by Zane Grey
“What do you mean?” John asked tersely.
“This!” High-Lo shot back immediately. “All my life I’ve knowed that someday I’d do suthin’ big. All my life I knew that suthin’ not reg’lar was goin’ to happen to me. It’s come. I have to shoot a man. An’ I can do it like I was shootin’ a hydrophobia skunk. Conscience just that clear.”
“Newton?” blazed John.
“My, but you’re smart,” drawled High-Lo. “That’s my man. I’ll shoot him tryin’ to stop me from stoppin’ him sellin’ booze to the Indians. See? He’s a dead man. I’m a hero. You’re a bridegroom.”
“But you can’t shoot Newton!”
“Oh, yes, I can! My arm ain’t paralyzed. I’m leavin’ you mucho pronto for Sage Springs. You’ll still be in Colorado when I’m seein’ my party over the trail.”
High-Lo sprang to his feet and stalked off.
“High-Lo!” called John.
No answer.
“High-Lo!”
Still no answer. The boy’s head was thrown back stubbornly as he swung along.
John drew his gun. “High-Lo, I’ll shoot you in the heel if you don’t come back!”
John might have saved his words. He shot into the air which proved another waste of effort. He fired the gun again. Then High-Lo turned.
“That girl has sure set you crazy!” he yelled back. “Pack your gun. You might need it to poke between me an’ a sheriff.” With that he broke into a run. John, furious at him, started in full pursuit. As he passed the sheepshed he caught sight of an old lasso rope dropped carelessly over the fence. He snatched it and swung the rope to a good-size loop. Then he renewed his pursuit. His arm swept wide, the rope circling, and in another moment High-Lo was checked with a startling jerk, and his hands were bound to his sides. He pulled back fiercely against the taut rope, his eyes blazing.
“Sorry!” said John yanking him closer. “You’ve got to listen to me when my affairs are at stake. When you get an idea of your own you’re worse than a pack mule.”
Though the indignity of his position made High-Lo fume with wrath, he seemed to grasp that John was in deadly earnest and in no way attempting to make a fool of him.
“Well!” he stormed.
“I said I needed you to help me, but you’ll only ruin things if you don’t let my opinions count,” John protested. “You or no other man is going to have blood on his hands for me. I never could face Mary Newton if you did such a thing. Don’t act in the heat of your passions. Cool off. Think clearly. Then act. It happens that Mrs. Newton says she will see me this spring. All winter I’ve been haunted with the thought that Newton had come back. Now I know he hasn’t. I’m pretty sure he never will. I can go to her free and happy. I know she doesn’t want him back. I have a place in her life even if it is small. Don’t take it away from me!”
High-Lo’s head dropped. He scrunched the sand lightly with the toe of his boot. “I’m the fool. I thought you was. Hang close to me, John. I’ll try. I wouldn’t shoot Newton now even if the sheriff hung him up for me for target practice.” He freed himself of the rope and tossed it away with a grin. “Shot at and hog-tied all in one day! That’s better than dyin’ by inches in a place where nothin’ happens.”
* * * * *
The days passed uneventfully. They slipped into weeks. High-Lo grew more restless. John, counting each sun, blessed it for passing. There came the time when he could wait no longer. What if he had to put in a month of unemployment when he reached Arizona? He must see Mary. He went to his brother and told him he was leaving and taking High-Lo with him. His brother expressed no surprise. Rather he agreed that he should go, saying that he felt the time was at hand when John ought to sell out his interests because only habit, grown from a faithfulness to family ties, kept him in Colorado.
High-Lo maintained that he had been waiting for word to go every time John opened his mouth to speak during the past few weeks, and every morning had packed his roll in readiness.
They were off without loss of time. For John their exodus was attended by all the palpitant hope and anticipation of the pilgrim of old to the promised land. Eight days they traveled, sometimes making trading posts at night, more often sleeping in the open and faring on Indian corn and jerked mutton. On the ninth day they climbed the broad back of the mesa behind Taho and saw the town in the far distance, a green oasis in a waste of sand.
CHAPTER XV
ONE AFTERNOON IN April Mary stood in the road in front of the house straining her eyes beneath her hand, wondering anxiously if from an impenetrable cloud of dust the mail stage would emerge. But the dust was being stirred by approaching mounted Indians. In her disappointment, she was conscious of Joy’s black eyes contemplating her smilingly. Like a stray brownie hesitating for a moment in the world of reality the child seemed, a little elf who did not understand, so accepted happily any circumstance that presented itself to her.
“No come?” she said.
“It has not come?” corrected Mary.
“It has not come?” Joy repeated with her unfailing good nature.
“No, dear. But when it comes there’ll be a letter on it telling us Aunt Katharine and Aunt Alice will be here soon. I’m sure of that.”
“Will Aunt Katharine send Joy for school?” Joy’s gleaming white teeth showed as she finished in a smile. But the smile did not mean that she wanted to go back to school. She asked the question often in this disarmingly happy manner. Mary had come to recognize the smile as faith that her answer would be the desired one.
“No, Aunt Katharine will not send Joy to school.”
“To school,” Joy said in devout contrition. She walked closer to Mary. “Maybe soon Joy be white girl,” she announced.
“White girl?” repeated Mary, off guard. Time and again she had been confronted with this announcement. It was an obsession with Joy that she might someday turn white, and her strange little soul seemed to burn incessantly with the longing.
“Yes. See? Joy make white here.” She lifted her arm and pointed to a scar for inspection. “Then Joy don’t go to Indian school.”
“Joy never will be a little white girl,” Mary said gently.
Tolerance for Mary’s misunderstanding glowed from Joy’s great dark eyes. “In Sunday school Joy sing, ‘Wash her, be whiter than snow.’ Joy wash and wash and wash. Joy’s white here.” She fingered the scar triumphantly.
Thought Mary: “‘Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow!’”
It was disconcerting to have to cope with Joy’s rebellion against her natural state. She could not compromise with the yearning in order to appease the child. Quietly, insistently she had met it with denial. Now she wondered sadly if she were harming Joy by her devotion. The life she led, the care and love she received as the ward of a white woman, were estranging her from the people of her own race and removing her far from the colorless life of the children who lived in the dormitories. Had she the means, she would educate Joy, send her to college, train her to preserve the best that her race had transmitted to her, to accept the best that the philosophy and art and religion of the white people could give her, develop her to be a help to the women of her own race, who were being sacrificed to an age of change which was crushing their old faiths and customs without adequate substitution. Lacking the resources, she might be cruel and not kind to Joy as she so heartfully desired to be. The little one had quickly won her love. Never had she received such obedience, patience, appreciation from a white child! Nor were her reactions the mere submission of an obtuse, negative individual. Joy was bright. Her inquiring mind dug into many matters Mary had to avoid. She recognized circumvention and repudiated it. Her thirst to learn was so great that Mary feared that she was destined to suffer because of it.
Though the urge of a generous impulse alone had led Mary to adopt Joy, the arrangement had reverted to her own good in the way of self-preservation. Joy had become her refuge from loneliness. Try as she scrupulously did, she could not keep John Curry from her
thoughts; yet she continued her losing fight. Feeling deep down in her soul the hypocrisy of her act, Mary placed a picture of Wilbur on the mantle over the fireplace. “My husband,” she would say to herself each morning early, and again each night with as much punctuality and as little feeling as did Joy when she said, “Our Father which art in heaven.” She was merely watering the ground where a flower had been uprooted, trying to make herself believe there would be a reblossoming. For what she thought was her own self-protection, she practiced this self-deceit. And now with April come she still denied the flutterings of her heart, telling herself that her anticipation of spring had to do only with Katharine’s return.
Would Katharine find her changed? she wondered. The wonder developed into fear which made Mary realize that she was not sincerely herself. It was the detection of her hypocrisy that she feared. Was she a coward only because she would not see the truth? Always she put the thought from her as quickly as she could. Going deeper and deeper into the intricacies of thought where Joy’s remark had thrust her, she discovered that the only way she could maintain her peace of mind was to forget everything except the present moment. So she proposed a race to the steps, and this time allowed Joy to win.
As they entered the front door Billy came in the back way with an armful of kindling wood.
“Saw you out there,” he said. “Didn’t knock. How’d you get in so fast?”
“Joy and I had a race,” said Mary.
Billy deposited his load in the woodbox with no trace of his usual celerity. He even picked up the tiny slivers he had scattered, going down on his knees to do so.
“Any word of anythin’ on the reservation out Black Mesa way or Sage Springs?” he asked, devoting himself sedulously to the minute flecks of wood.
“Had a letter from Mrs. Shelley last week and she said the Westons have been back almost a month.”
“Other folks have come back, too,” said Billy.
“No doubt everybody’s getting ready for the summer,” returned Mary.
“Folks have come that we weren’t expectin’ back,” Billy went on. He quit his painstaking job with this remark and walked toward the front door, his back to Mary when he spoke again. “Newton’s out on the desert somewhere,” he said.
Mary stared at Billy’s stalwart form, silenced by the shock his words had carried; and the words became transformed into the tall, lanky form of Wilbur effacing Billy there in the doorway. Wilbur near! Wilbur back — perhaps coming to her now! Returning in the spring! But she knew that it was not Wilbur she had expected!
A sudden awareness of Joy tugging at her skirt and the child’s words, “What’s matter, Mudder?” brought Mary’s mind back to the present.
“On the reservation — you mean?” she said haltingly, while to Joy she gave a smile which was meant to reassure her.
“Yes.”
“Just come?” Mary pursued.
“Looks that way.”
“In other words, you don’t know for sure?”
Billy swung around, his hands in his pockets for defense. He seemed to be holding himself back from a dash to safety. “A feller gets news from Indians and cowboys without knowin’ who handed it on to who, an’ you take the main idee for truth. All I’d want to make a trade on is that right now Newton’s somewheres back toward the border. It’s somethin’ I thought you’d like to know.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“That’s all, Ma’am. An’ I’m around, Ma’am, when you’re needin’ me.” His hand was on the screen door holding it part way open. “Don’t think I’m presumin’,” he continued, “if I give you a little advice, me bein’ a kid an’ all. I’d keep away from Castle Mesa an’ Black Mesa. That is — don’t go out sort of meetin’ him. Men that come back like to come the full way alone. An’ remember, if he does come, an’ you don’t want him, I’m willin’ to help make things hot for him.” As he spoke his face cleared from embarrassment to candor. Before Mary could reply, he was gone.
“What’s matter, Mudder?” Joy asked again.
“Something Joy wouldn’t understand, dear,” Mary hastened to say, shutting her mind against the thought that the child might be taken from her soon. “Run out and watch for the stage. Mother will let you get the mail if you’re good.”
That promise was enough. Joy scampered to the gate at once. Mary sank down into the nearest chair and clung to the sides, as if by so doing she could steady her reeling thoughts. Fate at last was destroying all of her little deceits, forcing a decision which she was not yet ready to make. Wilbur might come any time! All she had believed to the contrary was mere wishful thinking. She was Wilbur’s wife. Wilbur was not the type of man Miss Hills had described. He was vain, weak, negative, but he was not unfaithful. He was returning, but she did not know from where. All she knew was that he had not spent the winter on the reservation. His pride would never allow him to stay where people could point a finger of scorn at him. Mary believed in his pride; it was the only forceful thing about him, the thing that had deceived her into believing that she loved him. Love! Poor defiled word! Poor misquoted symbol! Must she go on inhibiting forever the secret desire of her heart? Life with Wilbur would have as little delight as a purposeless journey over the sands of a vast, colorless desert. She pictured sadly the long procession of the years to come. She had not moved when Joy called in that the stage had arrived and she reminded Mary of her promise.
“Watch till you see Mr. MacDonald go over,” Mary advised the eager little girl. “He waits till the mail is distributed. You may go then.”
Mary tried, by throwing herself busily into her household tasks, to drive from her mind the dread thought of Wilbur’s return, but mechanical duties called for so little concentration that her mind could not shift its harassing burden. The future loomed too dark for her to withdraw the present from its shadow.
How long Joy was gone Mary had no idea. In truth, it took the child’s return to remind Mary of her absence and the letters in her hand of her errand. Joy presented the letters proudly.
“Two, Mudder! ... From Aunt Katharine?”
“One’s from Aunt Katharine,” Mary replied. “The other from New York. H’m! I wonder—”
She slipped the official-looking envelope into her apron pocket and went into the living room. Joy stood by her chair as she perused the letter from Katharine. Short and to the point, it told Mary to expect them that same week. “Next mail stage,” thought Mary.
Joy was delighted with the news, and begged for permission to hold the letter. She examined solemnly the signs that were carriers of such pleasant words. Mary meanwhile opened the other communication. A lawyer, obviously her father’s lawyer, was giving her firsthand the distressing news that her father had suddenly passed away, and that she, joint heir with her stepmother to his estate, had been willed ten thousand dollars, a check for which was enclosed.
Mary was too stunned at first to grasp the truth. She had to reread the letter, to examine the check that was attached with a clip to the typewritten sheet.
“Father! ... Dead!” she said aloud.
“What, Mudder?” asked Joy.
Mary did not reply. Sorrow swept over her for the hard lovelessness of the man to whom she had been only a circumstance of marriage, who tolerated her as a moderately just man tolerates discomforts he has brought upon himself. There had been no abiding love between them. There was nothing from which grief for his partner to her birth could spring. In unemotional regard he had made this settlement on her. She wished sorrowfully that she had known so she could have thanked him before he died. He had said to her once when she thanked him for a Christmas gift, “I can’t stop anniversaries from coming.” She wondered if he would have met her now with, “I can’t stop death overtaking me.”
Ten thousand dollars! It was a fortune to her now. It was wealth. It was power. Ten thousand dollars! To have had it while her father lived — to have had it when Wilbur needed it most! Might it have changed things? ... “She’s holding out o
n you, tricky Northerner!” Terrible, scathing words that came from the past to torment her! That was what Wilbur had wanted — money!
“Joy, darling, perhaps I can make you happy yet,” Mary cried. “Perhaps all my dark days are behind me now. This may be the beginning of better things.” A taste of salt was on her lips. She was weeping and had not known it. She was crying, yet she did not understand the reason for her tears.
“Yes, Mudder,” said Joy obediently. She came to Mary, alarmed by her distress and worked her way into her lap. This simple token of sympathy was what Mary needed; she accepted it greedily, hugging Joy to her as she repeated between her sobs those alluring promises.
That night, shortly after Joy had been put to bed, Mary heard a heavy step upon the porch followed by a knock. Billy never knocked. Would Wilbur knock if he returned? The very thought of Wilbur paralyzed her. She wanted to call, “Come in,” but her voice failed her. She rose hesitatingly. If, when she opened the door, she should find Wilbur facing her, she knew she would swoon; she could feel all sense of reality slipping away from her now. She made the door; the knob evaded her, but on the second attempt she held on more firmly and the door yielded. Then a cry escaped her. It was John Curry she saw, eager, expectant. Surely someone outside of herself was listening to his words, the girl she was yesterday, perhaps, surely not Mary Newton of today who in a hysteria of dread and fear was waiting for her husband to return. She could only nod as she backed away, inviting him with her eyes to enter. She steadied herself against the table where he came to take her hands and press them hard in his.
“Didn’t expect to come through this early,” she heard him say. “Couldn’t wait. No other excuse. Haven’t you some word for me?”
“I’m — I’m glad to see you,” Mary murmured. “I’m afraid to be so glad.” She raised her eyes imploringly. “Why did I ever tell you to come by in the spring? I’ve been cheating us both with my expectations. I’ve been a creature without strength or decision. Perhaps that is why I am being brought to task at the eleventh hour.”