The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  Whetstone was a conquered beast, beyond any man’s doubt. He stood with flaring nostrils, scooping in his breath, not a dry hair on him, not a dash of vinegar in his veins.

  “Where’s Jim?” the Duke inquired.

  “Comin’,” Taterleg replied, waving his hand afield.

  “What’s he doin’ out there—where’s he been?” the Duke inquired, a puzzled look in his face, searching their sober countenances for his answer.

  “He thought you—”

  “Let him do his own talkin’, kid,” said Siwash, cutting off the cowboy’s explanation.

  Siwash looked at the Duke shrewdly, his head cocked to one side like a robin listening for a worm.

  “What outfit was you with before you started out sellin’ them tooth-puller-can-opener machines, son?” he inquired.

  “Outfit? What kind of an outfit?”

  “Ranch, innercence; what range was you ridin’ on?”

  “I never rode any range, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Well, where in the name of mustard did you learn to ride?”

  “I used to break range horses for five dollars a head at the Kansas City Stockyards. That was a good while ago; I’m all out of practice now.”

  “Yes, and I bet you can throw a rope, too.”

  “Nothing to speak of.”

  “Nothing to speak of! Yes, I’ll bet you nothing to speak of!”

  Jim didn’t stop at the corral to turn in his horse, but came clattering into camp, madder for the race that the Duke had led him in ignorance of his pursuit, as every man could see. He flung himself out of the saddle with a flip like a bird taking to the wing, his spurs cutting the ground as he came over to where Lambert stood.

  “Maybe you can ride my horse, you damn granger, but you can’t ride me!” he said.

  He threw off his vest as he spoke, that being his only superfluous garment, and bowed his back for a fight. Lambert looked at him with a flush of indignant contempt spreading in his face.

  “You don’t need to get sore about it; I only took you up at your own game,” he said.

  “No circus-ringer’s goin’ to come in here and beat me out of my horse. You’ll either put him back in that corral or you’ll chaw leather with me!”

  “I’ll put him back in the corral when I’m ready, but I’ll put him back as mine. I won him on your own bet, and it’ll take a whole lot better man than you to take him away from me.”

  In the manner of youth and independence, Lambert got hotter with every word, and after that there wasn’t much room for anything else to be said on either side. They mixed it, and they mixed it briskly, for Jim’s contempt for a man who wore a hat like that supplied the courage that had been drained from him when he was disarmed.

  There was nothing epic in that fight, nothing heroic at all. It was a wildcat struggle in the dust, no more science on either side than nature put into their hands at the beginning. But they surely did kick up a lot of dust. It would have been a peaceful enough little fight, with a handshake at the end and all over in an hour, very likely, if Jim hadn’t managed to get out his knife when he felt himself in for a trimming.

  It was a mean-looking knife, with a buck-horn handle and a four-inch blade that leaped open on pressure of a spring. Its type was widely popular all over the West in those days, but one of them would be almost a curiosity now. But Jim had it out, anyhow, lying on his back with the Duke’s knee on his ribs, and was whittling away before any man could raise a hand to stop him.

  The first slash split the Duke’s cheek for two inches just below his eye; the next tore his shirt sleeve from shoulder to elbow, grazing the skin as it passed. And there somebody kicked Jim’s elbow and knocked the knife out of his hand.

  “Let him up, Duke,” he said.

  Lambert released the strangle hold that he had taken on Jim’s throat and looked up. It was Spence, standing there with his horse behind him. He laid his hand on Lambert’s shoulder.

  “Let him up, Duke,” he said again.

  Lambert got up, bleeding a cataract. Jim bounced to his feet like a spring, his hand to his empty holster, a look of dismay in his blanching face.

  “That’s your size!” Spence said, kicking the knife beyond Jim’s reach. “That’s the kind of a low-down cuss you always was. This man’s our guest, and when you pull a knife on him you pull it on me!”

  “You know I ain’t got a gun on me, you—”

  “Git it, you sneakin’ houn’!”

  Jim looked round for Taterleg.

  “Where’s my gun? you greasy potslinger!”

  “Give it to him, whoever’s got it.”

  Taterleg produced it. Jim began backing off as soon as he had it in his hand, watching Spence alertly. Lambert leaped between them.

  “Gentlemen, don’t go to shootin’ over a little thing like this!” he begged.

  Taterleg came between them, also, and Siwash, quite blocking up the fairway.

  “Now, boys, put up your guns; this is Sunday, you know,” Siwash said.

  “Give me room, men!” Spence commanded, in voice that trembled with passion, with the memory of old quarrels, old wrongs, which this last insult to the camp’s guest gave the excuse for wiping out. There was something in his tone not to be denied; they fell out of his path as if the wind had blown them. Jim fired, his elbow against his ribs.

  Too confident of his own speed, or forgetting that Wilder already had his weapon out, Spence crumpled at the knees, toppled backward, fell. His pistol, half-drawn, dropped from the holster and lay at his side. Wilder came a step nearer and fired another shot into the fallen man’s body, dead as he must have known him to be. He ran on to his horse, mounted, and rode away.

  Some of the others hurried to the wagon after their guns. Lambert, for a moment shocked to the heart by the sudden horror of the tragedy, bent over the body of the man who had taken up his quarrel without even knowing the merits of it, or whose fault lay at the beginning. A look into his face was enough to tell that there was nothing within the compass of this earth that could bring back life to that strong, young body, struck down in a breath like a broken vase. He looked up. Jim Wilder was bending in the saddle as he rode swiftly away, as if he expected them to shoot. A great fire of resentment for this man’s destructive deed swept over him, hotter than the hot blood wasting from his wounded cheek. The passion of vengeance wrenched his joints, his hand shook and grew cold, as he stooped again to unfasten the belt about his friend’s dead body.

  Armed with the weapon that had been drawn a fraction of a second too late, drawn in the chivalrous defense of hospitality, the high courtesy of an obligation to a stranger, Lambert mounted the horse that had come to be his at the price of this tragedy, and galloped in pursuit of the fleeing man.

  Some of the young men were hurrying to the corral, belting on their guns as they ran to fetch their horses and join the pursuit. Siwash called them back.

  “Leave it to him, boys; it’s his by rights,” he said.

  Taterleg stood looking after the two riders, the hindmost drawing steadily upon the leader, and stood looking so until they disappeared in the timber at the base of the hills.

  “My God!” said he. And again, after a little while: “My God!”

  It was dusk when Lambert came back, leading Jim Wilder’s horse. There was blood on the empty saddle.

  CHAPTER IV

  “AND SPEAK IN PASSING”

  The events of that Sunday introduced Lambert into the Bad Lands and established his name and fame. Within three months after going to work for the Syndicate ranch he was known for a hundred miles around as the man who had broken Jim Wilder’s outlaw and won the horse by that unparalleled feat.

  That was the prop to his fame—that he had broken Jim Wilder’s outlaw. Certainly he was admired and
commended for the unhesitating action he had taken in avenging the death of his friend, but in that he had done only what was expected of any man worthy the name. Breaking the outlaw was a different matter entirely. In doing that he had accomplished what was believed to be beyond the power of any living man.

  According to his own belief, his own conscience, Lambert had made a bad start. A career that had its beginning in contentions and violence, enough of it crowded into one day to make more than the allotment of an ordinary life, could not terminate with any degree of felicity and honor. They thought little of killing a man in that country, it seemed; no more than a perfunctory inquiry, to fulfill the letter of the law, had been made by the authorities into Jim Wilder’s death.

  While it relieved him to know that the law held his justification to be ample, there was a shadow following him which he could not evade in any of the hilarious diversions common to those wild souls of the range.

  It troubled him that he had killed a man, even in a fair fight in the open field with the justification of society at his back. In his sleep it harried him with visions; awake, it oppressed him like a sorrow, or the memory of a shame. He became solemn and silent as a chastened man, seldom smiling, laughing never.

  When he drank with his companions in the little saloon at Misery, the loading station on the railroad, he took his liquor as gravely as the sacrament; when he raced them he rode with face grim as an Indian, never whooping in victory, never swearing in defeat.

  He had left even his own lawful and proper name behind him with his past. Far and near he was known as the Duke of Chimney Butte, shortened in cases of direct address to “Duke.” He didn’t resent it, rather took a sort of grim pride in it, although he felt at times that it was one more mark of his surrender to circumstances whose current he might have avoided at the beginning by the exercise of a proper man’s sense.

  A man was expected to drink a good deal of the overardent spirits which were sold at Misery. If he could drink without becoming noisy, so much the more to his credit, so much higher he stood in the estimation of his fellows as a copper-bottomed sport of the true blood. The Duke could put more of that notorious whisky under cover, and still contain himself, than any man they ever had seen in Misery. The more he drank the glummer he became, but he never had been known either to weep or curse.

  Older men spoke to him with respect, younger ones approached him with admiration, unable to understand what kind of a safety-valve a man had on his mouth that would keep his steam in when that Misery booze began to sizzle in his pipes. His horse was a subject of interest almost equal to himself.

  Under his hand old Whetstone—although not more than seven—had developed unexpected qualities. When the animal’s persecution ceased, his perversity fled. He grew into a well-conditioned creature, sleek of coat, beautiful of tail as an Arab barb, bright of eye, handsome to behold. His speed and endurance were matters of as much note as his outlawry had been but a little while before, and his intelligence was something almost beyond belief.

  Lambert had grown exceedingly fond of him, holding him more in the estimation of a companion than the valuation of a dumb creature of burden. When they rode the long watches at night he talked to him, and Whetstone would put back his sensitive ear and listen, and toss his head in joyful appreciation of his master’s confidence and praise.

  Few horses had beaten Whetstone in a race since he became the Duke’s property. It was believed that none on that range could do it if the Duke wanted to put him to his limit. It was said that the Duke lost only such races as he felt necessary to the continuance of his prosperity.

  Racing was one of the main diversions when the cowboys from the surrounding ranches met at Misery on a Sunday afternoon, or when loading cattle there. Few trains stopped at Misery, a circumstance resented by the cowboys, who believed the place should be as important to all the world as it was to them. To show their contempt for this aloof behavior they usually raced the trains, frequently outrunning those westward bound as they labored up the long grade.

  Freight trains especially they took delight in beating, seeing how it nettled the train crews. There was nothing more delightful in any program of amusement that a cowboy could conceive than riding abreast of a laboring freight engine, the sulky engineer crowding every pound of power into the cylinders, the sooty fireman humping his back throwing in coal. Only one triumph would have been sweeter—to outrun the big passenger train from Chicago with the brass-fenced car at the end.

  No man ever had done that yet, although many had tried. The engineers all knew what to expect on a Sunday afternoon when they approached Misery, where the cowboys came through the fence and raced the trains on the right-of-way. A long, level stretch of soft gray earth, set with bunches of grass here and there, began a mile beyond the station, unmarred by steam-shovel or grader’s scraper. A man could ride it with his eyes shut; a horse could cover it at its best.

  That was the racing ground over which they had contended with the Chicago-Puget Sound flier for many years, and a place which engineers and firemen prepared to pass quickly while yet a considerable distance away. It was a sight to see the big engine round the curve below, its plume of smoke rising straight for twenty feet, streaming back like a running girl’s hair, the cowboys all set in their saddles, waiting to go.

  Engineers on the flier were not so sulky about it, knowing that the race was theirs before it was run. Usually they leaned out of the window and urged the riders on with beckoning, derisive hand, while the fireman stood by grinning, confident of the head of steam he had begun storing for this emergency far down the road.

  Porters told passengers about these wild horsemen in advance, and eager faces lined the windows on that side of the cars as they approached Misery, and all who could pack on the end of the observation car assembled there. In spite of its name, Misery was quite a comfortable break in the day’s monotony for travelers on a Sunday afternoon.

  Amid the hardships and scant diversions of this life, Lambert spent his first winter in the Bad Lands, drinking in the noisy revels at Misery, riding the long, bitter miles back to the ranch, despising himself for being so mean and low. It was a life in which a man’s soul would either shrink to nothing or expand until it became too large to find contentment within the horizon of such an existence.

  Some of them expanded up to the size for ranch owners, superintendents, bosses; stopped there, set in their mold. Lambert never had heard of one stretching so wide that he was drawn out of himself entirely, his eyes fixed on the far light of a nobler life. He liked to imagine a man so inspired out of the lonely watches, the stormy rides, the battle against blizzard and night.

  This train of thought had carried him away that gentle spring day as he rode to Misery. He resented the thought that he might have to spend his youth as a hired servant in this rough occupation, unremunerative below the hope of ever gaining enough to make a start in business for himself. There was no romance in it, for all that had been written, no beautiful daughter of the ranch owner to be married, and a fortune gained with her.

  Daughters there must be, indeed, among the many stockholders in that big business, but they were not available in the Bad Lands. The superintendent of the ranch had three or four, born to that estate, full of loud laughter, ordinary as baled hay. A man would be a loser in marrying such as they, even with a fortune ready made.

  What better could that rough country offer? People are no gentler than their pursuits, no finer than the requirements of their lives. Daughters of the Bad Lands, such as he had seen of them in the wives to whom he once had tried to sell the All-in-One, and the superintendent’s girls were not intended for any other life. As for him, if he had to live it out there, with the shadow of a dead man at his heels, he would live it alone. So he thought, going on his way to Misery, where there was to be racing that afternoon, and a grand effort to keep up with the Chicago flier.
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  Lambert never had taken part in that longstanding competition. It appeared to him a senseless expenditure of horseflesh, a childish pursuit of the wind. Yet, foolish as it was, he liked to watch them. There was a thrill in the sweeping start of twenty or thirty horsemen that warmed a man, making him feel as if he must whoop and wave his hat. There was a belief alive among them that some day a man would come who would run the train neck and neck to the depot platform.

  Not much distinction in it, even so, said he. But it set him musing and considering as he rode, his face quickening out of its somber cloud. A little while after his arrival at Misery the news went round that the Duke was willing at last to enter the race against the flier.

  True to his peculiarities, the Duke had made conditions. He was willing to race, but only if everybody else would keep out of it and give him a clear and open field. Taterleg Wilson, the bow-legged camp cook of the Syndicate, circulated himself like a petition to gain consent to this unusual proposal.

  It was asking a great deal of those men to give up their established diversion, no matter how distinguished the man in whose favor they were requested to stand aside. That Sunday afternoon race had become as much a fixed institution in the Bad Lands as the railroad itself. With some argument, some bucking and snorting, a considerable cost to Taterleg for liquor and cigars, they agreed to it. Taterleg said he could state, authoritatively, that this would be the Duke’s first, last, and only ride against the flier. It would be worth money to stand off and watch it, he said, and worth putting money on the result. When, where, would a man ever have a chance to see such a race again? Perhaps never in his life.