
back, tied him up, and roped him fast. Silvermane tried to rear and
kick, but the saddle went on, strapped with a flash of the dark-skinned
hands. Then again Silvermane ran the level stretch beside the giant
roan, only he carried a saddle now. At the first, he broke out with free
wild stride as if to run forever from under the hateful thing. But as
the afternoon waned he crept weariedly back to the corral.

On the morning of the third day the Navajo went into the corral without
Charger, and roped the gray, tied him fast, and saddled him. Then he
loosed the lassoes except the one around Silvermane's neck, which he
whipped under his foreleg to draw him down. Silvermane heaved a groan
which plainly said he never wanted to rise again. Swiftly the Indian
knelt on the stallion's head; his hands flashed; there was a scream, a
click of steel on bone; and proud Silvermane jumped to his feet with a
bit between his teeth.

The Navajo, firmly in the saddle, rose with him, and Silvermane leaped
through the corral gate, and out upon the stretch, lengthening out with
every stride, and settling into a wild, despairing burst of speed. The
white mane waved in the wind; the half-naked Navajo swayed to the motion.
Horse and rider disappeared in the cedars.

They were gone all day. Toward night they appeared on the stretch. The
Indian rode into camp and, dismounting, handed the bridle-rein to Naab.
He spoke no word; his dark impassiveness invited no comment. Silvermane
was dust-covered and sweat-stained. His silver crest had the same proud
beauty, his neck still the splendid arch, his head the noble outline, but
his was a broken spirit.

"Here, my lad," said August Naab, throwing the bridle-rein over Hare's
arm. "What did I say once about seeing you on a great gray horse? Ah!
Well, take him and know this: you've the swiftest horse in this desert
country."