by Zane Grey
White and bronze glades and aisles stretched away under the brown-barked pines; deer fled in troops before the charge of the horses; golden shafts of sunlight shot down through the canopy of green; patches of bluebells smiled up from the grass and yellow columbines went down under the ruthless hoofs. Again Wade’s stern mind reacted to the fact that this act he was performing concerned only the fleeting present. When it had been consummated and these vicious rustlers were gone, this lovely and grand forest, with its stately pines and colorful glades, the sage-blue flats where the cattle grazed, the stonewalled canyons and the luring reach of the desert, all this wonderland that constituted Arizona would be left free, peaceful, prolific, to be loved and lived with, and to prosper by. The thought troubled Wade. What had he to do with thoughts like that? And he drove them away for the grim realism of this ride and its end soon to come.
Hicks made up for his caution. He raced his horse through the forest, down the aisles, dodging branches, leaping logs. The best Wade could do was keep him in sight. And at last he lost the half-breed altogether. But presently Wade saw the road, and a moment later Hicks on foot, bending low, searching for tracks. Wade pulled Pen to a halt and leaped off. And in another moment the cowboys came tearing to the road.
Wade took a look himself. Jerry sat his saddle lighting a cigarette.
“What you fellows lookin’ for?” he drawled. “There ain’t been any hosses along here for days.”
“Jerry, you always was a hombre thet kept your horse lean,” replied Hicks, which reply Wade interpreted to mean that Jerry preferred to tie up his horse. “But you’re right. No tracks either way for days.”
“Blue hasn’t come along yet?” querried Wade.
“Not on this road.”
“Boss, it’s too soon, anyhow,” added Strothers.
“We’re not ten miles from Pine Mound,” said Hicks.
“But men running for their lives do strange things,” rejoined Wade. “Hicks, ride on ahead and be sure you see them first, if they do come. If not, find where they turned off. Go slow. We’ll follow you.”
It was significant that the half-breed started off leading his horse. Wade waited until he turned a bend out of sight, then cautioning the cowboys to be slow and quiet he followed. They had proceeded in this way for a couple of miles when the sight of Hicks waiting made Wade’s heart leap fiercely. He was no longer Pencarrow’s savior, and foreman of a hard outfit that he had inspired, but back in the past. Rand Blue had betrayed him to the rangers. Wade again saw his chief—his father!—sitting grim and haggard with his guns leveled, his back to that elm tree, his brow already clammy with the dampness of death.
“Reckon Hicks ain’t shore of somethin’,” said Jerry. “An’ I ain’t myself.”
No one else spoke. Wade tried to read the half-breed’s mind before he got to him. A brook crossed the road, making a bend round a great wide-armed sycamore. Wet turkey tracks showed on a dry stone.
“Boss, I heerd somethin’ like iron on stone,” whispered Hicks. “So far I ain’t shore. Get off an’ we’ll hide our hosses back aways.”
This required a few moments, for Hicks went slowly and some distance back into the woods. “Fetch some ropes,” ordered Wade, grimly. They returned to the road.
“My hoss kept me from hearin’,” said Hicks. “Now all of you be still.”
He lay down in the middle of the road and spread himself comfortably with his ear to the ground.
The cowboys watched him with assurance in their intent glinting eyes. Cigarettes had been cast aside. In their standing and sitting postures there was a suggestion of strung readiness.
Wade shared their attention. But he felt that for him there was infinitely more in the charged moment.
The brook tinkled very faintly; an almost indistinguishable sough of wind, like a mysterious breath, came from the tips of the pines; so silent was the forest that it seemed to be waiting in suspense; the faraway plaintive note of a thrush accentuated the silence. For Wade, nature did not seem to be deaf to the tragedy of men.
Hicks rose as if on springs. “Somebody comin’,” he whispered. “Slow an’ not fur off.”
With noiseless steps the cowboys surrounded Wade.
“Six of you slip up along the road and hide,” he said in a whisper. “Rest of you stay here.”
Jerry and Strothers with four others melted into the green border of the road. Wade motioned some of those remaining to hide across the road. With Hicks and three others Wade took a like position on his side. He knelt behind some alder brush and pulling a scarf from his pocket he tied it round his face up to his eyes. Then he jerked his sombrero down and drew his gun.
They waited. The woodland dreamed in its hush. The brook tinkled over stones. Wade strained his ears in vain. Then he whispered to Hicks. The half-breed glided away, along the edge of the road, to the giant sycamore, from behind which he stealthily peeped. He drew back, appeared to think, and then took another and a longer look, after which he retraced his soft steps.
“Four riders,” he whispered. “Blue an’ a flash cowboy ahead.”
After what seemed an interminable period Wade heard voices before a thud of hoofs. They came closer, ceased for a moment; the pound of hoofs sounded just round the bend marked by the sycamore.
“Blue, you had money for Mason,” rang out an angry voice, “an’ some of thet was for me.”
“How do I know that?” came the reply, deep, throaty, with a tone that sent fire along Wade’s cold veins.
“I tell you. An’ I want my share. . . . Blue, I got you out of thet mess in Holbrook. But for me you’d decorated a tree.”
“Bah! . . . Steele, you were scared half to death.”
“Hell yes! Who wouldn’t be with Brandon an’ his hounds right there in town? All the same I saved you.”
“We’re not out of it yet,” growled Blue.
Two riders rounded the bend. The left one was a superbly built cowboy, young, his garb and the trappings of his horse signifying the dandy. The horseman on the right presented a marked contrast to the cowboy.
Wade, with a remembered face and form vividly in his mind, did not at first glance recognize in this heavy-paunched, tawny-bearded man, the only traitor Simm Bell had ever harbored in his band.
The horses splashed into the brook, jerking and bobbing their heads to lengthen their bridles. Then thirstily they drank. Steele looked back. Other horses were close.
“Blue, I want my share of that money,” he demanded, menacingly.
The rustler chief took off his sombrero to wipe his sweaty brow. His hollow eyes flared at the cowboy.
“You can go to hell, Steele,” he rasped out, malignance distorting his somber features.
Wade then recognized the big eyes, the crafty look, the coarse visage that had once been handsome, and particularly the rough cutting voice. Rand Blue! The years that seemed long as a lifetime were wiped away. Wade drew a deep breath, then expelled it in a stentorian command: “ Hands up!”
The bushes crashed on each side of the road to emit the cowboys, stony-faced and formidable with guns extended. At that moment the other two rustlers rounded the sycamore to pull frantically at their thirsty horses. Thudding footfalls behind them preceded the appearance of Jerry and Strothers.
“What’s—up?” demanded Blue, hoarsely, his jaw wobbling.
“Not your hands. . . . Quick!” yelled the half-breed, advancing with rifle held forward.
“Brandon’s outfit!” shrieked Steele, in desperate amaze and fury. His hand flashed low.
Hicks fired without raising the rifle. The cowboy lost action. His head sank forward so that his huge sombrero hid his face. He fell over the neck of his horse, which, startled more by that than by the shot, plunged to let him fall into the brook.
Blue’s hands went shakily aloft.
“No rope for me!” shouted the rustler farthest back, and he wheeled his horse to flee.
“Wait, boys, an’ bore him!” called out Jerry.
The outlaw got a start, and his quickening hoofbeats rang down the road. Then gunshots blended in a roar. The rapid clip-clop ceased in a heavy crash, crash of brush.
The fourth rustler spurred his frightened steed into a magnificent leap back of Blue. A second leap took him into the green, followed by hissing bullets just a fraction of a second too late. Swift as a flash Hicks ran into the woods.
“Blue, you-! Hang!” came back a mocking taunt from the fleeing rustler. The cracking rush of a horse through thicket, a pound of hoofs, gathering speed ended in a single spiteful rifle shot.
“Rustle, boys!” commanded Wade.
Behind Blue a lasso flew out like an uncoiling snake to whip round the rustler and draw tight. A single pull dragged him off his horse into the brook. Other cowboys laid hold of the rope and dragged Blue over Steel’s dead body, out into the road. Coughing, strangled by mud and water, the rustler got to his knees when a second noose whipped round him, pinioning his arms to his sides. Then the cowboys let him get up on his feet.
“Bran—don!” he gasped. “Which of you—is Brandon? . . . Let me—off! . . . I’ve money—more hidden! I’ll pay handsome . . . leave the country!”
“Shet up,” called one of Aulsbrook’s cowboys, a lean youth with eyes of blue flame, and he tossed a noose around the rustler’s neck. He gave the rope a pull that nearly toppled Blue. Then he tossed the other end of the long lasso over a wide arm of the sycamore.
“My—Gawd!” choked out the doomed man.
It took hard men at a hard time to gaze unmoved at his awful visage.
Wade leaped out of the brush. Hicks came gliding from the woods, carrying a gun-belt and a pair of silver spurs. These he laid down with his rifle, and sprang to line up with the cowboys at the taut rope.
“Brandon?—I can put a fortune in your way,” hoarsely pleaded the rustler.
“Stand ready, boys!” shouted Wade, in cold and ringing command. He advanced, strode up to Blue, peered into the convulsed face.
“Don’t you know me, Blue?”
“Who-who? . . . Hellsfire!”
Wade snatched off his mask and whispered: “Remember Simm Bell!”
The exiled Texan betrayed a profound and terrific emotion. He recognized Wade. Stricken to the point of collapse, he stared at an arisen ghost. Then he opened his gray lips once more to betray. But Wade lifted his hand and all Blue got out was a horrible strangled, “ag-gh!—” while he was jerked into the air like a grotesque jumping jack for the merciless cowboys to jibe at.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WHILE Wade sat on a log, sweating and shuddering from the reaction to that hideous execution, the cowboys searched the dead rustlers and tied Blue on his saddle.
Jerry brought Wade a heavy money belt and a huge roll of greenbacks surprisingly clean and new. “I found these on Drake,” he said. “Steele an’ thet oldish hombre were also well-heeled, accordin’ to Strothers, who searched them.”
“Tell Strothers to divide with you all.”
“Doggone it, boss, rustlin’ appears to be a profitable business in these parts.”
“It was, Jerry.”
They packed Blue to the outskirts of Pine Mound, where they hanged him on the notorious cottonwood tree. They tagged his slack figure with a paper bearing the word: RUSTLER.
Then the sleepy little hamlet of Pine Mound awakened to the end of the Drake-Harrobin regime of cattle stealing.
There were but few men in the old haunts of the rustlers and these were curtly invited to prove why they should not be hanged alongside Rand Blue. Those who could not give satisfactory proof of the status they claimed were taken out to view the dead rustler chief and then given an hour to leave town. The Bozemans and other store and saloon keepers who had grown rich off the rustlers were told in blunt language to harbor no more cattle thieves.
The cowboys began to drink and grow hilarious. At their departure, which Wade had trouble in bringing about, they shot up the town. And when they rode past the swinging Blue—ghastly object for the villagers to flock to see—they riddled his body with bullets.
It was midafternoon when they finally headed their tired horses into the Cedar Range trail. Wade with Jerry in front of him brought up the rear of that singing merry cavalcade. They knew they had made Arizona history, that any cattleman in all the territory would pay high for their services. The sun set gold over the purple land and dusk had come before the cowboys settled quietly down to the long ride home.
But Wade welcomed the distance, the darkness, the lonely ride through the pines and cedars. His back had hardly been turned upon the terrible spectacle of the hanging Blue, when the hard ruthless clamped mood of the man sloughed off like dead scales. He escaped the sickening aftermath of death dealing. When he realized that the work had been accomplished, a dark and splendid exultation visited him fleetingly. But that, like the powerful revulsion from bloodletting, did not last long before the terrific fact that the structure he had built for his conscience had collapsed. The certainty which he had relied upon—that he would be killed or seriously wounded in this rustler war—had been a vain anchor. He was alive, well, unscathed, and riding back to a range he had freed of its blood-suckers—to a range that was home, to a family who would worship him as their savior, to the girl with the dark proud passionate eyes, who would make a hero of him. And he must know every waking moment, and in his dreams as well, that he was a liar, a hypocrite, a robber still, and a greater villain than ever.
Yet despite his burning realization, and the helplessness that surged over him, and the miserable thought that after all his years of strife to keep his pledge to his father, fate had played him a scurvy trick, there would come moments of irresistible exultation. He could not prevent these; he had to yield to them. He found that he had an insatiable thirst for respect. He gloried in what he had done for the Pencarrows.
Long before Wade reached the cedar flat that night, weary with physical and mental exertion, the insidious tempter began to whisper: take what is your due—the past is dead—your secret is safe. But he had strength still to drive that devil out. It was an hallucination to imagine he had been safe or ever could be. Had not Rand Blue recognized him in that final appalling moment? Nothing could be surer than that Mahaffey, that hawk-eyed ranger, would know him on sight.
By keeping that fact before his consciousness, by fighting harder for Jacqueline Pencarrow in his hour of almost insupportable temptation than ever before, Wade vanquished the soft-voiced, persuasive tempter.
That struggle left him spent. What best to do and how to do it had to be left until he recovered. Late that night he came upon the cowboys at the Pencarrow corrals and realized that he wa9 home. Deaf to the solicitous Jerry, Wade flopped off Pen and staggered through the dark to his cabin. He barred the door and pulled off his boots. Then he unbuckled from his waist the heavy money belt taken from Blue. It dropped to the floor with a thud. His pocket bulged with the roll of greenbacks and his last conscious thought was a query.
Wade slept until late the next afternoon, and probably would have slept longer but for Elwood Lightfoot’s onslaught upon the door.
Wade let him in.
“They all been tryin’ to wake you,” said the homesteader. “Jacque sent me. She’s worried. It ’pears somebody peeped through the winder an’ seen you layin’ there an’ reckoned you was dead. . . . Wal, by gosh, no wonder! You couldn’t look no wuss if you was dead!”
“Elwood, I’m afraid I came through it very much alive,” replied Wade, thoughtfully.
“Anyone would reckon you was sorry. . . . Tex, it was the greatest deal I ever seen pulled in all my years on the border. You can’t escape the happiness of these good people. I reckon facin’ them will be harder than doin’ the job. But you must take your medicine.”
“Elwood, I—I couldn’t see Ja . . . any of them now. I must look like hell. . . . Besides, I feel like a poisoned hound.”
“Wal, thet ain’t strange. But if you’ll take a stiff
drink an’ clean up you’ll begin to feel better. Then come down an’ have supper with me.”
“That’s a good idea,” replied Wade, gratefully.
It was almost dusk when Wade walked down the trail to Light-foot’s ranch. The homesteader had supper ready. After eating they sat outside and smoked. It was drowsy and warm down under the rock wall. The mockingbirds sang after dark; the brook murmured on its way to its melodious fall into the canyon; the nights hawks wheeled low with raucous squeaks and the insects kept up an incessant hum. The sweetness and loveliness of the place pierced Wade’s mind.
“Lightfoot, what’ll I do with all this money?” asked Wade, suddenly finding his tongue without effort.
‘What money?”
“I’ve got a nose bag full of greenbacks and gold,” replied Wade, laughing grimly. “Harrobin had the money Mason paid him, and some of his own, I reckon. Those rustlers packed their ill-gotten gains around with them. Then Blue had a big sum on him. I got it all. What the cowboys found on the other rustlers they divided and it must have been plenty.”
‘Wal, I’ll be doggoned,” returned the homesteader, gleefully. “Can you beat thet? . . . Send me an’ Hogue down country to pay them cattlemen for their losses.”
“I’ll do that,” said Wade, brightening. “Did I tell you? . . . Of course I did—about buying Aulsbrook out just after he’d been rustled clean. I’ve a ranch of my own. Of all the luck—if it is luck!”
“Luck? Humph, you don’t know how lucky you are yet. . . . Thet’s a rich one on Aulsbrook. But he’s glad to get out. An’ it’s just as well. I’d have had to shoot thet Texan. Now, with your range adjoinin’ Pencarrow’s, we can run as many cattle as we want. I’d send Strothers back there with his riders, throw a new herd in, an’ figure on the rewards of virtue.”