by Zane Grey
During the autumn the settler families on the upper slope of this Tonto Basin gathered once a week for a dance. Occasionally it was held at a ranch cabin, sometimes in the woodland school-house, but mostly in the little town of Tonto Flat.
The dance represented their main social life. They had no church, no county house, no place where old and young could meet. Therefore the dance constituted a most serious and important affair. It was here that the strapping young backwoodsmen met and won their sweethearts. In fact, that was perhaps the vital purpose of the dances. There was little other opportunity for courting.
And seldom did a dance occur without one or more fights, one of which, now and then, could be serious. Fighting was characteristic for the Tonto youths. Had not their fathers fought the rustlers for twenty years? And as these hardy pioneers had settled many feuds over cattle, sheep, land, and water with cold steel or hot lead, so their sons settled many rivalries with brawn and blood.
Jake and Verde went to all the dances. Even when off on a hunt up into the canyons or over the rim, they made sure to get back in time for the great events of the week. And Jake and Verde were very popular among the valley girls. Seldom did they take the same girl twice in one season, and every occasion was a gala one. Sometimes they exchanged girls — an event which was regarded with wonder and amusement by their young comrades, and always with concern by their elders. Jake and Verde were not responding satisfactorily to the real purpose of the dance. Neither youth evinced any abiding interest in any one girl. They were both capital catches for any young woman, and this, coupled with their debonair indifference and their boyish brotherly absorption in each other, was the cause of considerable pique.
“Wal,” said Jacob Dunton, “I reckon them thar boys of mine ain’t feelin’ thar oats yet.”
“I’m tellin’ you, Pa,” replied his wife, “it ain’t that. They’re both full of fire an’ go. It’s jist that Jake an’ Verde are too wrapped up in each other to see any of these steady home-makin’ lasses they meet. I love Jake an’ Verde jist as they are, but sometimes it worries me.”
“Reckon thar’s reason for consarn,” said Dunton, shaking his shaggy head. “Some hussy will split them like a wedge in dry pine someday.”
CHAPTER II
ONE NIGHT, AT Tonto Flat, an extra dance was given in honor of Miss Kitty Mains, a newcomer to the settlement.
Jake and Verde, learning the news late, arrived without partners when the dance was in full swing. They had ample time to see Miss Mains and watch her before there came any opportunity to meet her. And so even before this meeting took place the havoc had already been wrought.
They also had plenty of time to learn all about her; the information was voluntarily offered by swains as dazzled as they. Kitty was the daughter of a St. Louis horse dealer, who had come to Arizona for his health and who was going to buy out the Stillwell cattle interests and take up ranching on rather a large scale. He was reputed to be rich.
But this news would not have been necessary excite interest in Kitty Mains. She was strikingly beautiful and something quite new to the gallants of the Tonto Basin. She was small of stature, though graceful and well rounded of form. She had a face that struck men and women alike as pretty and pert, and then gradually grew on one. Her hair was brown, curly, luxuriant, and rebellious. Her small lips, usually curved in a smile, were of the color and sweetness of a ripe cherry. She had a complexion that made the tanned and ruddy skin of the Tonto girls look coarse by comparison. She had an additional advantage over them by being daintily and stylishly dressed, her Eastern gowns showing something of her pretty round arms and white neck. But Kitty’s superlative charm lay in her eyes — in the remarkable fact of their variance, for one was blue and the other hazel — and of their strangely contrasting beauty. As it was undoubtedly a fact that Kitty Mains could look at a youth with different kinds of eyes, so it seemed that she could look with two kinds of natures, one sweet, wistful, appealing, and the other a dancing devil.
There was not the slightest doubt that she had heard all about Jake and Verde before they were introduced to her; and very little doubt of her curious and divided interest. No good angel was hovering near these raw and impressionable young men to warn them that Kitty Mains was an unconscious and instinctive flirt, an insatiably greedy little soul who lived on love and had never yet returned it, whose nature would never allow her to brook such a beautiful bond of brotherly affection such as that which long had bound Jake and Verde so closely together. She had the animal instinct that either garners for herself or destroys.
Out of her multiplicity of partners she found several whom she could exchange or desert for Jake and Verde. So in time they got to dance with her. The other girls present already knew, if Jake and Verde did not know, what had happened.
Kitty was as different to each as were her two eyes and two natures. Verde she tormented with that dancing little demon, tantalizing him, courting him with a running challenge of talk wholly new to him and utterly irresistible, always escaping from his eager arm yet continually drawing him on. Jake she entwined as if she were a clinging vine. She had little to say to this quiet, lonely, backwoods boy. But she gave him that shy, sweet, wistful blue eye, and yielded her soft form to the dance, so that her fragrant hair brushed his lips.
Jake and Verde left the dance in the gray hours of the morning, only when there seemed no more hope to get another dance with Kitty. They rode out under the dark blue dome of sky with its mantle of white stars. They did not feel the nipping, frosty air. They raved and babbled like two silly lads over the charms of the new girl and always ended with praising the two different eyes — the blue and the hazel — that were so sweet, so strange, so beautiful.
They rode off the highway into the trail through the lonely forest, under the dark pines, and they still talked on, raving over the charms of the new girl from St. Louis, each trying to outdo the other in the extravagance of his praises. But at last they fell silent.
Deeper and higher into the forest land they rode, while the first flush of dawn changed the steely sky to rose over the dark fringed canyon rim under which they lived. The rose turned to gold, and burst into the rising glory of the sun.
It was like the thing that had as suddenly burst in their own hearts.
All this happened to Jake and Verde along about the end of September, just at the beginning of the golden autumn season.
At first they found time to ride into Tonto Flat together. Then Jake made an excuse to go alone one day, while Verde was off somewhere on the range. When the next dance came around, it was Jake who was the proud escort of Kitty Mains.
Verde did not know what to make of the matter, particularly of his conflicting emotions. It hurt that Jake had not confided in him for the first time in his life. He went to the dance alone, silent and troubled. Kitty gave him more dances than she had reserved for Jake. This was contrary to the custom of the backwoods, for the escort always looked after his partner’s dances, and took them all himself if he chose. Jake would have been generous, but he was not permitted to choose, and he found himself lucky to get the few she deigned to give him. Thus it was that Jake had the honor of escorting this captivating and willful damsel, but Verde received most of her dances and the most dazzling of her smiles.
The next week the first rift appeared in the perfect relationship that had existed so long between these more than brothers. They did not yet understand what was taking place. But they did not ride together, nor work, nor hunt together. Verde was gone from home for two days, and returned by way of Tonto Flat, obviously with good reason to be exultant. And it was he who took the bewildering Miss Kitty to the next dance, where his triumph was all short-lived, for he had to suffer the same treatment she had accorded Jake on the previous occasion.
This triangle affair had now become the talk of the Tonto Basin. Never had the dances been so largely attended; and a girl would have had to be vain indeed not to be satisfied with Kitty Main’s conquest of the Dunto
n boys.
They neglected their fall work to such an extent that Dunton took them to task. But his unfamiliar and rude criticism only acted like burning embers upon naked flesh. Mrs. Dunton was too wise to say anything, but she grew more troubled as the days passed. The young men of the Tonto awaited with keen zest and wild speculation the inevitable fight. The young women, aside from natural jealousy and resentment, did not enjoy the strained situation.
Two more dances, one of which Kitty did not attend at all, leaving it a total loss for the lovesick twain, and the other to which she went with young Stillwell, brought matters to a climax between Jake and Verde.
They grew estranged, a feeling which found expression in a desire to be alone rather than in an open break. Their very avoidance of each other’s company widened the spiritual gulf that grew wider between them. Because of their long and beautiful companionship, anyone might have imagined that they would talk the matter over in a frank, manly way and decided to go to Kitty together and make her choose between them. But the very intensity of their feelings precluded that. They were in the grip of something beyond their experience.
Everything in the Tonto, according to the old backwoodsmen, presaged one of the long, lingering, late falls. These Indian summer seasons were welcomed by the pioneers. They made preparation for winter less arduous and meant that the winter would be shorter. But sometimes a late fall would end with a terrific storm, and that was always bad. Severe storms up under the rim were liable to destroy much of the improvement accomplished during the summer, not to mention the loss of stock.
The hard frosts did not come; the rains held off; the leaves changed color so slowly that the wonderful golden and scarlet and purple blaze of the canyons did not arrive at its fullness of beauty and fire until toward the end of October. The wild denizens of the forest gave no signs of the approach of winter. Ordinarily the deer and turkeys would be down off the mountain; the acorns would be ripe, the trails would be colorful with fallen leaves; the bears would be fat and “located”, as old Dunton would call it. Over all the wilderness lay a drowsy, slumberous sense of waiting. A deep sighing breath soughed through the pine forest. The squirrels delayed their cutting of spruce cones, so that as yet that sure sign of early snows, the thud of dropping cones, did not disturb the peaceful solitude. The elk had not begun to bugle, the jays to squall, the wolves to mourn.
But passion, once awakened in Jake and Verde and at last realized, did not wait for the slow ripening of nature’s fruitful season.
No Tonto youths ever let the autumn leaves heap round their long-spurred riding boots in the affairs of heart. They stormed the citadel and were seldom gentle about it. Jake and Verde had magnified in them all the elements of this primitive rockbounded wilderness. They never rode to Tonto Flat together any more, but there was not one of the closing mellow days of October in which they did not ride to Kitty Mains’ door. She found herself caught in her own devious toils. This fierce rivalry between two savage men was something new even to her experience. It frightened her.
For weeks the dances had been held at Tonto Flat and Green Valley, which were more accessible to the majority of Tonto Basin natives than the big log schoolhouse in the forest at the foot of the mountain slope. Here, in the years gone by, had taken place the important dances which had made history for the Tonto; and always the last dance of each season.
November came, with its still, blue-hazed mornings, and its warm, lazy, golden afternoons. But there seemed to be something exciting in the air, a cool breath in the silent forest. The deer had begun to range down from the heights.
Jake and Verde each had long solicited the honor of escorting Kitty Mains to this last dance of the season. In this instance they had given Kitty the privilege of choosing between them. She kept them waiting for her reply. Perhaps it was hard for her to make a decision — to show the Tonto people her preference. Perhaps she could not make up her mind which man she wanted to make happy and which she must hurt. Then perhaps she was afraid of this situation which she herself had brought about. In the end, and late in the day, she refused them both. It was probably the only instance, since her arrival at Tonto Flat, that she showed any strength of character.
On the day of this dance Jake came in from the woods to find Verde sitting aimlessly in the sun out by the log barn.
“Verde,” he said, “Kitty sent me word late — she won’t go with me tonight.”
“Same here, Jake,” replied Verde dejectedly.
“She’s going with Ben Stillwell.”
“No!”
“Sure. I heard so this mawnin’.”
“Who told you?”
“I was down to the mesa an’ dropped in on the Browns. They had all the latest news. Tuck had just come home from town.”
“How do you take this snub of Kitty’s?”
“Me? I’m not takin’ it at all,” rejoined Jake darkly. “Reckon it’s sort of a double-jointed slight. Kitty’s too smart an’ good to hurt one of us.”
“I wonder.”
“Reckon you savvy how she’s upset you an’ me?” asked Jake with eyes averted.
“Sure. But she cain’t be blamed for that. We only got ourselves to blame.”
“Hell of a mess!” mumbled Jake, and stood silent awhile, as if there was much to say, only he did not know what or how. These boys had not thought of each other for weeks. They were almost strangers now.
The chill, melancholy twilight had settled down over the Tonto schoolhouse when the first riders and wagons arrived. The November wind moaned through the pines. It bore an ominous note. A low murmur of the swift creek rose from the dark ravine. Voices, a girl’s laugh, the crack of iron-shod hoofs on stone echoed through the forest.
Fires were built, one outside near the great pile of wood cut for this occasion, and another in the stove in one corner of the large, empty, barnlike schoolroom. The school benches had been arranged around the walls. Half a dozen lamps emitted an uncertain, dim yellow flare.
Rapidly then the Tonto folk began to arrive, mostly on horseback, but many in wagons, buggies, buckboards. Soon a score or more of riotous children were making merry in the schoolroom. By seven o’clock there were over a hundred folk present, standing, talking, waiting, with more coming all the time.
Every time some newcomers entered the building there would be a stir and a buzz followed by hearty greetings. But when young Stillwell arrived, spick and span in his dark suit, and pale with excitement, leading a slender young woman wrapped in a fur coat, there was sudden cessation of sound.
They were not greeted until they reached the stove, and then a marked restraint seemed to attend the elders at least.
Kitty was cold, and said so in her sweet high treble. Stillwell removed her coat, to disclose her all in white, dainty and alluring, a girl for the backwoodsmen to feast their eyes upon, and over whom the women shook their heads silent and dubious.
But soon the old fiddler arrived with his fiddle, and the dance that would last till daylight was under way. The screaming children, darting among the dancers, were all that kept this annual festivity from being a strange, solemn affair. The young people took their dancing most seriously. There was no shyness, no immodesty, no ranting around, no loud talking, no forwardness; yet a blind man could have sensed that this was a courting business. Round and round the couples swayed in a moving circle, not ungraceful, not without rhythm, the young men with intent look and changeless faces; the girls rapt, absorbed; while the older folk looked on complacently and contentedly and the children played till from sheer exhaustion they fell asleep in the corner behind the stove, where blankets had been laid for them.
Jake and Verde rode down to the harvest dance together, though as uncommunicative as if miles of trail separated them. It was late when they reached the clearing and heard the fiddle and the steady shuffle of many feet. They unsaddled and blanketed their horses. As they approached the big outdoor fire to hold cold hands out to the blaze, the music ceased, and the shuffle
of sliding feet changed, and there followed a merry roar of voices. Couples by the dozen emerged from the school-house, some to pause by the fire, and others to wander off under the great solemn pines, close together, holding hands, whispering.
It was Jake who first confronted Kitty to ask her for a dance. She was flushed, lovely, nervous, yet sincerely glad to see him.
“I’ve saved three, Jake,” she replied, looking up to him with her strange eyes. “One for you and one for Verde — and another for you both to—”
‘To fight over, huh?” he drawled. “Well, mebbe it won’t come to that. An’ Kitty, I’m takin’ my dance out in talkin’.”
“Oh, no, Jake. That’ll spoil the whole evening for me,” she pouted.
“Hope not. Anyway it goes.”
In due time, when his dance came, Jake unceremoniously drew Kitty away from her admirers, and wrapping her in her coat, he led her out under the white cold stars, into the shadow of the pines. Here he took her little hands and drew her close.
“Kitty, this cain’t go on any longer,” he said.
“What?” she asked, trying to draw away.
“Why this fast an’ loose business... You’ve kissed me, haven’t you?”
“Well, no — not exactly,” she demurred.
“Yes, you have. Anyway it was enough to let me kiss you — which is a fact as sure as Gawd looks down out of those stars on us. An’ you swore you loved me.”
“Of course I love you, Jake,” she murmured, again her old capricious self, yet as if in earnest for once.
“That’s tellin’ me again, Kitty dear. That’s the fast of it. But on the other hand you’ve denied it, flouted me, hurt me. That’s the loose of it... Wal, it cain’t go on any longer.”