by Zane Grey
“It’s chilly. I’m going back to camp,” she said.
Manerube grasped her hand and tried to draw her closer. It took no small effort on Sue’s part to get away from him.
“Keep your hands off me,” she said, with a heat she could not restrain. “Didn’t I tell you before?”
“Sue, I reckon I’m in love with you,” he replied.
Without replying, Sue fled and went to her tent. She was furious. Her cheeks were hot. She felt them with her cool hands. Not until she was snug and cozy under her blankets did she find composure. Then she thought out her estimate of Manerube. He might have had some education, some advantages beyond those of a range-rider, but he was not a gentleman. Sue intuitively grasped that Manerube was not influenced in the least by her objection to being courted. He was not a man to care what a woman thought or said or did. He had no sense of shame, or perhaps of honor. He would work his will with a woman one way or another.
But as for his effect upon her — that was a matter very much more difficult of analysis. Sue was honest, most of all with herself. She had an honesty of soul and she was not afraid to tell herself what she found out. In this case she seemed baffled. If Manerube did not cease his importunities she was going to hate him, that much was certain, but it did not imply she did not feel some strange power in him. And she pondered over that. It could not be because he was a big bold-looking rider and handsome. She acknowledged that he was that, though she preferred dark men. There must be something which came to her in his presence that thrilled her, yet did not belong to him. Being masculine, virile, strong, he must represent something to her. Then she happened to think of Chess and the singular emotion his simple avowal of love had stirred in her heart. Strange to recall, Manerube’s had likewise quickened her pulse, though she scorned it. This vague power, then, had to do with love. Before that word love she trembled like a guilty creature surprised. It was an Open Sesame. Any man, did he choose to employ it, could make a woman’s heart quiver, if she happened to be in Sue’s peculiar state of unrest, of longing, of fancy-freedom.
Next morning Sue was awakened by her father’s cheery call.
“Up with you, lass, if you’re goin’ to be a wild-horse wrangler.”
Sue sat up in bed with a start. It was dark and the air felt cold.
“But, dad — it’s still night,” complained Sue, reluctantly.
“Fine mawnin’, Sue,” he replied. “Heah’s breakfast ready. Crawl out. We’re shore goin’ to chase wild mules.”
“Mules? Oh, I forgot,” said Sue, with a reviving thrill. “All right, dad. I’m a-rarin’ to go.”
Sue got up, not without feminine qualms and shivers, despite her enthusiasm, and nimbly put on her riding clothes and boots in the dark. Then she rushed out to get to the fire. Her hands were tingling with the cold. Hot water was a boon that morning. She brushed her hair by the light of the blaze, and quickly braided the long mass. Manerube, at her elbow, disconcerted her with a remark that she should be more careful of such beautiful hair.
“If I have to ride any more through the brush I’ll cut it short,” retorted Sue.
“Shore you will not,” replied her father. “Not until you get some boss besides your dad.”
Sue ate her breakfast in a wonderful dark morning twilight. In the east, low over the black waving range, hung the morning star, radiant, blue-white, blinking, a beacon that heralded the dawn. A grayness was imperceptibly stealing over the sky. The other stars looked pale, spectral. Down in the valley the shadows seemed lifting, changing, drifting.
The horses were in, and stamping the ground or champing their bits. When the riders, spurred and chapped, came trooping to the camp fire, Melberne called out:
“Wal, we’re off. Jim, shore somebody has to stay in camp with the women.”
“I reckon so. But we’re short of riders now, Manerube says,” replied his partner.
“Bonny, you an’ Captain Bunk toss up for who goes an’ who stays heah.”
“I’ll stay, boss,” spoke up Tway Miller, with astounding fluency.
“Say, Miller, is this heah stutterin’ of yourn all put on?” demanded Utah. “Playin’ to the porch, huh?”
“T-t-t-t-t-ta-ta-tain’t so!” retorted Miller, hotly, all of a sudden victim to his weakness.
“Aw, now yore naturool ag’in,” replied Utah, dryly.
Bonny won the choice of the toss and graciously waived it in Captain Bunk’s favor, who manifestly was eager to ride out on the mule chase.
“Shure you can go, Cap,” he said. “I was kicked by a mule once.”
“Thanks, mate. I’ll take my chances navigatin’ mules,” replied Bunk, animatedly.
Sue rode beside her father out into the crisp frosty morning. Once beyond the fire she realized how really cold it was. Yet how exhilarating! They rode at a brisk trot, with backs to the lightening east, toward the long wandering dim line of the western wall of the valley. Utah and Alonzo were in the lead; Manerube rode on the other side of her father; Loughbridge with Ora and the two remaining riders brought up the rear.
The exercise soon sent the warm blood dancing all over Sue. How wonderful it was to ride out on an autumn morning like this! The wild quest would not wholly be resisted. She did not want to see a mule hurt any more than another creature, but the adventure appealed to her. Utah and Alonzo rode there ahead, lithe, erect, yet easy, somehow as wild and picturesque as their calling. Then as the morning grayness brightened to full daylight Sue looked to the horizon line with a swelling heart. It was something original, big, splendid to ride along, and gaze at the purple changing to rose, to feel the loneliness and solitude of that vast land. She realized how subtly and surely the charm of this wilderness had enfolded her. Yet she struggled against that which implied surrender.
Jack rabbits and coyotes trotted before the band of riders. A gray wolf watched them from a ridge top. Wild horses kept moving away continually, not allowing near approach. They would stand like statues, erect, sharply defined, resembling the wolf in their wildness; then they would race down the valley, swift as the wind, presently to halt and look again.
Sue heard Manerube propounding with great vehemence his plan for capturing a thousand wild horses, all at one drive. She felt her father’s intense interest, and somehow it filled her with sorrow.
Wild Horse Mesa caught Sue’s eye and held it. Far away, yet how clear-cut and lofty, an endless black-fringed rosy-walled tableland, rising out of purple chaos! It did not seem real. It reached the soft, creamy, fleecy canopy of cloud that was turning pink. Then the sun burst over the obstructing range. All that rolling valley and waving rock line changed so suddenly and wondrously as to bewilder the vision. Wild Horse Mesa became a horizon of fire.
Presently Alonzo and Utah led off the valley slope into the mouth of a canyon, wide, low, gray-saged, and ribbed with outcroppings of ledges. No water showed in the sandy stream-bed. As they rode up the level meadow-like canyon floor the walls gradually grew more rugged, and the breaks fewer. Thickets of oak with gold and russet leaves livened the gray. Deer bounded up the slopes; birds flew in flocks from the acorn copses.
After several miles of travel mostly over even and a scarcely perceptible rising ground the canyon walls came together, forming a narrow gate. These rugged walls did not rise far without a breaking and falling back to ragged and crumbling steps.
This rock-walled lane opened into a long oval valley, sloping gently on each side up to rugged rims, colorful with dark green of cedars and a few straggling pines. The notches at the heads of the ravines were choked with oak thickets, lending an autumn touch of gold to the scene.
Straight ahead, however, the valley changed, showing lines of cottonwoods along a rock-strewn brook, and a number of remarkable ridges that ran up toward the head of the canyon like the ribs of a fan. It was a big country, this oval boxed end of the canyon, and beautiful enough to bring loud acclaim from Melberne.
“Shore this heah’s a place for a ranch!” he ejacu
lated, slapping his leg. “What do you say, Jim?”
“If we don’t find better we’ll homestead here,” declared Loughbridge, with enthusiasm.
“Pretty enough. Good water and grass,” agreed Manerube. “But it’s nothing to some of the box heads of canyons west.”
Sue was asked for her opinion, which she did not give in words. She just gazed as if spellbound. Manerube saw her rapt attention and asked her if she could be happy living there in a log cabin. The half-curious, half-ironic query gave Sue a remarkable thrill. It was one of deep emotion and it seemed to fling at her mind the truth that she could live happily in such a place — with the man of her dreams.
“Wal, boss,” said Utah, “you-all wait an’ I’ll ride up a ways an’ see if the mules are here yet.”
While Sue sat her horse, looking to all points of this shut-in park, her father and the other men discussed animatedly the wonderful natural trap this canyon afforded. Manerube rather dominated the council. Presently Utah rode back to the group.
“They’re shore here,” he said. “Seen mebbe a hundred. An’ ‘pears to me the boss of the bunch is a gray old cuss thet’s been branded. I didn’t see him the other day. Shore he wasn’t born wild. An old mule who has run away makes the wildest kind of a beast. He’ll take a lot of ketchin’.”
Manerube, with the common consent of Melberne and Loughbridge, began enlarging upon plans for the drive. Utah, who had found the band of mules and manifestly had plans of his own, did not take kindly to being disregarded by a stranger. But Manerube was indifferent to Utah’s suggestions. He ordered cedars cut and dragged to block the far end of the narrow defile through which the party had entered the park.
“We’ll trap the whole bunch,” he concluded, with great gusto.
“Ahuh! Mebbe we will,” declared Utah, sourly, and the look he gave Manerube was expressive. Tway Miller rode off with Utah and his stuttering speech floated back.
“W-w-w-w-why in t-t-t-the h-h-h-hell didn’t you kick? These are y-y-y-yore mules.”
Manerube at last turned to the girls.
“You can help without hard riding,” he said. “When we get ready to drive the canyon you ride up on top that first ridge. Watch the mules, and when they run into the trap here wave your scarfs, so we can all see.”
“I thought I was to chase mules,” pouted Ora, with a reproachful look at Manerube.
“Chase them all you like when they run down this way,” replied Manerube.
The men then set to work cutting and dragging cedars. Sue dismounted and let her horse graze, while she sat under a cottonwood. Ora very manifestly avoided her. As always when resting or waiting, Sue passed the time in dreams. And those several hours were short.
It occurred to Sue that it was not necessary for Manerube to escort her and Ora to the station he had assigned them on the ridge, but he did so, giving his attention solely to Ora. This brought Ora out of her sulky mood, and if the truth had been known pleased Sue as well. She scorned an incipient idea that she had begun to be afraid of this man.
From the ridge top Sue saw the band of mules perhaps a quarter of a mile up the canyon and now below her position. They were out in the open. Some of them were grazing, but most were facing down the canyon, as stiff and erect as any wild horses. Several white ones showed conspicuously. There were also some tans. Most of them were brown. They looked shaggier than any mules Sue had seen before. Finally her glance fell upon the one gray mule in the band. He was large and there was something distinctive about him. Presently the riders appeared below, rounding the corners of the ridge. The big gray mule was the first to move. He headed up the canyon and his band fell in behind him. They were soon out of sight.
At the head of the grassy park the horsemen separated into pairs and rode on, spreading out, until they too disappeared around slopes and into the brushy thickets. That end of the canyon formed a kind of amphitheater with the ridges wide apart at the base and sloping up toward the wall, growing closer as they ascended. The ravines between these ridges were green and gold with oak thickets; the ridges were treeless, some gray with sage, some touched with patches of green grass, some yellow with exposed earth.
Sue was thrilled to see the mules, led by the gray chief, appear in a compact band on the center ridge and move quite swiftly up toward the wall. Puffs of dust rose and, forming clouds like yellow smoke, blew away on the wind. This ridge was long, still Sue could see the mules plainly. By the time they had reached the base of the wall four of Melberne’s riders were climbing. The old gray mule watched them, with his band huddled behind him. There seemed something incongruous about this watching-and-waiting process. These mules did not appear wild.
Presently the gray leader wheeled away, to trot along the base of the wall. His band followed. They passed the heads of several of the ridges, until they came to the last rib of the fan-shaped slope. Here they halted.
Meanwhile, two other riders appeared climbing another ridge. Sue recognized Manerube and Loughbridge. One of them yelled. At this signal Melberne and his men broke into a gallop along the base of the wall in the direction of the mules. Sue began to get excited.
“Ora! Look!” she cried to her companion, some paces distant. “These horse-hunters of ours won’t have such a picnic as Mr. Manerube thought.”
The girl responded with the glare of one whose idol had been insulted.
Then the gray mule tore down the far slope, with his band at his heels. They were lost in clouds of dust. Both groups of riders rode down their particular ridges. Evidently the descent was rather steep. Utah was the only one who maintained a gallop. Both riders and mules disappeared, but the trampling of their hoofs proved they were still moving.
In a few moments Sue saw the band of mules appear from behind the far slope on her side of the canyon. They were running. Sue thought they would come down the valley. But the wary old leader never even headed down that way; he ran across the wide part of the park and took to another slope.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” declared Sue, in delight.
“Don’t you want them to catch the mules?” snapped Ora.
“I sure don’t. Do you?”
Ora did not deign to reply to that.
Alonzo was the first of the riders to come again into view. He had lassoed a mule and was running with it out into the open. Sue had forgotten the vaquero. He bestrode a racy black horse, without saddle or bridle. There appeared to be a broad strap round his horse. He had hold of the lasso and was handling the mule roughly. Presently he hauled it to a stop and cautiously closed in on it. Suddenly the mule wheeled swiftly, to kick with a violence and viciousness that made Sue gasp. Then she heard the half-breed yell, evidently for help. Manerube hove in sight next, waving his arms.
“What — we — want — one mule? Let go! Help us drive!” came in a faint roar to Sue’s ears.
“Aha!” chuckled Sue. “Ora, your great horse-wrangler is not happy.”
All the riders came into sight and clustered round Manerube. The Mexican somehow dexterously released the mule he had captured, yet restrained the lasso. Manerube waved his arms, manifestly to emphasize the harangue he was giving the riders. There were other waving arms, that attested to a loss of temper, if nothing more. Then Manerube led three riders down to the base of the slope up which the mules had gone. Melberne took the remaining men up the central slope. When both groups had climbed about halfway up their respective ridges the wise old mule led his band along the wall, and taking to a slope between those being ascended by his pursuers he ran down to the level again. The riders halted, manifestly bewildered.
Sue let out a peal of laughter that was most offensive to the sentimental Ora.
“They’ll never catch those mules — not while that old fellow leads,” declared Sue. “Oh, what fun! I wouldn’t miss this for worlds.”
Ora rode down the slope and out into the park. Sue had a desire to follow, but she did not want to lose any of the ridiculous chase. So she stood her ground and wat
ched.
Plain it was that Manerube’s plan had been to get behind the band of mules and drive them down the canyon into the trap. Easy to plan but vain to achieve, was Sue’s contention. Three times as many riders would have been necessary to accomplish this. But the chasers kept on chasing, and grew more violent as the game progressed. Always the gray mule led down an unguarded ridge to run up another. Fast and furious grew the riding of Manerube. He did not spare his horse. It seemed to Sue that Utah and Alonzo did not here live up to their reputations as great riders. Sue did not blame them. Here were a lot of fools chasing a wise old mule.
Once several of the riders got quite close to the mules along the base of the wall. It happened that when the mules charged down a ridge Captain Bunk on his white horse appeared ascending that ridge. For some reason, perhaps the steepness of the slope, he did not see them until they were right upon him. Above the trample of hoofs Sue heard his yell. His horse wheeled in fright and plunged down. Despite her concern for his safety Sue suffered a spasm of glee. The tenderfoot seafaring man made a grotesque figure trying to hang on to his horse. Twice he was unseated, but lurched back into the saddle. The mules caught up with him, and no doubt the roar of their hoofs, their snorts and whistles, increased his terror to the extent that he swerved his horse away from them, over the steep bank, and went sliding down into the brush, out of sight.
The running up and down these ridges apparently left the mules as fresh as ever, but such hard work began to tell on the horses. Manerube’s last effort was to collect all the riders in one group and run the mules without trying to head them. This worked well so far as it went. The horses, even though tired, soon overtook the mules on the level run beneath the wall, and also on the open ground at the foot of the ridges. But the mules could not be headed or turned; they ran right back up one of the slopes.