The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  The boat was half full of water. Nas Ta Bega scooped out great sheets of it with his hands. Shefford sprang to aid him, found the shovel, and plunged into the task. Slowly but surely they emptied the boat. And then Shefford saw that twilight had fallen. Joe was working the craft toward a narrow bank of sand, to which, presently, they came, and the Indian sprang out to moor to a rock.

  The fugitives went ashore and, weary and silent and drenched, they dropped in the warm sand.

  But Shefford could not sleep. The river kept him awake. In the distance it rumbled, low, deep, reverberating, and near at hand it was a thing of mutable mood. It moaned, whined, mocked, and laughed. It had the soul of a devil. It was a river that had cut its way to the bowels of the earth, and its nature was destructive. It harbored no life. Fighting its way through those dead walls, cutting and tearing and wearing, its heavy burden of silt was death, destruction, and decay. A silent river, a murmuring, strange, fierce, terrible, thundering river of the desert! Even in the dark it seemed to wear the hue of blood.

  All night long Shefford heard it, and toward the dark hours before dawn, when a restless, broken sleep came to him, his dreams were dreams of a river of sounds.

  All the beautiful sounds he knew and loved he heard—the sigh of the wind in the pines, the mourn of the wolf, the cry of the laughing-gull, the murmur of running brooks, the song of a child, the whisper of a woman. And there were the boom of the surf, the roar of the north wind in the forest, the roll of thunder. And there were the sounds not of earth—a river of the universe rolling the planets, engulfing the stars, pouring the sea of blue into infinite space.

  Night with its fitful dreams passed. Dawn lifted the ebony gloom out of the canyon and sunlight far up on the ramparts renewed Shefford’s spirit. He rose and awoke the others. Fay’s wistful smile still held its faith. They ate of the gritty, water-soaked food. Then they embarked. The current carried them swiftly down and out of hearing of the last rapid. The character of the river and the canyon changed. The current lessened to a slow, smooth, silent, eddying flow. The walls grew straight, sheer, gloomy, and vast. Shefford noted these features, but he was listening so hard for the roar of the next rapid that he scarcely appreciated them. All the fugitives were listening. Every bend in the canyon—and now the turns were numerous—might hold a rapid. Shefford strained his ears. He imagined the low, dull, strange rumble. He had it in his ears, yet there was the growing sensation of silence.

  “Shore this ’s a dead place,” muttered Lassiter.

  “She’s only slowed up for a bigger plunge,” replied Joe. “Listen! Hear that?”

  But there was no true sound, Joe only imagined what he expected and hated and dreaded to hear.

  Mile after mile they drifted through the silent gloom between those vast and magnificent walls. After the speed, the turmoil, the whirling, shrieking, thundering, the never-ceasing sound and change and motion of the rapids above, this slow, quiet drifting, this utter, absolute silence, these eddying stretches of still water below, worked strangely upon Shefford’s mind and he feared he was going mad.

  There was no change to the silence, no help for the slow drift, no lessening of the strain. And the hours of the day passed as moments, the sun crossed the blue gap above, the golden lights hung on the upper walls, the gloom returned, and still there was only the dead, vast, insupportable silence.

  There came bends where the current quickened, ripples widened, long lanes of little waves roughened the surface, but they made no sound.

  And then the fugitives turned through a V-shaped vent in the canyon. The ponderous walls sheered away from the river. There was space and sunshine, and far beyond this league-wide open rose vermilion-colored cliffs. A mile below the river disappeared in a dark, boxlike passage from which came a rumble that made Shefford’s flesh creep.

  The Mormon flung high his arms and let out the stentorian yell that had rolled down to the fugitives as they waited at the mouth of Nonnezoshe Boco. But now it had a wilder, more exultant note. Strange how he shifted his gaze to Fay Larkin!

  “Girl! Get up and look!” he called. “The Ferry! The Ferry!”

  Then he bent his brawny back over the steering-oar, and the clumsy craft slowly turned toward the left-hand shore, where a long, low bank of green willows and cottonwoods gave welcome relief to the eyes. Upon the opposite side of the river Shefford saw a boat, similar to the one he was in, moored to the bank.

  “Shore, if I ain’t losin’ my eyes, I seen an Injun with a red blanket,” said Lassiter.

  “Yes, Lassiter,” cried Shefford. “Look, Fay! Look, Jane! See! Indians—hogans—mustangs—there above the green bank!”

  The boat glided slowly shoreward. And the deep, hungry, terrible rumble of the remorseless river became something no more to dread.

  CHAPTER XX

  WILLOW SPRINGS

  Two days’ travel from the river, along the saw-toothed range of Echo Cliffs, stood Presbrey’s trading-post, a little red-stone square house in a green and pretty valley called Willow Springs.

  It was nearing the time of sunset—that gorgeous hour of color in the Painted Desert—when Shefford and his party rode down upon the post.

  The scene lacked the wildness characteristic of Kayenta or Red Lake. There were wagons and teams, white men and Indians, burros, sheep, lambs, mustangs saddled and unsaddled, dogs, and chickens. A young, sweet-faced woman stood in the door of the post and she it was who first sighted the fugitives. Presbrey was weighing bags of wool on a scale, and when she called he lazily turned, as if to wonder at her eagerness.

  Then he flung up his head, with its shock of heavy hair, in a start of surprise, and his florid face lost its lazy indolence to become wreathed in a huge smile.

  “Haven’t seen a white person in six months!” was his extraordinary greeting.

  An hour later Shefford, clean-shaven, comfortably clothed once more, found himself a different man; and when he saw Fay in white again, with a new and indefinable light shining through that old, haunting shadow in her eyes, then the world changed and he embraced perfect happiness.

  There was a dinner such as Shefford had not seen for many a day, and such as Fay had never seen, and that brought to Jane Withersteen’s eyes the dreamy memory of the bountiful feasts which, long years ago, had been her pride. And there was a story told to the curious trader and his kind wife—a story with its beginning back in those past years, of riders of the purple sage, of Fay Larkin as a child and then as a wild girl in Surprise Valley, of the flight down Nonnezoshe Boco an the canyon, of a great Mormon and a noble Indian.

  Presbrey stared with his deep-set eyes and wagged his tousled head and stared again; then with the quick perception of the practical desert man he said:

  “I’m sending teamsters in to Flagstaff tomorrow. Wife and I will go along with you. We’ve light wagons. Three days, maybe—or four—and we’ll be there.… Shefford, I’m going to see you marry Fay Larkin!”

  Fay and Jane and Lassiter showed strangely against this background of approaching civilization. And Shefford realized more than ever the loneliness and isolation and wildness of so many years for them.

  When the women had retired Shefford and the men talked a while. Then Joe Lake rose to stretch his big frame.

  “Friends, reckon I’m all in,” he said. “Good night.” In passing he laid a heavy hand on Shefford’s shoulder. “Well, you got out. I’ve only a queer notion how. But someone besides an Indian and a Mormon guided you out!… Be good to the girl.… Good-by, pard!”

  Shefford grasped the big hand and in the emotion of the moment did not catch the significance of Joe’s last words.

  Later Shefford stepped outside into the starlight for a few moments’ quiet walk and thought before he went to bed. It was a white night. The coyotes were yelping. The stars shone steadfast, bright, cold. Nas Ta Bega stalked
out of the shadow of the house and joined Shefford. They walked in silence. Shefford’s heart was too full for utterance and the Indian seldom spoke at any time. When Shefford was ready to go in Nas Ta Bega extended his hand.

  “Good-by—Bi Nai!” he said, strangely, using English and Navajo in what Shefford supposed to be merely good night. The starlight shone full upon the dark, inscrutable face of the Indian. Shefford bade him good night and then watched him stride away in the silver gloom.

  But next morning Shefford understood. Nas Ta Bega and Joe Lake were gone. It was a shock to Shefford. Yet what could he have said to either? Joe had shirked saying good-by to him and Fay. And the Indian had gone out of Shefford’s life as he had come into it.

  What these two men represented in Shefford’s uplift was too great for the present to define, but they and the desert that had developed them had taught him the meaning of life. He might fail often, since failure was the lot of his kind, but could he ever fail again in faith in man or God while he had mind to remember the Indian and the Mormon?

  Still, though he placed them on a noble height and loved them well, there would always abide with him a sorrow for the Mormon and a sleepless and eternal regret for that Indian on his lonely cedar slope with the spirits of his vanishing race calling him.

  * * * *

  Willow Springs appeared to be a lively place that morning. Presbrey was gay and his sweet-faced wife was excited. The teamsters were a jolly, whistling lot. And the lean mustangs kicked and bit at one another. The trader had brought out two light wagons for the trip, and, after the manner of desert men, desired to start at sunrise.

  Far across the Painted Desert towered the San Francisco peaks, black-timbered, blue-canyoned, purple-hazed, with white snow, like the clouds, around their summits.

  Jane Withersteen looked at the radiant Fay and lived again in her happiness. And at last excitement had been communicated to the old gun-man.

  “Shore we’re goin’ to live with Fay an’ John, an’ be near Venters an’ Bess, an’ see the blacks again, Jane.… An’ Venters will tell you, as he did me, how Wrangle run Black Star off his legs!”

  All connected with that early start was sweet, sad, hopeful.

  And so they rode away from Willow Springs, through the green fields of alfalfa and cotton wood, down the valley with its smoking hogans and whistling mustangs and scarlet-blanketed Indians, and out upon the bare, ridgy, colorful desert toward the rosy sunrise.

  EPILOGUE

  On the outskirts of a little town in Illinois there was a farm of rolling pasture-land. And here a beautiful meadow, green and red in clover, merged upon an orchard in the midst of which a brown-tiled roof showed above the trees.

  One afternoon in May a group of people, strangely agitated, walked down a shady lane toward the meadow.

  “Wal, Jane, I always knew we’d get a look at them hosses again—I shore knew,” Lassiter was saying in the same old, cool, careless drawl. But his clawlike hands shook a little.

  “Oh! will they know me?” asked Jane Withersteen, turning to a stalwart man—no other than the dark-faced Venters, her rider of other days.

  “Know you? I’ll bet they will,” replied Venters. “What do you say, Bess?”

  The shadow brightened in Bess’s somber blue eyes, as if his words had recalled her from a sad and memorable past.

  “Black Star will know her, surely,” replied Bess. “Sometimes he points his nose toward the west and watches as if he saw the purple slopes and smelt the sage of Utah! He has never forgotten. But Night has grown deaf and partly blind of late. I doubt if he’d remember.”

  Shefford and Fay walked arm in arm in the background.

  Out in the meadow two horses were grazing. They were sleek, shiny, long-maned, long-tailed, black as coal, and, though old, still splendid in every line.

  “Do you remember them?” whispered Shefford.

  “Oh, I only needed to see Black Star,” murmured Fay, her voice quivering. “I can remember being lifted on his back.… How strange! It seems so long ago.… Look! Mother Jane is going out to them.”

  Jane Withersteen advanced alone through the clover, and it was with unsteady steps. Presently she halted. What glorious and bitter memories were expressed in her strange, poignant call!

  Black Star started and swept up his noble head and looked. But Night went on calmly grazing. Then Jane called again—the same strange call, only louder, and this time broken. Black Star raised his head higher and he whistled a piercing blast. He saw Jane; he knew her as he had remembered the call; and he came pounding toward her. She met him, encircled his neck with her arms, and buried her face in his mane.

  “Shore I reckon I’d better never say any more about Wrangle runnin’ the blacks off their legs thet time,” muttered Lassiter, as if to himself.

  “Lassiter, you only dreamed that race,” replied Venters, with a smile.

  “Oh, Bern, isn’t it good that Black Star remembered her—that she’ll have him—something left of her old home?” asked Bess, wistfully.

  “Indeed it is good. But, Bess, Jane Withersteen will find a new spirit and new happiness here.”

  Jane came toward them, leading both horses. “Dear friends, I am happy. Today I bury all regrets. Of the past I shall remember only—my riders of the purple sage.”

  Venters smiled his gladness. “And you—Lassiter—what shall you remember?” he queried.

  The old gun-man looked at Jane and then at his clawlike hands and then at Fay. His eyes lost their shadow and began to twinkle.

  “Wal, I rolled a stone once, but I reckon now thet time Wrangle—”

  “Lassiter, I said you dreamed that race. Wrangle never beat the blacks,” interrupted Venters.… “And you, Fay, what shall you remember?”

  “Surprise Valley,” replied Fay, dreamily.

  “And you—Shefford?”

  Shefford shook his head. For him there could never be one memory only. In his heart there would never change or die memories of the wild uplands, of the great towers and walls, of the golden sunsets on the canyon ramparts, of the silent, fragrant valleys where the cedars and the sago-lilies grew, of those starlit nights when his love and faith awoke, of grand and lonely Nonnezoshe, of that red, sullen, thundering, mysterious Colorado River, of a wonderful Indian and a noble Mormon—of all that was embodied for him in the meaning of the rainbow trail.

  DESERT GOLD, by Zane Grey

  A ROMANCE OF THE BORDER

  PROLOGUE

  I

  A face haunted Cameron—a woman’s face. It was there in the white heart of the dying campfire; it hung in the shadows that hovered over the flickering light; it drifted in the darkness beyond.

  This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set in with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron’s mind was thronged with memories of a time long past—of a home back in Peoria, of a woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector for gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed infinitude, because he wanted to be alone to remember.

  A sound disturbed Cameron’s reflections. He bent his head listening. A soft wind fanned the paling embers, blew sparks and white ashes and thin smoke away into the enshrouding circle of blackness. His burro did not appear to be moving about. The quiet split to the cry of a coyote. It rose strange, wild, mournful—not the howl of a prowling upland beast baying the campfire or barking at a lonely prospector, but the wail of a wolf, full-voiced, crying out the meaning of the desert and the night. Hunger throbbed in it—hunger for a mate, for offspring, for life. When it ceased, the terrible desert silence smote Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul. He and that wandering wolf were brothers.

  Then a sharp clink of metal on stone and soft pads of hoofs in sand prompted Cameron to reach for his gun, and to move out of t
he light of the waning campfire. He was somewhere along the wild border line between Sonora and Arizona; and the prospector who dared the heat and barrenness of that region risked other dangers sometimes as menacing.

  Figures darker than the gloom approached and took shape, and in the light turned out to be those of a white man and a heavily packed burro.

  “Hello there,” the man called, as he came to a halt and gazed about him. “I saw your fire. May I make camp here?”

  Cameron came forth out of the shadow and greeted his visitor, whom he took for a prospector like himself. Cameron resented the breaking of his lonely campfire vigil, but he respected the law of the desert.

  The stranger thanked him, and then slipped the pack from his burro. Then he rolled out his pack and began preparations for a meal. His movements were slow and methodical.

  Cameron watched him, still with resentment, yet with a curious and growing interest. The campfire burst into a bright blaze, and by its light Cameron saw a man whose gray hair somehow did not seem to make him old, and whose stooped shoulders did not detract from an impression of rugged strength.

  “Find any mineral?” asked Cameron, presently.

  His visitor looked up quickly, as if startled by the sound of a human voice. He replied, and then the two men talked a little. But the stranger evidently preferred silence. Cameron understood that. He laughed grimly and bent a keener gaze upon the furrowed, shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A long-forgotten sensation stirred in Cameron’s breast, one so long forgotten that he could not recognize it. But it was akin to pain.