by Zane Grey
The pursued was out of sight when Lambert gained the hilltop, the pursuer just disappearing behind a growth of stunted brushwood in the winding dry valley beyond. He pushed after them, his anxiety increasing, hoping that he might overtake Vesta before she came within range of her enemy. Even should he succeed in this, he was at fault for some way of stopping her in her passionate design.
He could not disarm her without bringing her wrath down on himself, or attempt to persuade her without rousing her suspicion that he was leagued with her destructive neighbors. On the other hand, the fence-cutting girl would believe that he had wittingly joined in an unequal and unmanly pursuit. A man’s dilemma between the devil and the deep water would be simple compared to his.
All this he considered as he galloped along, leaving the matter of keeping the trail mainly to his horse. He emerged from the hemming brushwood, entering a stretch of hard tableland where the parched grass was red, the earth so hard that a horse made no hoofprint in passing. Across this he hurried in a ferment of fear that he would come too late, and down a long slope where sage grew again, the earth dry and yielding about its unlovely clumps.
Here he discovered that he had left too much to his horse. The creature had laid a course to suit himself, carrying him off the trail of those whom he sought in such breathless state. He stopped, looking round him to fix his direction, discovering to his deep vexation that Whetstone had veered from the course that he had laid for him into the south, and was heading toward the river.
On again in the right direction, swerving sharply in the hope that he would cut the trail. So for a mile or more, in dusty, headlong race, coming then to the rim of a bowl-like valley and the sound of running shots.
Lambert’s heart contracted in a paroxysm of fear for the lives of both those flaming combatants as he rode precipitately into the little valley. The shooting had ceased when he came into the clear and pulled up to look for Vesta.
The next second the two girls swept into sight. Vesta had not only overtaken her enemy, but had ridden round her and cut off her retreat. She was driving her back toward the spot where Lambert stood, shooting at her as she fled, with what seemed to him a cruel and deliberate hand.
CHAPTER XIII
“NO HONOR IN HER BLOOD”
Vesta was too far behind the other girl for anything like accurate shooting with a pistol, but Lambert feared that a chance shot might hit, with the most melancholy consequences for both parties concerned. No other plan presenting, he rode down with the intention of placing himself between them.
Now the Kerr girl had her gun out, and had turned, offering battle. She was still a considerable distance beyond him, with what appeared from his situation to be some three or four hundred yards between the combatants, a safe distance for both of them if they would keep it. But Vesta had no intention of making it a long-range duel. She pulled her horse up and reloaded her gun, then spurred ahead, holding her fire.
Lambert saw all this as he swept down between them like an eagle, old Whetstone hardly touching the ground. He cut the line between them not fifty feet from the Kerr girl’s position, as Vesta galloped up.
He held up his hand in an appeal for peace between them. Vesta charged up to him as he shifted to keep in the line of their fire, coming as if she would ride him down and go on to make an end of that chapter of the long-growing feud. The Kerr girl waited, her pistol hand crossed on the other, with the deliberate coolness of one who had no fear of the outcome.
Vesta waved him aside, her face white as ash, and attempted to dash by. He caught her rein and whirled her horse sharply, bringing her face to face with him, her revolver lifted not a yard from his breast.
For a moment Lambert read in her eyes an intention that made his heart contract. He held his breath, waiting for the shot. A moment; the film of deadly passion that obscured her eyes like a smoke cleared, the threatening gun faltered, drooped, was lowered. He twisted in his saddle and commanded the Kerr girl with a swing of the arm to go.
She started her horse in a bound, and again the soul-obscuring curtain of murderous hate fell over Vesta’s eyes. She lifted her gun as Lambert, with a quick movement, clasped her wrist.
“For God’s sake, Vesta, keep your soul clean!” he said.
His voice was vibrant with a deep earnestness that made him as solemn as a priest. She stared at him with widening eyes, something in his manner and voice that struck to reason through the insulation of her anger. Her fingers relaxed on the weapon; she surrendered it into his hand.
A little while she sat staring after the fleeing girl, held by what thoughts he could not guess. Presently the rider whisked behind a point of sage-dotted hill and was gone. Vesta lifted her hands slowly and pressed them to her eyes, shivering as if struck by a chill. Twice or thrice this convulsive shudder shook her. She bowed her head a little, the sound of a sob behind her pressing hands.
Lambert put her pistol back into the holster which dangled on her thigh from the cartridge-studded belt round her pliant, slender waist.
“Let me take you home, Vesta,” he said.
She withdrew her hands, discovering tears on her cheeks. Saying nothing, she started to retrace the way of that mad, murderous race. She did not resent his familiar address, if conscious of it at all, for he spoke with the sympathetic tenderness one employs toward a suffering child.
They rode back to the fence without a word between them. When they came to the cut wires he rode through as if he intended to continue on with her to the ranchhouse, six or seven miles away.
“I can go on alone, Mr. Lambert,” she said.
“My tools are down here a mile or so. I’ll have to get them to fix this hole.”
A little way again in silence. Although he rode slowly she made no effort to separate from his company and go her way alone. She seemed very weary and depressed, her sensitive face reflecting the strain of the past hour. It had borne on her with the wearing intensity of sleepless nights.
“I’m tired of this fighting and contending for evermore!” she said.
Lambert offered no comment. There was little, indeed, that he could frame on his tongue to fit the occasion, it seemed to him, still under the shadow of the dreadful thing that he had averted but a little while before. There was a feeling over him that he had seen this warm, breathing woman, with the best of her life before her, standing on the brink of a terrifying chasm into which one little movement would have precipitated her beyond the help of any friendly hand.
She did not realize what it meant to take the life of another, even with full justification at her hand; she never had felt that weight of ashes above the heart, or the presence of the shadow that tinctured all life with its somber gloom. It was one thing for the law to absolve a slayer; another to find absolution in his own conscience. It was a strain that tried a man’s mind. A woman like Vesta Philbrook might go mad under the unceasing pressure and chafing of that load.
When they came to where his tools and wire lay beside the fence, she stopped. Lambert dismounted in silence, tied a coil of wire to his saddle, strung the chain of the wire-stretcher on his arm.
“Did you know her before you came here?” she asked, with such abruptness, such lack of preparation for the question, that it seemed a fragment of what had been running through her mind.
“You mean—?”
“That woman, Grace Kerr.”
“No, I never knew her.”
“I thought maybe you’d met her, she’s been away at school somewhere—Omaha, I think. Were you talking to her long?”
“Only a little while.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I thought,” said he, slowly, his face turned from her, his eyes on something miles away, “that she was a girl something could be made out of if she was taken hold of the right way. I mean,” facing her earnestly, �
�that she might be reasoned out of this senseless barbarity, this raiding and running away.”
Vesta shook her head. “The devil’s in her; she was born to make trouble.”
“I got her to half agree to a truce,” said he reluctantly, his eyes studying the ground, “but I guess it’s all off now.”
“She wouldn’t keep her word with you,” she declared with great earnestness, a sad, rather than scornful earnestness, putting out her hand as if to touch his shoulder. Half way her intention seemed to falter; her hand fell in eloquent expression of her heavy thoughts.
“Of course, I don’t know.”
“There’s no honor in the Kerr blood. Kerr was given many a chance by father to come up and be a man, and square things between them, but he didn’t have it in him. Neither has she. Her only brother was killed at Glendora after he’d shot a man in the back.”
“It ought to have been settled, long ago, without all this fighting. But if people refuse to live by their neighbors and be decent, a good man among them has a hard time. I don’t blame you, Vesta, for the way you feel.”
“I’d have been willing to let this feud die, but she wouldn’t drop it. She began cutting the fence every summer as soon as I came home. She’s goaded me out of my senses, she’s put murder in my heart!”
“They’ve tried you almost past endurance, I know. But you’ve never killed anybody, Vesta. All there is here isn’t worth that price.”
“I know it now,” she said, wearily.
“Go home and hang your gun up, and let it stay there. As long as I’m here I’ll do the fighting when there’s any to be done.”
“You didn’t help me a little while ago. All you did was for her.”
“It was for both of you,” he said, rather indignant that she should take such an unjust view of his interference.
“You didn’t ride in front of her and stop her from shooting me!”
“I came to you first—you saw that.”
Lambert mounted, turned his horse to go back and mend the fence. She rode after him, impulsively.
“I’m going to stop fighting, I’m going to take my gun off and put it away,” she said.
He thought she never had appeared so handsome as at that moment, a soft light in her eyes, the harshness of strain and anger gone out of her face. He offered her his hand, the only expression of his appreciation for her generous decision that came to him in the gratefulness of the moment. She took it as if to seal a compact between them.
“You’ve come back to be a woman again,” he said, hardly realizing how strange his words might seem to her, expressing the one thought that came to the front.
“I suppose I didn’t act much like a woman out there a while ago,” she admitted, her old expression of sadness darkening in her eyes.
“You were a couple of wildcats,” he told her. “Maybe we can get on here now without fighting, but if they come crowding it on let us men-folks take care of it for you; it’s no job for a girl.”
“I’m going to put the thought of it out of my mind, feud, fences, everything—and turn it all over to you. It’s asking a lot of you to assume, but I’m tired to the heart.”
“I’ll do the best by you I can as long as I’m here,” he promised, simply. He started on; she rode forward with him.
“If she comes back again, what will you do?”
“I’ll try to show her where she’s wrong, and maybe I can get her to hang up her gun, too. You ought to be friends, it seems to me—a couple of neighbor girls like you.”
“We couldn’t be that,” she said, loftily, her old coldness coming over her momentarily, “but if we can live apart in peace it will be something. Don’t trust her, Mr. Lambert, don’t take her word for anything. There’s no honor in the Kerr blood; you’ll find that out for yourself. It isn’t in one of them to be even a disinterested friend.”
There was nothing for him to say to this, spoken so seriously that it seemed almost a prophecy. He felt as if she had looked into the window of his heart and read his secret and, in her old enmity for this slim girl of the dangling braid of hair, was working subtly to raise a barrier of suspicion and distrust between them.
“I’ll go on home and quit bothering you,” she said.
“You’re no bother to me, Vesta; I like to have you along.”
She stopped, looked toward the place where she had lately ridden through the fence in vengeful pursuit of her enemy, her eyes inscrutable, her face sad.
“I never felt it so lonesome out here as it is today,” she said, and turned her horse, and left him.
He looked back more than once as he rode slowly along the fence, a mist before his perception that he could not pierce. What had come over Vesta to change her so completely in this little while? He believed she was entering the shadow of some slow-growing illness, which bore down her spirits in an uninterpreted foreboding of evil days to come.
What a pretty figure she made in the saddle, riding away from him in that slow canter; how well she sat, how she swayed at the waist as her nimble animal cut in and out among the clumps of sage. A mighty pretty girl, and as good as they grew them anywhere. It would be a calamity to have her sick. From the shoulder of the slope he looked back again. Pretty as any woman a man ever pictured in his dreams.
She passed out of sight without looking back, and there rose a picture in his thoughts to take her place, a picture of dark, defiant eyes, of telltale hair falling in betrayal of her disguise, as if discovering her secret to him who had a right to know.
The fancy pleased him; as he worked to repair the damage she had wrought, he smiled. How well his memory retained her, in her transition from anger to scorn, scorn to uneasy amazement, amazement to relief. Then she had smiled, and the recognition not owned in words but spoken in her eyes, had come.
Yes, she knew him; she recalled her challenge, his acceptance and victory. Even as she rode swiftly to obey him out of that mad encounter in the valley over there, she had owned in her quick act that she knew him, and trusted him as she sped away.
When he came to the place where she had ridden through, he pieced the wire and hooked the ends together, as he had told her he would do. He handled even the stubborn wire tenderly, as a man might the appurtenances to a rite. Perhaps he was linking their destinies in that simple act, he thought, sentimentally unreasonable; it might be that this spot would mark the second altar of his romance, even as the little station of Misery was lifted up in his heart as the shrine of its beginning.
There was blood on his knuckles where the vicious wire had torn him. He dashed it to the ground as a libation, smiling like one moonstruck, a flood of soft fancies making that bleak spot dear.
CHAPTER XIV
NOTICE IS SERVED
Taterleg was finding things easier on his side of the ranch. Nick Hargus was lying still, no hostile acts had been committed. This may have been due to the fierce and bristling appearance of Taterleg, as he humorously declared, or because Hargus was waiting reenforcements from the penal institutions of his own and surrounding states.
Taterleg had a good many nights to himself, as a consequence of the security which his grisly exterior had brought. These he spent at Glendora, mainly on the porch of the hotel in company of Alta Wood, chewing gum together as if they wove a fabric to bind their lives in adhesive amity to the end.
Lambert had a feeling of security for his line of fence, also, as he rode home on the evening of his adventurous day. He had left a note on the pieced wire reminding Grace Kerr of his request that she ease her spite by unhooking it there instead of cutting it in a new place. He also added the information that he would be there on a certain date to see how well she carried out his wish.
He wondered whether she would read his hope that she would be there at the same hour, or whether she might be afraid to risk Vesta P
hilbrook’s fury again. There was an eagerness in him for the hastening of the intervening time, a joyous lightness which tuned him to such harmony with the world that he sang as he rode.
Taterleg was going to Glendora that night. He pressed Lambert to join him.
“A man’s got to take a day off sometimes to rest his face and hands,” he argued. “Them fellers can’t run off any stock tonight, and if they do they can’t git very far away with ’em before we’d be on their necks. They know that; they’re as safe as if we had ’em where they belong.”
“I guess you’re right on that, Taterleg. I’ve got to go to town to buy me a pair of clothes, anyhow, so I’ll go you.”
Taterleg was as happy as a cricket, humming a tune as he went along. He had made liberal application of perfume to his handkerchief and mustache, and of barber’s pomatum to his hair. He had fixed his hat on carefully, for the protection of the cowlick that came down over his left eyebrow, and he could not be stirred beyond a trot all the way to Glendora for fear of damage that might result.
“I had a run-in with that feller the other night,” he said.
“What feller do you mean?”
“Jedlick, dern him.”
“You did? I didn’t notice any of your ears bit off.”
“No, we didn’t come to licks. He tried to horn in while me and Alta was out on the porch.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t have a show to do anything but hand him a few words. Alta she got me by the arm and drug me in the parlor and slammed the door. No use tryin’ to break away from that girl; she could pull a elephant away from his hay if she took a notion.”
“Didn’t Jedlick try to hang on?”