by Zane Grey
“Wal, Cash, reckon I’ll think more’n I say,” returned Nevada, ponderingly. “You shore talked straight. I savvy when a man’s tellin’ me the truth. It’s a darn interestin’ story. What the courts might say aboot it I cain’t guess. But I reckon half that hundred thousand Setter gave you is honestly yours. Maybe the other half, too. Nobody could tell just how much money Setter earned an’ what he got speculatin’. He was always careful to get the other fellow to take the risks. Yes, sir, I reckon the Arizona ranch is yours, all right.”
“Good. I’m glad you see the deal that way,” replied Burridge, rubbing his hands together. “An’ you’ll accept my offer?”
“Cash, I cain’t promise that yet,” responded Nevada, slowly. “Reckon to be honest, the day might come when I’d be glad to take you up. But now I want time to think aboot it.”
“Take all the time you want,” spoke up Burridge, heartily.
“Wal, I might need a lot. There’s a couple of points that’ll shore be hard to get over.”
“What are they, Jim? I might help you.”
“Wal, the first is — your past deals might crop up any day.”
“I thought long about that,” returned Burridge, earnestly. “An’ at last I figured myself free of any worry. I’m not known in Arizona. Idaho never knew me as Cash Burridge. An’ what do any two-bit deals here amount to? They’ll be forgotten after I’ve gone.”
“Reckon you don’t miss it far,” replied Nevada. “But my second point is the serious an’ important one. That is, so far as I am concerned.”
“Shoot!” replied Burridge, with good-natured impatience.
“Wal, Cash, I don’t mean any offense, but I’m just plain doubtful that you can ever go straight.”
Burridge threw his cigar at the stove and the dark blood waved over his face in a tide. “By Heaven! that sticks in my craw, too! I wonder. But I’m no damn fool an’ I’m not without some brains.”
“Shore. I admit that. But, Cash, you’ve asked my opinion an’ heah it is. You’ve a weakness for women an’ red liquor. An’ the crux of the deal is — can you stand prosperity?”
“Ha! I never had a chance to find out,” replied Burridge, clenching his fist. “I’ve got it now. We’ll see. I swear I want to make the best of it. An’ I’d do better with my chance if I had you beside me. That’s all.”
“Wal, I appreciate that, Cash, an’ I’ll think it over. What I hate aboot it is livin’ up to my name.”
Nevada went downstairs with Burridge and amused himself by standing and walking in front of Cawthorne for a while. Lize did not put in an appearance. It was mid-week and business was slack. Nevada left the Gold Mine early, not forgetful that Mrs. Wood surely would wait up for him. The night was dark and cold, with a hint of snow in the air. The wind whistled through the leafless trees. Excitement and distraction had somehow been good for him. He found his landlady waiting up beside the kitchen fire.
“Wal, Mother Wood, heah I am, standin’ on both feet an’ without any hole in my haid,” he said, cheerily.
“So I see, Mr. Lacy,” she returned. “But that might be only a matter of luck. Did you run into Link?”
“Shore. I stood around hours, but nothin’ happened. So I reckon you got me all scared for nothin’.”
“Scared! Pooh! I wish I could put the fear of the Lord in you,” she replied.
“Wal, I’ll agree to let you, if you will give me a piece of pie an’ a mug of milk.”
The short days passed, the snow fell, adding to Nevada’s work. In the evenings, if the weather was not stormy, he would drop in at the Gold Mine. Burridge had made another strong plea for Nevada to join him, and then had left for Arizona, intending to make a wide detour through Oregon and California to avoid the snow.
Lize Teller had passed from jest to earnest in her mood toward Nevada. She was vain, willful, and malignant when under the influence of drink. Her life worked daily toward some final tragedy. During the early part of the winter she had made love to Nevada, more, he thought, to inflame Cawthorne than for any other reason. But the time came, which was coincident with Cawthorne’s further bold attempt to force or aggravate Nevada into a fight, when she ceased wholly her flirting with Nevada. Soon after that she broke her engagement with Cawthorne and took to wild flirtations and drinking bouts with the gamblers. She lost all restraint and began to fail in health.
When Nevada at length took her to task, as if indeed he were a brother, he received an impression that gave him concern.
“No decent man wants me and I’m slated for hell,” she told him, bitterly.
From this speech Nevada conceived the idea that somehow he had failed the girl. It could not have been otherwise, yet the fact hurt him. Another side of the situation was the peril she had incurred by jilting Cawthorne. There was, however, no use in talking to Lize about that. Whenever Cawthorne accosted her, whether humbly or harshly, or in a maudlin way, she flouted him as she would have a repulsive dog.
Days and weeks went by, and this situation wore on, growing toward its climax.
Nevada resisted his premonition of its outcome. Almost he yielded to the urge to leave Lineville even in the dead of winter. But the side of him that was Jim Lacy, brooding, augmenting, always in conflict with Nevada, would not let him run from a cheap bully and from a worthless girl whom he yet might help. Something held Nevada back from the easiest escape out of that dilemma.
Always there was encroaching upon his gentle kindly mood, eating like a poison lichen into the sorrow and dream of his love for Hettie Ide, lost to him forever, that dark instinctive fire of spirit, that antagonism of the gunman.
Nevada acquitted himself of any responsibility for what he had become. As a mere boy he had been thrown among brutal and evil men. He had worked himself above their influence time and time again, only to be thrown back, by accident, by chivalry in him to redress a wrong done some one, by passion to survive, into that character which fate had fastened upon him and to which he seemed unfortunately and wonderfully fitted.
“Reckon it’ll always be so for me,” he soliloquized, somberly. “I cain’t get away from myself. . . . I wonder if Hettie would believe me false to her faith. No! No! . . . I’ll always know, even if I’m forced to be Jim Lacy again, that I’m true to her.”
One afternoon Nevada, actuated by an impulse beyond his ken, bent his steps toward the Gold Mine. All night an oppression had persisted through his slumbers, and all morning he had been restless, brooding.
He entered the place by the side door, and paused in the hall before the entrance to the gambling room. The usual quiet of that den had been disrupted.
With his left hand Nevada quickly opened the door and entered sidewise, his right arm crooked. The room was full of men, all standing. Cards, coins, chips, glasses on the tables showed evidence of having been violently abandoned. There followed whispers, a cough, shuffling of feet. The noise that had halted Nevada came from the saloon. Suddenly it augmented to a banging on the bar accompanied by the bellow of a harsh voice.
“Rum! Hand it out — er I’ll bust your head, too!”
Nevada strode to the nearest group of men. Something terrible had happened. He saw it in their faces. Immediately he connected it with the raucous voice in the saloon.
“What’s happened?” he queried.
“There’s been a hell of a mess,” replied one, wiping a moist face.
“Jim, we was playin’ our card games, quiet as usual,” spoke up the gambler, Ace Black, “when we heerd an awful row in the hall there. Then a woman’s screams, quick hushed, I’ll tell you. An’ after that a heavy fall. We all jumped up an’ some one rushed out to see what it was. An’ by Gawd—”
“Wal?” broke in Nevada, cool and grim, as Black choked.
“Lize Teller! She was layin’ half naked, streamin’ blood. Link Cawthorne had beat her over the head with his gun. She’ll die! . . . An’ listen to him!”
In three long bounds Nevada had reached and split the beaded
door-curtain. His swift eye swept all.
“Cawthorne!” he yelled, in piercing voice that brought an instant breathless silence.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS SPRINGTIME in northern California. Old Mt. Shasta stood up grandly and took the morning light, his vast snowslopes beginning to be ridged by black. From the Tule Lake depression the land waved upward in wide belts, brown and gray, and at last green as emerald.
Honk! Honk! Honk! The wild geese were coming from the south. Great flocks in triangle formation, led by huge old honking ganders, came flying over the sage hills, to circle the grain fields and drop down among their fellows.
The wide acres of the Ide ranch, mostly lake-bottom land that the draining of Tule Lake had made available, spread rich and fertile along the southern shore. The squares of brown soil but recently ploughed, the fields beginning to show a tinge of green, the pasture lands, running far up on the gray sage slopes, the droves of horses and herds of cattle, the hedge fences, the orchards, young and old, the neat sheds and the rambling red-roofed barn, and the white house half hidden in a grove of maples and pines — all these amply testified to the prosperity of the Ides.
Hettie Ide had awakened this morning twenty years old. The wild geese that she had loved since childhood had come back from their pilgrimage to the south, and were honking as if they knew it was her birthday and that on this beautiful May day she must be joyous with young life.
But Hettie had a secret sorrow, which she hid deep in her heart, while she ministered to her ailing mother, and shared with her brother Ben the one bitter drop in his cup of happiness.
It wanted an hour yet before breakfast. As Hettie tripped down the stairs she heard Ina shrieking with laughter, no doubt at little Blaine’s pranks. How happy they were and how blessed by God! But Hettie had no envy in her heart this birthday morning. She was closer to Ben than ever, and she loved Ina and the child as if indeed they were her own flesh and blood.
Hettie went outdoors. What a glorious morning! Bright and warm was the sun; the birds were singing in the maples; violets lifted their sweet faces out of the green; the wild-lilac buds were bursting into pink.
She knew where to find Ben. Down in the hedge-lined lane to the corrals she strolled, her heart full, yet with the old pang keener, listening to the hum of bees and the honk of wild geese, the bawl of calves and the twittering of the swallows.
Above all these sounds, so sweet to her listening ears, she heard the shrill whistle of Ben’s great wild stallion, California Red. He was trooping across the pasture in defiance of Ben, or venting his displeasure at the corral bars.
Hettie found Ben sitting on top of the corral fence. California Red was inside, and indeed he did not like it. Hettie halted to peep through at him. She loved this wonderful horse, too, for his beauty, his spirit, and for another reason which only Ben would ever have suspected.
California Red had been in captivity four years. He had been broken, yet never had lost his spirit. It took a halter to make him lower his ears and stop rolling his fine dark eyes. Red was never gentle, but, on the other hand, he had not one mean trait. He shone red, glossy, silken, beautiful, and his long mane was a flame. He was a big horse, yet so perfectly proportioned that most observers would not have judged his size. High and rangy, with body round as a barrel, a wonderful deep wide chest, legs powerful, yet not heavy, and an arching neck and noble head, he looked indeed what he had been for years, the wild stallion king of the sage hills of northern California.
Hettie climbed to a seat beside her brother.
“Mawnin’, pard,” she drawled, mimicking the Southern accent of one neither of them ever forgot.
Ben gave a little start. He had been gazing out over the red stallion, over the corrals and fields and the sage slopes, to something beyond. Hettie did not often take such liberty with her brother. But this was her birthday and she meant to recall something of the past that might hurt them both.
“Wal, howdy there, old girl!” replied Ben, surprising her with his answering drawl. Beneath the humor in his voice lay deep feeling. But as he reached for her with his gloved hand he did not look at her.
“What’re you doing, Ben?” she asked, brightly, as she took his hand in both hers.
“I was just coaxing that red son-of-a-gun,” he replied, nodding at the stallion.
“Red doesn’t seem to obey you very well.”
“I’d have to rope him before he’d lay down those ears.”
“Ben, you mustn’t expect him to grow tame.”
“Tame? No, I only want him to love me.”
“Perhaps love was left out of Red’s makeup,” laughed Hettie. “Or perhaps he can’t forgive you for taking him from his sage hills. I certainly wouldn’t love you, if I were Red.”
“It’s four years now,” said Ben, thoughtfully. “What a long time! I couldn’t ask a finer, gamer horse. Sure there isn’t one in all California that can touch him. But I — I always seem to want something from Red — I never get.”
“Ben dear,” replied Hettie, pressing his hand, “what you want is something — some one to tame Red.”
“I reckon. . . . The only man who ever could tame Red,” muttered Ben, more to himself than to her.
“Your old pard, Nevada,” she whispered, leaning closer.
Ben dropped his head, and his gloved hand closed tight on Hettie’s.
Not for a long time had Hettie dared to broach this subject and now that she had, she meant to follow it up in a way to help her, and perhaps Ben, too.
“Ben, this is my birthday,” she spoke up, softly.
“Well, so it is,” replied her brother, starting out of his reverie. “I plumb forgot. But I reckon I can dig you up a present of some kind. . . . Let’s see, you must be eighteen — nineteen.”
“Twenty,” she added, gravely.
“How time flies! Why, you’re a grown woman, and a darned fine handsome one, too. But you always seem my kid sister.”
And as he turned to kiss her cheek she saw tears in his dark eyes. There were threads of gray, too, in the hair over Ben’s temples. That shocked Hettie. He, so young and strong and virile! But Ben, all those long years exiled from his home, outcast and wild-horse hunter, had led a lonely and hard life. It was Nevada who had saved him. And now, as so often in the past, she prayed God to bless Nevada, and keep him good and clean and brave as when she had known him.
“Ben,” she spoke up, “I don’t want any present on my twentieth birthday. But I ask this. If I’m a woman now I’m old enough to be listened to. Let me talk to you as I want — as I need to.”
“Hettie, I’m sorry you had to ask me that,” he returned, contritely. “But you hurt so. . . . And I thought you just a — a sentimental girl — that you’d forget.”
“Forget him? Never,” she whispered. “Have you forgotten?”
“If I ever do may God forgive me,” replied Ben, poignantly.
“Ben, I know your secret, and I think Ina knows, too,” went on Hettie, earnestly. “We are dear friends — nay, we’re sisters. She’s so good — so lovable. . . . We have talked often. You remember when Ina came home from college — when you were a poor wild-horse hunter of the hills and father almost hated you — remember how Ina and I plotted for you and Nevada. How we fought for you!”
“Ah, Hettie — I do remember,” said Ben, dreamily.
“Well, Ina and I know what ails you. It’s loss of your pard, Nevada!”
“No, Hettie dear, not all loss of mine,” burst out Ben, passionately. “I’m not so selfish as that. I could stand loss. But what has grieved and shamed me — and, well, broken my heart — is that Nevada saved me, made all my good fortune, my happiness, possible, by sacrificing himself. Father forgave me, took me back home to mother and you. Hart Blaine was proud to give me — me, the lonely wild-horse hunter — his talented and beautiful daughter, the richest girl in all this valley of rich ranchers. I had fame, family, home, love, happiness beyond belief. Then father died, leaving me
rich. I should say leaving us rich, for half of all this wonderful ranch is yours, Hettie. Next little Blaine came to bless me — my boy! . . . And Nevada went back to where he came from. God only knows where that is. I’ve spent a lot of money searching the West for a lean-faced rider who drawled his Texas accent — and answered to the name Nevada. And I can’t find him.”
“Some day you will, Ben,” she whispered, thrillingly.
“Always I believed I would,” went on Ben, whose tongue, once loosed, seemed in haste to unburden itself. “I lived on that hope. But it’s four years now. Four years. And that Forlorn River Ranch of ours is now worth a fortune. Half of that is Nevada’s. Half of the Mule Deer Flat Ranch is Nevada’s. He’s worth money. . . . Why didn’t he come back? The whole country rose up to bless him for killing Less Setter and his two accomplices. Why didn’t he ever write? Just a line — a word to let me know he was alive and hadn’t forgotten. Oh, damn him — damn him!”
“Hush — Ben,” returned Hettie, almost faltering. “You don’t mean to damn Nevada. . . . Don’t you understand that the reason he disappeared like that, and became as one dead to you, was not because he feared the law might hold him for killing those wicked men who had trapped you. No! But because he feared we would find out who he really was. Oh, I know, Ben. That was it. Nevada had been bad. How bad I dare not imagine. . . . Don’t you remember that day when he rode so furiously into the crowd to face Setter? How the mere sight of him froze them with terror. . . . Oh, Ben, I fear Nevada had been some great and terrible gunman. . . . That gentle, soft-voiced boy who was afraid to touch me with his little finger! Oh, the mystery, the pity of it!”
“Gunman?” queried Ben, almost harshly. “I reckon so. I think I guessed it, he was so strange with guns. He handled a gun so marvellously. But what was that to me? . . . He could be Billy the Kid, or Plummer, or Wess Hardin, or Kingfisher, or Jim Lacy, or any other desperado I ever heard the name of — and what would I care?”