by Zane Grey
“Jake, rustle some grub,” called Chane, and then he turned to Melberne. “Some news, Melberne. Though I’m not surprised. Loughbridge and Manerube, with five men and no women, are camped back on the rim about five miles.”
“Five men now, an’ no womenfolk!” ejaculated Melberne. “Huh! that’s kind of funny. How’d they get rid of Ora and her mother?”
“They’re packing their outfit. They haven’t the wagon you gave Loughbridge. Reckon that’s gone to Wund with the girl and Mrs. Loughbridge.”
“Wal, that’s where Jim Loughbridge ought to be, I’m thinkin’. But shore I’m not carin’ where he is.”
“Would you mind if he packed down here?” inquired Chane.
“Huh! I shore would,” declared the other, bluntly. “I just wouldn’t let him. This is my range.”
Chane threw up his hands as if he had understood before he asked. “That talk is as old as the West, Melberne. You can hold the water rights of Nightwatch Spring. But that’s all.”
“I reckon it’s enough. What’s your idee aboot it?”
“Water is power here. We might be in for trouble if Manerube has control. I’m just wondering if those extra men could be Bud McPherson and his cronies.”
“Wal, I don’t know, that’s shore,” declared Melberne. “But your wonderin’ aboot it makes me think.”
Chane bent lower toward Melberne, so that none but he and Sue who sat with him, could hear.
“It’s got a funny look. Both ways,” whispered Chane. “Especially Sosie’s brother and husband trailing along when I supposed them over the rivers. Do you get my hunch?”
“Ahuh!” ejaculated Melberne, seriously.
CHAPTER XIV
OCTOBER ENDED, BUT Indian summer still lingered down under the zigzag walls of Wild Horse Mesa.
Melberne, along with wild-horse chasing, had thrown up a two- room log cabin of peeled spruce. Utah and Miller had returned with two wagon-loads of supplies, not the least of which was a plough Melberne regarded with the pride of a pioneer. In the spring he meant to drive in cows for domestic use, and cattle to range the grassy reaches.
Loughbridge’s threat that Melberne had not seen the last of their deal was far from being forgotten. Nevertheless, as the days passed without any sign of him or the riders with whom he had chosen to consort, gradually expectation dwindled. Perhaps in the swift rush of the full days, if it had not been for the two Piute Indians riding into camp now and then, without any apparent reason for remaining in the vicinity of Wild Horse Mesa, Melberne and Chane would not have felt any further concern. But the presence of the brother and husband of Sosie Nokin was proof to Chane at least that Manerube still hovered on the trail of the Melberne outfit. Whatever anxiety Chane betrayed, however, appeared to be in the interest of the Indians. Often he was seen in earnest conversation with the Piutes, particularly Sosie’s husband, but he did not divulge what transpired between them.
In the two weeks of their stay there Alonzo had roped close to fifty wild horses, which was about as many as Melberne felt he could handle that fall. The Mexican was now at the harder and longer task of breaking them. Sometimes the Piutes would help him, to Chane’s satisfaction, for they were skilled in that regard. It had been decided a better plan to build a fence of cedar posts and spruce poles all the way across the canyon instead of attempting to drive the wild horses out. More and more horses showed up down in the canyon as the days went by. As yet Chane had not been able to find where they entered. This elongated and walled box was called canyon only for want of a better name. A month of hard riding would be needed to explore the nooks and crannies of the western wall, and thus far Chane had devoted his efforts only to the Wild Horse Mesa side.
He would return at sunset, sometimes on foot, at others riding Brutus, with stories of his vain attempts to find a way up over the wall to the first escarpment of the great mesa.
“I’m sure one of these cracks in the wall can be climbed,” he said. “But I’ve not hit it yet. It’d take days to go up our trail and under the Henry Mountains and round west through the canyons. I want to get up right at this end and save seventy-five miles’ travel.”
“Wal, keep huntin’,” replied Melberne. “I shore want to know all aboot Wild Horse Mesa. Reckon I’ll run cattle up there some day.”
November ushered in days as still and mellow and golden as had been those of October. The only difference Sue could see was a gradual increase in the nipping morning air, a deepening of the autumn purple and gold and red, and an almost imperceptible southward trend of the setting sun.
One afternoon Chane came back to camp ragged and dusty of garb, beaming of face, and bursting with news.
“By golly! I’ve found a way out on top,” he ejaculated, happily. “Funny how easy, after I found it. Took me right under the sharp bluff of the mesa. Grandest view in all the world! Now I can explore the great wall all along this side. And on the other I’ll be right on the bare rock benches that slope down into the canyon country. Fact is I was close to the place where I worked up from the rivers.”
Sue, watching Chane and listening to him, was inclined to believe Chess’s whisper — that Chane had something up his sleeve. “Sue, the son-of-a-gun is on the track of Panquitch,” added Chess, in her ear. Anything concerning Chane had power to interest and excite Sue, and this time she was fascinated. Under his physical weariness and the contrasting enthusiasm of his talk there seemed a deep suppressed emotion. Could Chane care so much about the capture of a wild horse? It was just the intensity of his nature.
“Wal, I’ll tell you what,” interposed Melberne. “I’ll go with you. We’ll take a pack horse an’ explore for a few days.”
Chane did not exhibit his usual happy acceptance of any plan by which he could serve.
“Dad, I want to go and I’m going,” declared Sue, with sudden positiveness.
“You couldn’t keep me from going if you hawg-tied me,” spoke up Chess.
“Say, is this a picnic I’m to be scout for?” queried Chane.
“Shore it’s a picnic,” replied Melberne. “We’ll take the kids, Chane. They can look after themselves. I’ll do the same. That’ll leave you free to carry out your own explorations. But we’ll have a camp we’ll all come back to.”
Sue suddenly realized that she was staring at Chane, caught off her guard. The guilty blood warmed her cheek. What did he mean by his penetrating, almost stern gaze? The days had passed by until the Stark Valley episode seemed dim and far away, yet Chane had not changed. She was nothing to him.
“All — right,” drawled Chane, with returning good nature, “if you can keep up with me.”
“Huh! Thought you said it was an easy climb,” retorted Melberne.
“Boss, the talk of this brother of mine is a delusion and a snare,” averred Chess. “But we don’t care what his easy means. Hey, Sue?”
“We don’t care in the least what Chane — thinks,” rejoined Sue, demurely, with eyes cast down.
Chess let out a merry peal of laughter, Melberne looked wise, and Chane retreated within himself.
NEXT morning in the cold dark clearness of dawn Sue rode out of camp with Chess, following her father and Chane, who were driving two pack horses. The adventure to Sue had an alluringly bright face.
“Well, sister dear,” began Chess, “this little trip will be Chane’s finish. The big stiff of an iceberg!”
“Chess, I declare, if you begin to tease me about — about him — I — I’ll not go,” replied Sue.
“Not go? You’re crazy. This’ll be the chance we want. But I know you’re bluffing. You just couldn’t keep from going.”
How well he knew her! Indeed, Sue could not have imagined on the moment anything that could have kept her back. Chess seemed unusually happy, brotherly, protective, and yet more devilish than ever. He absolutely could not be trusted, so far as his verbosity to her was concerned. Sue no longer had control over Chess. Since that moment of anguish when she had confessed her love for Ch
ane — that it was killing her — Chess had made her completely his own, in a boyish, masterly, brotherly way. She could do nothing with him. He had closed her protesting lips with a kiss. When she slapped him, with no slight hand, he had offered the other cheek. She was afraid to be alone with him, because of this propensity to torture her; yet, strange paradox, his presence, his laughing eyes, his never-ending habit of yoking her name with Chane’s, her future with Chane’s, caused her as much ecstasy as torment.
Sue followed Chess into one of the many mouths of the cracked wall, finding it identical with others she had visited. Presently they passed the zone of fertility, to go into a narrowing gulch where riding soon became impossible. Climbing on foot, however, had one relieving virtue — Chess had to save his breath and so could not tantalize her.
The fissure in the wall narrowed, zigzagged, grew steeper and more choked with rock and shale, until Sue gladly welcomed those intervals when Chane and her father worked to make a trail, cracking with sledge hammer, heaving the stones. There were places where the pack horses had to squeeze through. It was slow, hot, laborsome work, and Sue felt so confined and restricted by the winding upward passage that she had no pleasure in this part of the day’s adventure.
An hour was consumed on the last devious steep ascent of the split in the wall.
“Ea — sy! That — son-of-a-gun said — easy,” panted Chess, as he surmounted the rim. “Come on — Sue.”
Sue’s leaden boots could barely be lifted; they seemed riveted to the trail. At length she made it, and raising her eyes was almost staggered by a colossal red corner of wall, cracked, seamed, stained, sheering up so high that she had almost to unjoint her neck to bend back her head to see the top.
“What’s — that?” she asked, huskily.
“Reckon it’s Wild Horse Mesa. Isn’t Chane an awful liar? Easy to get on top, he said. Why, we’ve only climbed one step of a stairway to the sky.”
The bulging red corner hid whatever lay to east and south. In the other direction the view showed the country back upon which Sue had so often gazed — desert upland, sweeping away, grass and ridge and range, to the distant black mountains. Suddenly she gazed down. The gray canyon yawned at her feet, not unlike when she had first seen it from the other rim. Her father’s labors seemed lost in the vastness of gray and green. Only the column of blue smoke proved that the homestead was a reality.
“Get on and ride,” called Chane.
The bare red rock sloped up gently in the direction Chane and her father were leading. Sue trotted her horse to catch up with them. To her left the stone slanted gradually, growing broken, and at length merged in the deceiving irregularity of the desert. She felt a mounting curiosity to see what lay beyond the close horizon. As for the wall of the mesa to her right, that somehow staggered her.
Chane and her father halted with the pack horses just as Sue reached them. Then for Sue the very world of stone upon which she stood seemed to have dropped away before her transfixed gaze.
The southwest country, the canyon country, lay beneath her, as if by some incredible magic, within the grasp of her vision. Waving gently, bare and red, the rock beneath her sloped down and down, until it seemed to be lost in the gleaming abyss.
Sue did not need to be told that the first terrible gap in the terraced stone was the Grand Canyon. She saw the granite walls, almost black, and under them the swirling red river. Dark and menacing, this canyon wound in rugged sweeps through the leagues of bare stone, meeting lines of cleavage that were other canyons, emptying into it. Between and beyond rolled the endless waves, knolls, ridges, domes of red and yellow rock; and dark clefts, thin, wandering, showed deep in every rounded surface. It was a grand and stunning spectacle. Dimly across this waste of canyon- cut stone rose a flat land, purple in color, overtopped by a round black mountain. The west seemed all closed by the bulk of Wild Horse Mesa. It ranged away, an unscalable wall, for many miles, regular and clear-cut at single glance, but discovering to long study a mountain of seamed and creviced stone, with millions of irregularities, sheering down to the base of bare stone that appeared to be its foundation. This mesa rose from a tableland that in itself towered above the canyon country. The far end of Wild Horse Mesa stood up in supreme isolation and grandeur, bright-walled in the morning sun.
If Chane expected those whom he had brought here to exclaim with rapture their impressions of this spectacle, he had reckoned falsely. Chess was the only one to speak, and his exclamations proved the natural tendency of some persons to be funny when they mean to be impressive. Sue wanted intensely to get off by herself; she gazed no more because her faculties seemed to have become dwarfed.
Chane rode down over the waving stone, to enter a curving- walled break, that soon became a canyon in itself and swallowed them up. It opened at length into a loftier walled canyon, where clear water ran, and the richest of green grass and most exquisite of flowers, white, yellow, lavender, made verdure on the narrow benches. Cottonwood trees showed foliage just beginning to turn gold.
“Here’s a good place to camp,” said Chane. “Grass, water, and wood. And we can explore in four directions.”
“Wal, I reckon we’d better hang up right heah,” declared Melberne. “Because, I’ll be darned, if you show me any more pretty places I’ll get discontented with my homestead.”
“Melberne, did you see any tracks on the way across the bench above?” asked Chane as he swung out of his saddle.
“Tracks! On that bare rock? I shore didn’t,” replied Melberne.
“Well, I did, and some of them were fresh, made by shod horses. They were headed west along the bench. The Piute boys rode up this way yesterday, but their ponies were not shod. I’m inclined to believe Manerube and his outfit made those tracks.”
“Ahuh! Wal, what if they did?” demanded the other.
“No matter, I reckon. They’re leaving us alone,” rejoined Chane, thoughtfully. “But it bothers me — the idea they may be trying to climb Wild Horse Mesa. They’re on the wrong track down that bench, for about ten or twelve miles down there’s an impassable break which runs square up to the wall. That’ll turn them back.”
“How far have we come down heah?”
“Two or three miles, I should say.”
“Wal, I’ll take it afoot an’ go back, keepin’ an eye peeled for them. Shore I’d just as lief do that as go further into these canyons. I want to climb where I can see. What’ll you do?”
“Melberne, I don’t mind telling you I think I can get on top of the mesa.”
“Good! You make shore,” he replied, with satisfaction. “An’, Chess, you an’ Sue prowl around to please yourselves, only don’t work back up the way we come. Now let’s make camp quick, have a bite to eat, an’ then be free till dark.”
Sue and Chess, more in spirit of fun than for any other reason, had trailed Chane down the canyon until they lost his tracks.
“Dog-gone him! Has he turned into a bird?” complained Chess.
“He’s an angel,” said Sue, who had responded strangely to this growing adventure.
The canyon had grown to be a remarkable one, narrow, lofty- walled, full of golden gleams and hollow echoes. It drew Sue on and on. Chess gathered flowers, caught frogs and butterflies for her, helped her over the boulders.
“Do you suppose he climbed out?” inquired Sue.
“Who?”
“Chane, of course, silly.”
“So-ho! You’re just toddling along with me because of him. Sue Melberne, I’d be ashamed.”
“I am,” confessed Sue, boldly. “But then you’re nice at times. And when you are I like to be with you.”
“I don’t see how we could have missed any place where Chane could have gone up with Brutus. It sure is queer. But, Sue, we’ve come mostly over bare wet rock and granite boulders. I’m not so bad following tracks. Still, with a distractingly sweet girl like you, I couldn’t track an elephant in the mud.”
“Chess, you can shore spout,” replied
Sue, merrily.
Presently the canyon narrowed until all the space was covered with water. It ran swift in places, and appeared shallow.
“Looks like we’re stumped,” observed Sue, ruefully.
“Us stumped? Never. I’ll carry you,” said Chess, gayly, and without more ado he gathered her up, as easily as Chane had once, and splashed into the stream. The water began to rise above his knees. Chess slipped, then caught his balance. Sue cried out:
“Don’t you dare fall with me, Chess Weymer.”
Suddenly he halted in the middle of the canyon, with roguish eyes on hers. Sue recognized the gleam of deviltry.
“That gives me a wonderful idea,” he said.
“Does it? All right. But hurry and get me out of this.”
“Not at all. That isn’t the idea. I suddenly thought just how much love Chane and I have wasted on you.”
“Oh! Have you? Well, you needn’t waste any more. Hurry, I tell you.”
Chess hugged her a little and laughed down at her.
“Sue, you kiss me or I’ll be sure to slip and fall.”
“I will not. Chess, this isn’t fun,” she said, hurriedly.
“It’s great. I never had such a chance. I’m sure Chane won’t miss one little kiss. Come—”
“Shut up!” interrupted Sue. “I declare you are no — no gentleman.”
“You don’t appreciate me. I’m fighting you for your happiness and for Chane’s. You love each other and you’re a couple of fools.”
“I am, yes. But not he.... Chess, don’t hold me here — jibbering that way — like an idiot.”
“Kiss me, then, and call me brother,” he went on, shaking her gently.
“You — you—” began Sue, and ended abruptly. There did not appear to be any other way out of the dilemma. Chess seemed just a little different today. Yet the look of him was the same as always when he teased her, only now it held something sweet, possessive. “Very well, Little Boy Blue,” she went on, and raised her face to his, to kiss his cheek. “Brother!”