The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  They clutched and rocked together. From the moment of the grapple it was unequal—a sick and wounded creature struggling in arms that were as iron bands about his puny frame. But as a furious child fights for a moment successfully with its enraged elder, he tore and beat at his opponent, striking blindly at the face he loathed, writhing in the grip that bent his body and sent the air in sobbing gasps from his lungs. Their trampling was muffled on the stone, their shadows leaped in contorted waverings out from their feet and back again. Broken and twisted in Courant’s arms, David felt no pain only the blind hate, saw the livid plain heaving about him, the white ball of the sun, and twisting through the reeling distance the pale thread of the Emigrant Trail, glancing across his ensanguined vision like a shuttle weaving through a blood-red loom.

  They staggered to the edge of the plateau and there hung. It was only for a moment, a last moment of strained and swaying balance. Courant felt the body against his weaken, wrenched himself free, and with a driving blow sent it outward over the precipice. It fell with the arms flung wide, the head dropped backward, and from the open mouth a cry broke, a shrill and dreadful sound that struck sharp on the plain’s abstracted silence, spread and quivered across its surface like widening rings on the waters of a pool. The mountain man threw himself on the edge and looked down. The figure lay limp among the bushes thirty feet below. He watched it, his body still as a panther’s crouched for a spring. He saw one of the hands twitch, a loosened sliver of slate slide from the wall, and cannoning on projections, leap down and bury itself in the outflung hair. The face looking up at him with half-shut eyes that did not wink as the rock dust sifted into them, was terrible, but he felt no sensation save a grim curiosity.

  He stole down a narrow gulley and crept with stealthy feet and steadying hands toward the still shape. The shadows were cool down there, and as he touched the face its warmth shocked him. It should have been cold to have matched its look and the hush of the place. He thrust his hand inside the shirt and felt at the heart. No throb rose under his palm, and he sent it sliding over the upper part of the body, limp now, but which he knew would soon be stiffening. The man was dead.

  Courant straightened himself and sent a rapid glance about him. The bushes among which the body lay were close matted in a thick screen. Through their roots the small trickle of the spring percolated, stealing its way to the parched sands outside. It made a continuous murmuring, as if nature was lifting a voice of low, insistent protest against the desecration of her peace.

  The man standing with stilled breath and rigid muscles listened for other sounds. Reassured that there were none, his look swept right and left for a spot wherein to hide the thing that lay at his feet. At its base the rock wall slanted outward leaving a hollow beneath its eave where the thin veneer of water gleamed from the shadows. He took the dead man under the arms and dragged him to it, careful of branches that might snap under his foot, pausing to let the echoes of rolling stones die away—a figure of fierce vitality with the long, limp body hanging from his hands. At the rock he crouched and thrust his burden under the wall’s protecting cope, the trickle of the water dying into a sudden, scared silence. Stepping back he brushed the bushes into shape, hiding their breakage, and bent to gather the scattered leaves and crush them into crevices. When it was done the place showed no sign of the intruder, only the whispering of the streamlet told that its course was changed and it was feeling for a new channel.

  Then he crept softly out to the plain’s edge where the sunlight lay long and bright. It touched his face and showed it white, with lips close set and eyes gleaming like crystals. He skirted the rock, making a soft, quick way to where the camp lay. Here the animals stood, heads drooped as they cropped the herbage round the spring. Daddy John sat in the shade of the wagon, tranquilly cleaning a gun. The mountain man’s passage was so soundless that he did not hear it. The animals raised slow eyes to the moving figure, then dropped them indifferently. He passed them, his step growing lighter, changing as he withdrew from the old man’s line of vision, to a long, rapid glide. His blood-shot eyes nursed the extending buttresses, and as he came round them, with craned neck and body reaching forward, they sent a glance into each recess that leaped round it like a flame.

  Susan had remained in the same place. She made no note of the passage of time, but the sky between the walls was growing deeper in color, the shadows lengthening along the ground. She was lying on her side looking out through the rift’s opening when Courant stood there. He made an instant’s pause, a moment when his breath caught deep, and, seeing him, she started to her knees with a blanching face. As he came upon her she held out her hands, crying in uprising notes of terror, “No! No! No!” But he gathered her in his arms, stilled her cries with his kisses, and bending low carried her back into the darkened cavern over which the rocks closed like hands uplifted in prayer.

  CHAPTER VI

  Till the afternoon of the next day they held the train for David. When evening fell and he did not come Daddy John climbed the plateau and kindled a beacon fire that threw its flames against the stars. Then he took his rifle and skirted the rock’s looming bulk, shattering the stillness with reports that let loose a shivering flight of echoes. All night they sat by the fire listening and waiting. As the hours passed their alarm grew and their speculations became gloomier and more sinister. Courant was the only one who had a plausible theory. The moving sparks on the mountains showed that the Indians were still following them and it was his opinion that David had strayed afar and been caught by a foraging party. It was not a matter for desperate alarm as the Diggers were harmless and David would no doubt escape from them and join a later train. This view offered the only possible explanation. It was Courant’s opinion and so it carried with the other two.

  Early in the evening the girl had shown no interest. Sitting back from the firelight, a shawl over her head, she seemed untouched by the anxiety that prompted the old man’s restless rovings. As the night deepened Daddy John had come back to Courant who was near her. He spoke his fears low, for he did not want to worry her. Glancing to see if she had heard him, he was struck by the brooding expression of her face, white between the shawl folds. He nodded cheerily at her but her eyes showed no responsive gleam, dwelling on him wide and unseeing. As he moved away he heard her burst into sudden tears, such tears as she had shed at the Fort, and turning back with arms ready for her comforting, saw her throw herself against Courant’s knees, her face buried in the folds of her shawl. He stood arrested, amazed not so much by the outburst as by the fact that it was to Courant she had turned and not to him. But when he spoke to her she drew the shawl tighter over her head and pressed her face against the mountain man’s knees. Daddy John had no explanation of her conduct but that she had been secretly fearful about David and had turned for consolation to the human being nearest her.

  The next day her anxiety was so sharp that she could not eat and the men grew accustomed to the sight of her mounted on the rock’s summit, or walking slowly along the trail searching with untiring eyes. When alone with her lover he kissed and caressed her fears into abeyance. As he soothed her, clasped close against him, her terrors gradually subsided, sinking to a quiescence that came, not alone from his calm and practical reassurances, but from the power of his presence to drug her reason and banish all thoughts save those of him. He wanted her mind free of the dead man, wanted him eliminated from her imagination. The spiritual image of David must fade from her thoughts as his corporeal part would soon fade in the desiccating desert airs. Alone by the spring, held against Courant’s side by an arm that trembled with a passion she still only half understood, she told him of her last interview with David. In an agony of self-accusation she whispered:

  “Oh, Low, could he have killed himself?”

  “Where?” said the man. “Haven’t we searched every hole and corner of the place? He couldn’t have hidden his own body.”

 
; The only evidence that some mishap had befallen David was Daddy John’s, who, on the afternoon of the day of the disappearance had heard a cry, a single sound, long and wild. It had seemed to come from the crest of the rock, and the old man had listened and hearing no more had thought it the yell of some animal far on the mountains. This gave color to Courant’s theory that the lost man had been seized by the Diggers. Borne away along the summit of the ridge he would have shouted to them and in that dry air the sound would have carried far. He could have been overpowered without difficulty, weakened by illness and carrying no arms.

  They spent the morning in a fruitless search and in the afternoon Courant insisted on the train moving on. They cached provisions by the spring and scratched an arrow on the rock pointing their way, and underneath it the first letters of their names. It was useless, the leader said, to leave anything in the form of a letter. As soon as their dust was moving on the trail the Diggers would sweep down on the camp and carry away every scrap of rag and bone that was there. This was why he overrode Susan’s plea to leave David’s horse. Why present to the Indians a horse when they had only sufficient for themselves? She wrung her hands at the grewsome picture of David escaping and stealing back to find a deserted camp. But Courant was inexorable and the catching-up went forward with grim speed.

  She and the old man were dumb with depression as the train rolled out. To them the desertion seemed an act of appalling heartlessness. But the mountain man had overcome Daddy John’s scruples by a picture of their own fate if they delayed and were caught in the early snows of the Sierras. The girl could do nothing but trust in the word that was already law to her. He rode beside her murmuring reassurances and watching her pale profile. Her head hung low on her breast, her hat casting a slant of shadow to her chin. Her eyes looked gloomily forward, sometimes as his words touched a latent chord of hope, turning quickly upon him and enveloping him in a look of pathetic trust.

  At the evening halt she ate nothing, sitting in a muse against the wagon wheel. Presently she put her plate down and, mounting on the axle, scanned the way they had come. She could see the rock, rising like the clumsy form of a dismantled galleon from the waters of a darkling sea. For a space she stood, her hand arched above her eyes, then snatched the kerchief from her neck and, straining an arm aloft, waved it. The white and scarlet rag flapped with a languid motion, an infinitesimal flutter between the blaze of the sky and the purpling levels of the earth. Her arm dropped, her signal fallen futile on the plain’s ironic indifference.

  During the next day’s march she constantly looked back, and several times halted, her hand demanding silence as if she were listening for pursuing footsteps. Courant hid a growing irritation, which once escaped him in a query as to whether she thought David, if he got away from the Indians, could possibly catch them up. She answered that if he had escaped with a horse he might, and fell again to her listening and watching. At the night camp she ordered Daddy John to build the beacon fire higher than ever, and taking a rifle moved along the outskirts of the light firing into the darkness. Finally, standing with the gun caught in the crook of her arm, she sent up a shrill call of “David.” The cry fell into the silence, cleaving it with a note of wild and haunting appeal. Courant went after her and brought her back. When they returned to the fire the old man, who was busy with the cooking, looked up to speak but instead gazed in silence, caught by something unusual in their aspect, revivifying, illuminating, like the radiance of an inner glow. It glorified the squalor of their clothing, the drawn fatigue of their faces. It gave them the fleeting glamour of spiritual beauty that comes to those in whom being has reached its highest expression, the perfect moment of completion caught amid life’s incompleteness.

  In the following days she moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life. She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David, had been so persistently lively, now, when it came to herself, was dead. Question of right or wrong, secret communings, self judgment, had no place in the exaltation of her mood. To look at her conduct and reason of it, to do anything but feel, was as impossible for her as it would have been to disengage her senses from their tranced concentration and restore them to the composed serenity of the past.

  It was not the sudden crumbling of a character, the collapse of a structure reared on a foundation of careful training. It was a logical growth, forced by the developing process of an environment with which that character was in harmony. Before she reached the level where she could surrender herself, forgetful of the rites imposed by law, unshocked by her lover’s brutality, she had been losing every ingrafted and inherited modification that had united her with the world in which she had been an exotic. The trials of the trail that would have dried the soul and broken the mettle of a girl whose womanhood was less rich, drew from hers the full measure of its strength. Every day had made her less a being of calculated, artificial reserves, of inculcated modesties, and more a human animal, governed by instincts that belonged to her age and sex. She was normal and chaste and her chastity had made her shrink from the man whose touch left her cold, and yield to the one to whom her first antagonism had been first response. When she had given Courant her kiss she had given herself. There was no need for intermediary courtship. After that vacillations of doubt and conscience ended. The law of her being was all that remained.

  She moved on with the men, dust-grimed, her rags held together with pins and lacings of deer hide. She performed her share of the work with automatic thoroughness, eating when the hour came, sleeping on the ground under the stars, staggering up in the deep-blue dawn and buckling her horse’s harness with fingers that fatigue made clumsy. She was more silent than ever before, often when the old man addressed her making no reply. He set down her abstraction to grief over David. When he tried to cheer her, her absorbed preoccupation gave place to the old restlessness, and once again she watched and listened. These were her only moods—periods of musing when she rode in front of the wagon with vacant eyes fixed on the winding seam of the trail, and periods of nervous agitation when she turned in her saddle to sweep the road behind her and ordered him to build the night fire high and bright.

  The old servant was puzzled. Something foreign in her, an inner vividness of life, a deeper current of vitality, told him that this was not a woman preyed upon by a gnawing grief. He noted, without understanding, a change in her bearing to Courant and his to her. Without words to give it expression he saw in her attitude to the leader a pliant, docile softness, a surreptitious leap of light in the glance that fell upon him in quick welcome before her lids shut it in. With Courant the change showed in a possessive tenderness, a brooding concern. When, at the morning start, he waited as she rode toward him, his face was irradiated with a look that made the old man remember the dead loves of his youth. It was going to be all right Daddy John thought. David gone, whether forever or for an unknown period, the mountain man might yet win her. And then again the old man fell a wondering at something in them that did not suggest the unassured beginnings of courtship, a settled security of relation as of complete unity in a mutual enterprise.

  One afternoon a faint spot of green rose and lingered on the horizon. They thought it a mirage and watched it with eyes grown weary of the desert’s delusions. But as the road bore toward it, it steadied to their anxious gaze, expanded into a patch that lay a living touch on the earth’s dead face. By the time that dusk gathered they saw that it was trees and knew that Humboldt was in sight. At nightfall they reached it, the first outpost sent into the wilderness by the new country. The red light of fires came through the dusk like a welcoming hail from that unknown land which was to be theirs. After supper Daddy John and Courant left the girl an
d went to the mud house round which the camps clustered. The darkness was diluted by the red glow of fires and astir with dusky figures. There were trains for California and Oregon and men from the waste lands to the eastward and the south, flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the desert’s shore. Inside, where the air was thick with smoke and the reek of raw liquors, they heard again the great news from California. The old man, determined to get all the information he could, moved from group to group, an observant listener in the hubbub. Presently his ear was caught by a man who declared he had been on the gold river and was holding a circle in thrall by his tales. Daddy John turned to beckon to Courant and, not seeing him, elbowed his way through the throng spying to right and left. But the mountain man had gone. Daddy John went back to the gold seeker and drew him dry of information, then foregathered with a thin individual who had a humorous eye and was looking on from a corner. This stranger introduced himself as a clergyman, returning from the East to Oregon by way of California. They talked together. Daddy John finding his new acquaintance a tolerant cheery person versed in the lore of the trail. The man gave him many useful suggestions for the last lap of the journey and he decided to go after Courant, to whom the route over the Sierra was unknown ground.

  The camps had sunk to silence, the women and children asleep. He skirted their tents, bending his course to where he saw the hood of his own wagon and the shadowy forms of Julia and her mates. The fire still burned bright and on its farther side he could make out the figures of Susan and Courant seated on the ground. They were quiet, the girl sitting with her feet tucked under her, idly throwing scraps of sage on the blaze. He was about to hail Courant when he saw him suddenly drop to a reclining posture beside her, draw himself along the earth and curl about her, his elbow on the ground, his head propped on a sustaining hand. With the other he reached forward, caught Susan’s and drawing it toward him pressed it against his cheek. Daddy John watched the sacrilegious act with starting eyes. He would have burst in upon them had he not seen the girl’s shy smile, and her body gently droop forward till her lips rested on the mountain man’s. When she drew back the old servant came forward into the light. Its reflection hid his pallor, but his heart was thumping like a hammer and his throat was dry, for suddenly he understood. At his step Susan drew away from her companion and looked at the advancing shape with eyes darkly soft as those of an antelope.