by Zane Grey
They reached Red Lake at dusk. Miss Van Dever’s maid, who had been in the front seat with the chauffeur, led her off into the darkness, directed by Brubaker. Lee met Wesley to grasp him as if he were a long lost brother.
“Wes, you bunk in my tent,” said Lee. “Got a stove. It’s colder’n hell. Snowed some. . . . Say, those movie people are sure the real thing. Got any cowboy outfit I ever saw skinned to a frazzle. They work, I’ll tell the world. My trucks got here at four o’clock. Tents all up. Baggage unpacked. Beds made. And the cooks will be yelling ‘come an’ get it’pronto. Wes, you got to hand it to these movie folks.”
“Wal, I been handing it, all right,” drawled Wesley dubiously. “How about your hosses, Lee? And more particularly Sarch and Brutus.”
“Trucked them over with my best stock. They’re eatin’ their heads off right now.”
“Which is what I’m needing. I had a biscuit and a cup of coffee at daylight this mawning.”
“All same like good ol’ ridin’ days. Wes, I told Jerry and the boys not to push my hosses. They’ll take a while gettin’ here.”
“Are you going to use them in that wild hoss stampede?”
“Yes. An’ a thousand mustangs as wild as any broomtails you ever chased. Ha . . . here’s the supper gong. Let’s go rarin’.”
Presendy, under a huge tent, well-lighted, Wesley found himself straddling a bench to sit down at a white-clothed table, steaming with savory viands. And directly across from him a distractingly pretty girl with curly fair hair and stormy blue eyes that immediately appraised him thoroughly and impartially. There were several pretty girls, all good-looking.
“Wal, Lee, I reckon you had it correct,” he drawled. “I’m in for a swell time.” Lee, however, was too gastronomically active to talk. Whereupon Wesley endeavored to conjure up the enormous appetite he had hinted of. The supper was bountiful and as good as a Harvey dinner, which was the standard of cowboy excellence. Presendy Wesley appeased his hunger to the extent of being able to look up from his plate. There were fully fifty persons at the long table, four of whom were young women. Neither Miss van Dever nor Pelham was present.
“Lee, who’s the little peach across from me?” asked Wesley.
“That’s Betty Wyatt. She doubles for the star. And you work with her. Tough break, huh, pard? She was shore lampin’ you.”
“Yeah. I’m sort of leery,” grumbled Wesley, recalling in dubious dismay how easy he had been for Vera Van Dever.
“Hinckley gypped you, pard,” returned Lee, speaking low. “He and Pelham had a row. You see these stars are married or engaged . . . or Gawd knows what. And Pelham was as sore as a wet hen because Hinckley threw you in with Van Dever. I’ve got a hunch they framed you. Anyway, don’t class Betty Wyatt with that proud golden-haired dame. Betty is Western, all over an’ deep down. She’s a Californian, hard-boiled, sure, an’ knows her stuff. The company calls her Nugget, an’ it suits her, believe me.”
“Yeah. So that crazy galoot framed me? Lee, wait all I go out and walk it off. Then you can introduce me to the little double.”
Wesley stalked out into the night. The desert wind, sweeping along the ground, rustling the sage, stinging his face with tiny atoms of alkali dust, brought to mind the nature of this Red Lake. Striding away from the noise and glare of the camp, Wesley halted on the ridge below the great octagonal trading post, the one and only white man’s habitation in the barren region. It looked like a black fort, dark and forbidding, silhouetted against the cold sky. Below spread the sand slopes, down to the wide valley where the pale gleam of water identified the small lake that gave the place its name.
He stood motionless a while, feeling as always the strange sense of kinship with this solitude and wasteland. Red Lake was a gateway to the sublime cañon country of the north. But for once Wesley did not wholly respond to this influence. He was still under the spell of Vera Van Dever, still smarting at Lee’s hint that she had been set to use her charms in the interest of the director. Wesley repudiated this suspicion. Nevertheless, it galled him, and, finding that he could not shake it, he went back to camp in search of Lee.
Upon passing near a big white tent, Wesley heard his name spoken by someone inside. The silvery laughter of the actress pealed out like low bells. Then Hinckley’s deeper voice cut in: “For Pete’s sake, have a heart, Bryce. I told Vera to play up to the fellow. We had to land him for this double sequence.”
“Oh, hell! Did you have to make me ride in an open car through that hideous sandstorm?” demanded Pelham hotly. “Did Vera have to ride sixty miles lying in his arms?”
“A little play like that in a good cause. . .
“Bunk! She kissed him . . . and God only knows what else!”
Here Vera’s mocking, sweet laugh sent a chill over Wesley.
“Registering jealousy, Bryce? I didn’t think it was in you. No one but God ever will know what else I did. I’m a capable obedient star. I obey orders, which you never do. Hinck’s order was to hold this big boy in the car if I had to sit on his lap and make love to him.”
“Bah! I know you, Vera. You get a kick out of it!”
“I’ll tell the world! There’s one cowboy who is a sweet innocent kid. It was a dirty trick to vamp him.”
“Well, I’ll tell you both,” ground out Pelham. “If you pull any more stuff like that again, I’ll slug your sweet innocent kid and walk off the set.”
Wesley thought it high time for him to walk off himself. In fact he ran, burning with shame, furious with himself, utterly amazed that so lovely a creature could be such a cheat, that she should be married or engaged to such a poor excuse for a man as the actor. The nameless and beautiful emotion she had roused in Wesley died a violent death.
On the far side of the tents a bright campfire, surrounded by Indians and members of the company, brought Wesley to a walk. What a fool he was to run like that! Run from whom? He felt hurt, sick, disillusioned. He decided he would tell Lee that these double-crossing motion picture people could make their Western without him.
As he approached the fire, he espied the girl, Betty Wyatt, standing in the light, a vivid contrast to the dark cowboy figures and the lean picturesque Navajos. She wore a white coat, and her uncovered head blazed like gold. All feeling within Wesley seemed to rush to her. Here was something real, of his own world, not sham like all these moving picture people. This girl did the dangerous work, took the hard knocks that glorified the star.
In another moment Lee was introducing him to the heavy, to a girl who was to play the part of a Navajo maiden, to others of the company, and finally to Miss Wyatt. Out in the open, with the firelight playing on her face and the wind blowing her hair, she might have been recompense for a dozen stars, except that Wesley still felt like a burnt child.
“Lee has been building you up,” she said gaily. “It’d never do to believe him.”
“Don’t. He’s an awful liar. Like all cowboys, he loses his haid at sight of a pretty girl.”
“And you’re the cowboy exception to that rule?”
“Me? I’m no cowboy a-tall. I have to boss half a hundred of the lazy, loony buckaroos. But I wouldn’t be corralled daid being a real one.”
“You talk just like me. You look like one. I wonder?”
“Lady, if I’ve got to act like Pelham and save you, who’re doubling for Miss Dever, wal, we’re starting wrong.”
“I hope you can’t act like Pelham, any more than I can act like Miss Vera Van Dever,” replied Betty, subtly changing. Wesley caught a trace of bitterness. The laughter and glow left her face. He had struck a wrong note. The intimation of antagonism, almost contempt, for the stars struck Wesley deeply and melted away his armor.
“That makes me shore we ought to get acquainted, outside of being doubles,” he said simply.
“What you mean . . . acquainted?” He encountered a look that made him feel he would like to stand honest and square before this girl. Instinctively, she had put up the bars. It did not seem m
uch of a compliment to cowboys in general and him in particular.
“Let’s walk a bit. I cain’t talk heah. I’ll show you something worth seeing.” And taking her arm, he led her away from the fire toward the ridge overlooking the valley.
“OK. But I’ll freeze to death. I’m a California rose.”
“You’re limping,” he said, surprised, and turned to look at her.
“Are you telling me? I got hurt the other day. My trick was to jump my horse off a cliff, down at Oak Creek. We went clear under. The water was so cold it damn near turned my blood to ice. I pulled the stunt OK. But riding out, I fell off too soon, and the horse hit me.”
“Oak Creek! Why, it’s high now, and icy, you bet. That was pretty risky, Miss Wyatt!”
“All in the day’s work. That’s my job,” she replied flippantly. “I’m only a double.”
“But do you have to . . . to take all these chances?” he queried earnestly.
“Of course, I do.”
“Couldn’t you go in for regular movie work . . . being an actress, you know, like Miss Dever?”
“Couldn’t I? I tried to, for two long years, and almost starved to death. At that, I’d have made the grade if I’d . . . well, just skip it. One day I had a job riding with some extras. They found me out. I’ve been doubling ever since.”
“And you hate it?”
“Oh, my God! But I stick on my horse somehow. Fifteen bucks a day! She pulls down two grand every week. . . . Maybe I’ll get a break some day.”
“Shore you will,” rejoined Wesley, and fell silent.
They passed Navajos, gliding by with moccasined tread, and came out of the shadow of the huge trading post, looming like a bluff, to the edge of the ridge. Wesley kept on to a jumble of big rocks, among which he threaded a careful way to a protected shelf.
“We’ll be out of the wind heah,” he explained. “Hell of a place for cold wind, blowing sand, and stinging alkali dust . . . this heah Red Lake. But it’s great. See that white glow above the bluff across there? The moon will slide up over the rim soon. And then you’ll see why Arizona has it all over California.”
But she did not look across. Instead she looked up at him. “All right, big boy. You’ve set the stage. Get going.”
“Get going? I’m not going anywhere,” he returned, puzzled.
“I’ve been led around like this by a hundred cowboys.”
“Yeah?”
“And I’m always curious to see what kind of a line they hand out. They haven’t much originality. Now you . . . what’s yours?”
“Oh, I get you.” Wesley laughed at her half-naïve, half-scornful explanation. Then he faced her to grasp that, as a matter of course, she expected him to take her in his arms. He wanted to. There was an allurement about her as strong as Miss Van Dever’s, but entirely different. There was more . . . a hard simplicity and honesty far removed from the wiles of the actress.
“Lee said they called you Nugget. How come?”
“My hair, I guess. Its real color.”
“And Miss Dever’s?”
“Was red last picture.”
“Nugget. I kind of like that. It means solid gold. . . . Wal, Betty, if you expect me to talk and . . . and pet like a cowboy, you’re in for disillusion.”
“Good Lord! Am I hitting the pipe? But you are a cowboy.”
“Shore. That was a bluff of mine. I’m an Arizona cowboy, dyed in the wool, like my dad was, and my grandad. It makes no difference that I’m the luckiest dog ever . . . that I’m the boss of six outfits and eighty thousand head of cattle. Betty, I’m just a plain sap cowboy. That was shore proved today.”
“Don’t take it too hard. Vera’s specialty is making saps out of men.”
“Aw! How did you know? You saw us in the car?”
“Yes. And I wasn’t the only one. Bryce Pelham tore his hair out by the roots. Did that tickle me? I’m telling you, big boy.”
“Hinckley put up a job on me, Betty,” explained Wesley shamefacedly. “He sicced that blonde onto me. To vamp me! Land me for this double job. I was easy. I fell for her.”
“Oh, Wesley, you didn’t fall in love with that . . . not really?” cried Betty heatedly.
“No. But just short of it. Only a little more of her would have. . . . Wal, never mind, Nugget. Meeting you is a balance. I’m daid lucky.”
“Meeting me!” she exclaimed incredulously, with her luminous eyes upon him, as if they had just seen him clearly.
“Yes. I can be my real self.”
“But, big boy, I might be like lots of the movie girls . . . like her.”
“Yes, you might. But are you? Tell me straight.”
“I’m every way but that way, I am.”
“That is the only way I’m counting. Look, Betty. The moon. Heah’s where you go back on California.” .
The environs of Red Lake, all in one instant, had been transformed as if by enchantment. A full moon had sailed up over the black rim to flood the valley with a transcendent glamour of silver light. Like a burnished shield the lake glistened and glimmered in the middle of the valley of sand. Except under the looming bluff opposite, all blackness, and weird shadow, and stark desolation had vanished in the magic of the moon. An ethereal softness fell upon the desert. Far across, through the opaque veil of light loomed up mesas and escarpments leading off to mystic obscurity.
There was life down below that had not been visible until the moon shone out. A bunch of cattle trooped around the lake, slaking the desert thirst of the day. A moving, round spot, gray in the moonlight, proved to be a flock of sheep coming in to water, shepherded by barking dogs. Off to the north straggled a line of mustangs driven by Navajo riders. Their mournful chant floated up on the cold air.
“How about it, Betty?” queried Wesley, after what seemed a long while.
“Ah! I forgot where I was,” she murmured. “Arizona might win if. . . . Let’s go, Wesley. I’m frozen.”
On the way back to camp it was she who held to his arm, not lightly, and she who was silent. There was something pregnant for Wesley in that silence and that contact, something that made him decide to accept the rôle of double if only because he might share the danger with this girl, and in some way possibly minimize it for her.
Five miles from Red Lake, on the vast slope of the upland desert, the motion picture company, with the cowboys and horses, and the Navajos with their hundreds of mustangs, had assembled to film the great stampede.
Hinckley had selected a sage ridge for the scene upon which he depended for the climax and punch of his picture. To Wesley’s experienced eye no more magnificent setting could have been found in all Arizona. If it could be filmed! If the gusts of cold wind, blowing yellow veils of sand and dust, would hold off for the shooting! On the south side of a gentle rise of sage ridge, fairly well down, waited the immense drove of mustangs, corralled in the mounted circle of cowboys and Indians. This band was to be driven by shooting cowboys and yelling Indians up over the ridge top in a wild stampede. Four cameras had been set up to shoot the action, one on a high rock to the extreme left, two across the cañon upon which the ridge verged, and the last on the crest of the ridge, precariously close to where the mustang horses would run. The action faced the sage slope in the north and the ruined front of white bluff, and then the red rise of the mesa to the grand crowning wall of purple rock, that wound away into infinity.
All morning Hinckley labored with details, angles, light possibilities. At high-noon he was ready for action.
“Now Lee, trot out this buckaroo you wished on me,” he shouted stridently. “Oh, man, he’s got to be good!”
On the moment Wesley was trying to assure Betty that his horse, Sarchedon, would not run her down.
“He’s grand. But, oh, so wild!” she exclaimed, as she ventured to caress the noble arch of neck. “See how he flinches. Wesley, I’ll have to ride him or die.”
“Betty, you won’t have to die to own him,” flashed Wesley.
“Cow
boy! What will I have to do?”
Lee dashed up to disrupt that colloquy. His hawk eyes glinted. Dust sifted off his sombrero. In charge of the cowboys and Indians, with the great drive at hand, he looked cool and hard, equal to the responsibility invested in him.
“Come, pard. Do your stuff.”
Wesley rode out upon the ridge with him, where they were met by Hinckley, Brubaker, Pelham, and the cameramen. The director had eyes only for Sarchedon.
“What a horse! Does he know what’s coming off?”
“I’ll say he does.”
“All right, Reigh. See that red scarf there. Ride back to your stand. When I wave my arms, put that roan devil in high, and pick up the scarf at top speed.”
Wheeling Sarch back, Wesley trotted to the spot designated and turned to await the signal. When it came, he spurred Sarch into a run across the ridge. In a few jumps the roan was going like the wind. Then, with Sarch at the top of his stride, Wesley swung down in perfect timing, to snatch scarf and tuft of sage off the ground. He had not tried that trick for a long time, but it was easy. Not easy, however, was it to pull Sarch out of that gait. He wanted to run. Wesley slowed him presently and turned to ride back to the group, which Wesley observed had been joined by Betty. At a distance he noted her strong resemblance to Miss Van Dever in stature and coloring. Moreover, she was dressed in smallest detail as the star had been the day before.
“Good,” said Hinckley, rubbing his hands. “You’ll do, cowboy. But don’t ride down so thundering hard. I know I told you to. Never mind. . . .”
“The faster, the better,” interrupted Pelham somberly excited. “And let him cut in quicker, so his back will be to the cameras.”
“Bryce, I’m directing this sequence,” retorted Hinckley irritably. “Hell of a lot you’d care, if he ran Nugget down. It’s a tough spot for her.”
“She’s doubling for Vera, isn’t she? This is our big scene. It’s got to be fast, hard.”