by Zane Grey
“I came out here to have a little talk with Lenora,” said Wilbur.
“Just Lenora?” asked Mary with a catch in her voice.
“Yes, just Lenora. I’m going away tomorrow and there are things we want to talk aboot that won’t be of interest to you.”
“You don’t mind, dear, do you?” Lenora’s sweetness was exasperating.
“Oh, please don’t consider my feelings in the matter,” returned Mary with a laugh that was not at all gay. “I am used to being put in my place. I wish you both a pleasant evening.”
She left before they could hear the sob that rose to her lips. “I’m tired — too tired,” Mary said to herself, outrunning threatening tears on the way to the porch. There they fell in a quick rush. It made her unhappy to be tired and lonely. The burden of it weighed upon her. But Mary was not given to tears for long. Tears meant surrender, and to surrender was to be weak.
She walked out to the broad avenue, the one and only thoroughfare of Taho, and along it to the desert in which it ended. Theirs was the last house on the avenue, a circumstance that afforded Mary pleasure in her times of stress — the desert close and intimate, and people all behind her, lost in their own petty interests and unconcerned with hers. The desert was like a father, profound in unspoken consolation, in the understanding of the loneliness of one’s soul, wise with the wisdom of years, sad with the sorrow of age.
Mary’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness which had fallen with the suddenness of the desert. She felt the great loneliness about her, she heard the whispered rustle of a breeze in the brush and the chirp of a cricket, melancholy, sad. She came across a discarded government wagon which would soon go under the ax, and she climbed to the high seat, from which she could look down and through the solemn glory that she loved.
Out there was Castle Mesa and fifty miles beyond Black Mesa, and Curry was there — Curry, the only person who had ever expressed a feeling for her that sprang from the needs of the soul.
* * * * *
The next day Wilbur left. Lenora shed a few tears and promised she would take care of her sister-in-law. “He’s asked me to,” she confided to Mary.
Mary felt that Wilbur’s admonition was pretense and wished with all her hungry heart that it could have sprung from tender solicitude. As she went about her work with the energy of a healthy, vigorous woman, she was aware of Lenora’s scrutiny from time to time.
“You ought to live in Texas where you can get help cheap,” Lenora suggested over the top of her book from the depths of Wilbur’s chair. “We couldn’t exist if we had to do our own housework.”
Mary smiled at this remark from the Texas lady. Lenora had no idea that her own grandmother had referred to the junior Newtons as a lazy shiftless lot, the frayed-out stock of a broken-down aristocracy, and had explained that their continual indebtedness came from such unnecessary luxuries as a general-work girl, or a procession of them who came and left, left usually with a threat to sue for their back wages. How that proud impoverished old lady deplored her son’s deterioration and the hopeless wasters his shiftless wife had brought into the world! Yet her complaints had come over soft, fluffy dresses with which her rheumatic fingers struggled and which her conscience excused with the saying that the girls couldn’t go naked. How Mary had pitied the generous old soul!
Day after day, Lenora, when not reading, lounged under the cottonwood tree that spread its shade into Mary’s front yard from the edge of the broad avenue. Her gay-colored dresses were signals of her presence there. They drew attention from Taho’s citizens and the few strangers who passed through. Following her appearance, several people called on Mary, people not usually given to social intercourse. It developed that Lenora had spoken to them and pressed them to come to the house for tea. She took it upon herself to go to the post and purchase some fancy crackers which she charged to Wilbur.
Soon Mary noticed that several cowboys, engaged in building a government barn across the road, spent the fag-end of their lunch hours along the roadside under the shade of the cottonwood, not far from Lenora’s customary place to which she retreated the minute lunch was over. Presently Lenora announced there was going to be a dance at the government mess and she guessed she would go, though Mary could not, Wilbur being away.
It was a fine-looking half-breed Indian, an educated young man in government employ, who brought Lenora home from the dance. He talked so audibly during scattered moments of the hour that he lingered with Lenora on the porch, that Mary, in the room beyond, recognized his voice and could not sleep.
“Nice set of young folks for such a small place,” Lenora commented the next morning. “But I haven’t seen a man yet who could give me a thrill. There must be some nice ones around somewhere.”
Mary gave Lenora a look that was too honest for the Texas girl to take.
“Oh, I don’t mean that I could marry and live out here,” she hurried to say. “That would be all right if I were a native, to settle in a place like this, but with family, I’ve got to marry family, and someone with money too.”
The remark savored of something that had passed between her and Wilbur that night before he had left, and Mary suffered a strange sinking sensation for a moment.
“Wouldn’t you like to ride someday?” Mary asked by way of changing the conversation. “I can borrow some horses.”
“I’ve got such delicate skin and I’d ruin it out in the sun. Now, if we could ride along in the shade....” Lenora left her conclusions for her sister-in-law to surmise.
Mary made no comment. Lenora, giggling foolishly, started on another tack.
“There’s one condition under which I would go in a minute.”
“What’s that?” Mary asked with no great show of interest.
“If a certain cowboy asked me.”
The remark failed to arouse any curiosity in Mary.
“Does he come this way often?” Lenora purred.
Mary recalled the three cowboys who were now on such easy speaking terms with Lenora. “Which one?” she asked.
“Curry — Mr. John Curry!”
Mary was staggered. She felt the blood mount to her face.
“Now, what are you blushing about?” Lenora taunted. “You — a married woman! That’s why I want to meet him. He must be a wonder. You’re usually so straight-laced, Mary, and if you’ve gone and fallen for him....”
As the girl went on with her merciless harangue, thoughts, strange and terrible, flashed through Mary’s mind.
“You — have — met Mr. Curry?” Mary faltered.
“No, but I’m dying to.... Wilbur told me how completely he had turned your head, and he wants me here to keep him off.”
“Oh-h-h!” Mary’s exclamation was almost a wail. “And you believe your brother’s slanderous, jealous talk! You dare to intimate that I — that I — would.... You are here to watch, to spy, to take care of me — you poor, silly little fool! Why I despise you, I pity you!”
Mary slammed the screen door and hurried out beyond the garden, down along the irrigation ditch toward the little house where Katharine lived. Brush caught at her skirts and tore her stockings. She tore it free and ran. A neighbor called a greeting to her and she shouted a response, but her feet carried her on faster and faster. Katharine at last! She stumbled over the low step and flung herself against the door. It gave way. Katharine, standing at the stove, a spoon in one hand suspended over a pot, was staring at her in amazement.
“Mary, dear, what’s wrong!”
The spoon fell with a clatter. Mary, safe in Katharine’s arms, sobbed out, “Oh, Katharine, it’s too much for me! I tell you, it’s just too much.”
CHAPTER V
JOHN CURRY MAINTAINED his popularity among the cowboys at the Black Mesa trading post by demonstrating his need of their counsel. He was their leader by virtue of his power to control and because of his position of trust with Mr. Weston as chief of the outfit. Though he never pressed his authority, he exercised it wisely. Among the boys
he was “good old John,” the buddy of every fellow on the place. An unconscious recognition of John Curry’s leadership was expressed in the epithet “old,” for John, who had just reached twenty-eight, was younger than four or five of his own men.
That the leader of the outfit looked upon High-Lo as his own special charge endeared him even more to the rough, desert-bred men. High-Lo had become completely disassociated from his Christian name by his preference for the nickname John had given him. When addressed as Alex Hardy, he seldom responded. Readdressed as High-Lo, his characteristic grin immediately appeared. Alex Hardy lost his identity one day when Hicks, a cross-eyed, red-haired cowboy, came to John protesting, “I’ve looked for that dumb fool Alex high an’ low an’ I can’t find him anywheres.” Such was the usual state of affairs. Whenever Alex was especially needed, everyone had to join in a search for him, and as Hicks expressed it, “look high and low.” The truant was often found far from camp, high in spirits because he had been up to some deviltry, or low in the torture of self-abnegation, stricken with a sense of his own uselessness. High-Lo, John had decided, was a good name for Alex.
High-Lo was a handsome young fellow short of twenty, with a tremendous store of energy which, in his early youth, had been misdirected. When he was a lad of seven or eight his father had introduced him to the delights of a whisky flask and had nourished in him the false notion that the true measure of a man was his ability to drink heavily without losing his sensibilities. High-Lo had tried his best to measure up to this standard, but seldom succeeded in meeting the required restriction. Consequently he was outlawed before he was eighteen by the man who had ruined him and the community in which he lived. He had faced the county judge once too often. Before High-Lo left the family homestead in Colorado, he rustled three of the county judge’s own maverick calves, marked them with his father’s brand, and personally presented them to the judge as a gift from a father who wished to show his appreciation for the judge’s leniency toward his wayward boy.
It was on High-Lo’s momentous exodus from his home state to nowhere, at which time he was intoxicatedly careless about whether he happened to be riding into Utah or Arizona, that he encountered John Curry journeying to Black Mesa from his brother’s ranch in Colorado. The incident of their meeting opened a new chapter in the boy’s life. High-Lo made the aimlessness of his ride known, and later sobbed out his troubles over a campfire. John adopted the boy at once, nursed him through his drunken sickness, then when he found him drinking again, after making an impressive ceremony of destroying High-Lo’s stock, thrashed him soundly. At the close of a ten days’ journey he brought in a thoroughly steadied new hand for Mr. Weston’s outfit. The new hand developed into a much-loved nuisance, at once the best and the worst cowboy Black Mesa trading post had ever acquired.
At the Black Mesa post, contact with tourists made the cowboys fastidious about their attire, but High-Lo was not affected in like manner. He was individual enough not to care that his hair stuck through a hole in his sombrero, that his boots were seldom blacked and were run down at the heels. However, when John returned from Oraibi, High-Lo met him resplendent in new boots and sombrero and a painfully starched white cotton shirt, and with the confession that he had “fallen for the society stuff.” John was not impressed. The source of High-Lo’s inspiration was too obviously the Blakely girls. They had turned more than one cowboy’s head, and each victim had complained to John of the folly of two nice pretty girls wasting their time on Hank Hanley. Hank Hanley’s kind of girl was no kind for High-Lo. John worried for a week. At last he resolved to protest.
He looked for High-Lo in the store, the kitchen, the laundry, the toolshed, among the men and Indians who were idling before the door of the trading post, and finally, at Hicks’s suggestion, sought him at the corral where he was headed when last seen.
The corral could not be seen from the trading post. The store and the cluster of buildings about it were arranged snugly against the slope of a great curving hill that swung down from the floor of the main valley. The corral was above on the high level, where an enchanting sweep of country never failed to delight John’s love of scenic grandeur. Great hummocky mountains of red rock lifted above the ridges that confined the snug =v=-shaped lowland and hid the post, and bound the larger valley on the east. Four or five miles westward Black Mesa, dark with its growth of cedar, loomed majestically, presenting its impregnable corrugated front as far as the eye could see; and from the intercepting mesas of the north, the tremendous length of the valley broadened to a vast and limitless plain above which towered two great monuments of rock, one red, one black and gray. Greasewood, green from a good season of rain, carpeted the country with color. The air had been sweetened by a shower that had come in the night, and it carried the delicate fragrance of desert flowers.
High-Lo, intent on shoeing a horse, did not see John approach.
“So that’s how you’re putting in your time, cowboy!” John called to him.
High-Lo grinned. “Shore! I ain’t wastin’ none of my time when the boss is around. You want these fellers shoed, don’t you?”
“Yes, the new tourists will be hitting the trail day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll show the outfit I can shoe a horse prettier’n the rest. Them lazy cusses was puttin’ it off fer tomorrer.”
High-Lo slipped some nails between his teeth and continued busily with his task.
“Think I’ll send you out on the trail this time,” John began.
The nails were blown wide, and High-Lo almost gave up his hold on the hoof between his legs. “What? Me? Again?” he expostulated. “It ain’t my turn! What’s the row? You goin’?”
“No, I’m not going.”
“If that’s the goods I’m not worryin’ none about me goin’.”
“I’m dead serious. I ought to keep Stuffy home, and you’ll have to go in his place,” John protested.
“There’s nothin’ wrong with Stuffy ‘cept he’s been eatin’ too much. It’ll be good for him to go out. He’ll have to go easy on grub then.” High-Lo was hammering hard again.
“That’s all right, High-Lo. I’m entitled to an opinion once in a while,” returned John.
High-Lo contemplated his boss a minute. “Say, ain’t you hidin’ suthin’ under your saddle blanket?” he blurted out at last.
John did not meet the question directly. “I’m trying to hide a feeling that you’re about ready to bust loose again.”
“Lordy, cowboy, you hit it!” cried High-Lo. “That’s what I am. An’ I’ll be even worse on the trail. You better keep me close to home. I hate to tell you, John, but I’ve took to liquor again.”
John laughed out loud. “Anyone as smart as you deserves to be let out. Taken to liquor! This place is bone dry. A fellow could safely assure booze fighters that a vacation out here would cure them. You’re not in Colorado. You’re on an Indian Reservation in Arizona. I’d hate to be riding steady since you took your last drop.”
“Then you’re gettin’ tender. I took my last drop yestiddy.”
When High-Lo spoke the truth, he never failed to convince.
“Hey, cowboy, can’t you tell me you’re lying?” asked John uneasily.
High-Lo let go the horse’s leg, led him into the corral and then swung to a seat on the timbers. “Not this time, John,” he announced from his high place. “But don’t get riled. I’ll tell you about it. Honest, it’s sort of funny.”
John was not prepared to see it that way, but he listened.
“Yestiddy there wasn’t no one to take the Blakely girls ridin’, so I ups and offers my services.”
“That’s another thing,” interrupted John. “Stub should have taken them.”
“Stub couldn’t. Someone shaved his hair off, an’ he’s hidin’ like a settin’ hen. Natural-like, with so many of the boys out, I had to take his place.”
Inasmuch as High-Lo sounded so like injured innocence, John could not refrain from saying accusingly, “You’re the
hombre who tied Stub and shaved his head, you son-of-a-gun, because he was too popular with the Blakely sisters.”
“Say!” burst out High-Lo, “I thought I was tellin’ you suthin’! You’re gettin’ me off my trail.”
“Beg your pardon,” said John, aware that he himself was being sidetracked now.
“At the last minute one of the girls ups and guesses she won’t go, and leaves me with the other, the youngest and prettiest one,” continued High-Lo. “So me and my sweetie goes ridin’ alone. When we get down in the Red Canyon Wash, she guesses she’ll have a drink, and me not havin’ a canteen thinks she’s plumb crazy and has in mind that muddy water. But, John, she had a little canteen under her slicker no bigger’n a pint. She offers it to me and I thanks her and says no. Then she comes back that she won’t take none unless I do and paralyzes me with a stare from them big calf eyes of her’n. So I hauled off for a swaller, and, by golly, John, I like to died. I spit all over the place. It wasn’t water she handed me, it was good old Scotch. I was sick at the thought of wastin’ it.”
John swore mildly. High-Lo, ignoring him, went on. “She says, ‘What did you think it was? Milk? I’m past my teethin’ days and I only use water to wash in.’ Honest, that girl that I thought must sure be awful nice said that to me. It was the first time I ever had anyone I thought was a lady offerin’ me a snifter. I told her to help herself, an’ then after I’d take another nip, an’ I did.”
“High-Lo, you were a skunk, to do that!” John shouted. “You missed a chance to let her know that all cowboys are not like Hanley. You should have told her what you just said to me — that it was the first time you ever had anyone you considered a lady offer you a drink of liquor. What’s more, you broke your promise to me.”
High-Lo leaped to the ground. “Don’t be so damn quick to call me a skunk and to say I’m breakin’ promises. I had a reason for wantin’ to seem sociable. I would of told you, but I sure ain’t goin’ to now!”
“Suppose I suspect your reason,” returned John. “Suppose that’s the real reason why I’m sending you out on Wednesday.”