Outcasts of Picture Rocks

by Cherry Wilson

  Something struck each heart then like the passing of an icy wind.

  Completely in her spell, swayed from Shang to her, they asked guidance in regard to this stranger.

  “The Book!” cried Yance. “We’ll go by it.”

  With dazed compliance she took a small Bible from her dress, opened it blindly, and blindly marked a passage. Then, bending her eyes to it in the gloom, read in a tone dead to all emotion, but affecting them as no accent could, just by its cold text, for it was Scripture—you couldn’t get away from it: “‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire … I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick and …’”

  Zion’s queer, choked cry broke into this edict. His eloquent eyes were triumphant as he saw the hot red of shame leap to his uncle’s cheeks. Shang, too, saw it. With a curse, unintelligible save in its threat, but deadly plain in that, he swung on his heel and stalked off. And Revel Jore, firm as a statue that, rocked by a mighty tremblor, has righted itself, steadied René, while Zion slipped to the ground and drew the collapsing form into his strong young arms.

  CHAPTER SIX

  EDEN

  So René was admitted to the Picture Rocks, over Shang Haman’s protests, against the sober judgment of the Jores. But there was no sense of victory for him, although he had taken a first long step toward the repayment of his debt to Race, a debt that must be paid before he could call his life his own. His was scarcely a sense of living. He was vaguely aware of being carried into one of the cabins and laid upon a bed, of being disturbed in this, his first chance to rest, by the frantic insistence of one he knew to be Zion: “He’ll die inside! You shut dead things up. Live things crawl to the open, where they can breathe. Where the wind can touch ’em. Where the sun won’t have to hunt them.”

  René felt himself picked up again, borne into the open, and gently placed upon a bunk that was mattressed deep with feathery fir boughs, so freshly cut, even his failing senses rejoiced at the sweet, resinous tang of their crushed needles. Here, on the porch that overlooked the lake, he lay for three days, aware of little else. When he felt at all, it was as a dead stick that is cast into the fire. When he thought, it was with a curious detachment, as if all this were happening to someone else. He had no interest in what was going on, and less about the outcome. But one experience was sharp enough to leave its impress firmly in his mind.

  In the dead of that first night—moonless, and so sable-hung that the whole universe seemed steeped in sadness—he was aroused by the light and heat of a candle held close, and saw a face bent to his—a face luminous with such tenderness as he had known but once before. And he cried, his lips trembling in a glad smile: “Mother!”

  Soft as a breath, “Yes,” she had answered. “Yes.” Then, so softly it might have been the night wind’s whisper in the cottonwoods: “For what you will do for son of mine … yes!”

  Then the light was gone, and the face with it, and all was black, although with a radiance which the light on her face seemed to have imparted to it. He remembered that his mother was dead. She had died when he was seven years old, and he knew that this was Zion’s mother—Revel, who had interceded for him.

  Other nights he felt her near, felt upon his hot face the cool caress such as only a woman can give. Often, when the climbing sun had found him, she would rouse him to force food upon him—food which he had not the slightest desire for, but ate to please her.

  At these times, looking into her haunted eyes, that were filled with anxiety always, with tears often, he dully recalled her promise to be a mother to him. For what? He knew he ought to ask her about that. But he did not. He just gave up, just lay there in that volcano, secure in the blessed sense of being cared for, lulled by the lapping of the water, while three times the sun-gold of morn splashed on the mighty cliff beyond, three times dusk’s amethyst veiled the figures on it, and three times big yellow stars blazed out above its rims.

  Hour after hour he would stare at the pictures on the rocks with no wonder at how they came to be there—just accepting them as a part of this wild background, as much so as the painted butterflies that fluttered by the porch or the jar of wild roses on the railing, or the great wolfhound, Capitán, that crept to his side, licked his hand, and, with many turnings, lay down to share his durance, the same speechless adoration in its solemn eyes that had been in Zion’s.

  Hour after hour he would watch the lake, blue with the blue of fathomless depths; blue as the eyes of the girl named Eden, whom he had not seen yet, nor thought about. Nor did he ever think of Race Coulter dodging Luke Chartres in Big Sandy, consumed with his desire for Black Wing; nor even thought to warn the Jores of the law’s probable invasion; just drifted—like a dead leaf on the lake that dallies with the tide.

  But, waking from a sound sleep on the afternoon of the fourth day, perceptions long slumbering awoke with him. Suddenly, all the grandeur, the peace, and the beauty broke upon him. It seemed heaven. But almost instantly he realized that this was the Picture Rocks Basin; was suddenly aware that it was he, René Rand, lying helpless there; that the murmurs that reached him, along with the nicker and stamp of horses in the corral out front, were the voices of dreaded outlaws—Jores, of Shang Haman, who had murderously opposed his entrance.

  Jerked to full consciousness, he heard a step, light as a falling snowflake, and, turning his head on the pillow, he saw a girl on the trail. As he first saw her, he never forgot her, but carried in his heart forever the picture she made then, framed by the quivering green of the cottonwood leaves, her slim, girlish figure, outlined against the shimmering water, imparting grace to the simple blue dress she wore.

  Her short hair, like black silk, was brushed straight back, intensifying the slenderness of her face, chiseled fine and true as a cameo, but warm with youth’s rosy flush; a face memorable for a haunting sadness that was of no passing mood, but there even in her smile, as truly a heritage as Zion’s restlessness as were her eyes—amethyst, under long black lashes—Jore eyes. To René, she seemed the living spirit of this wild and lovely place.

  Fearfully, as she came up the steps, he searched her eyes for some reflection of the pity Race had said she would have for him, shrinking in dread of it, steeling his heart against her. But there was no pity there, and—he loved her. She didn’t pity him because he was down. She knew he was man enough to get up again.

  “You’re better,” she said in a voice that seemed tuned to the music of the water, and he knew that he had heard her voice in those numb hours; knew that her hands had picked those flowers. She had been near him often, and he hadn’t known it—a dead stick, sure enough.

  Tensely, he said: “You’re Eden. I was just thinkin’ I’d hit heaven.” Her coloring shamed the roses on the railing, as, dropping to the low stool beside her, she took Capitán’s great shaggy head in her lap.

  “Heaven?” she echoed with a little laugh. “That’s a strange name for the Picture Rocks.”

  His dark eyes earnest, René vowed: “Anyhow, it’s the purtiest place on earth.”

  She stroked idly the dog’s rough mane. “Is it?” she asked, incurious. “I’m no judge myself. You see, I’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “Never been away from the Picture Rocks?” René couldn’t credit that.

  “Just once … to Big Sandy.” Her eyes clouded with sudden pain. “And it did seem heavenly … getting home. I never want to go again.” She trembled as with sudden chill. “It was awful.”

  “Awful?” cried René, thinking how awful it was to keep a girl like her locked up here.

  “So many people to stare and whisper. I … I was a Jore. They’d point me out. Like Jores weren’t human. Like we didn’t have feelings. I … I was in trouble. My father … I wasn’t going to see him again. They fought to get in the courtroom.” Her face quivered. Softly, Capitán whimpered. “Oh, I try to tell Zion. But he won’t listen.”


  It seemed to René that she was trying to tell him something. He wanted to help, to assure her that he would listen. The words were on his lips, when suddenly he remembered why he was here, and, sick with shame, could only watch her, sitting with dark head flung back, blue eyes steadily fixed on his.

  A man going by on the trail paused at sight of the pair, his eyes a wicked glitter. Angrily, he took a stride in their direction but, checked by the nearness of those voices in the corral, thought better of it and went on. So, at their first meeting, as at most to come, the shadow of Shang Haman fell upon them.

  But, unconscious of him, the girl cried unexpectedly: “I’m glad you came!”

  Fervently, for this was one thing he could say in all honesty, René rejoined: “I sure am.”

  “I’m glad,” she said in some confusion, “for Zion. He needs someone of his own age. The men … His youth shuts him out of their confidence … throws him on himself. He’s alone too much. And he broods about Dave. I’m afraid of what it may lead to. And he … he dreams about leaving us. He won’t listen to me. He says I don’t really know. He won’t listen to my uncles. He thinks they don’t want him to go. But you …”

  Bravely, her eyes met his again, and he knew by the appeal in them that this was what she had come to ask him. “With you to tell him what it’s like out there … that he’s better off here. You … you have talked to him. You must have seen he wouldn’t fit in.”

  Only thus, with terrible reluctance, did she indicate by word or sign that there was any lack, any difference, in Zion. This was wrung from her by her great love for her brother, a love that would follow him to the very end, an end she seemed to foresee, to be battling with. “Oh, I’m afraid,” she whispered. “There’s things in his blood.” In swift appeal she bent toward René. “If only you’d discourage him.”

  Gently, he promised: “I’ll do my best, Eden.”

  His heart leaped to the swift, grateful touch of her hand, to her joyous: “Oh, I am glad you came! Glad it was you! It might have been someone else who would have lured him away. But now he’ll stay. He’ll listen to you. He trusts you.”

  Stabbed by remorse, impelled by something stronger than himself, René raised up. “Do you, Eden?” he asked.

  He fell back, white and shaken, at her low-voiced: “Yes.”

  * * * * *

  Her trust was torture in the days that passed. For he had come as a thief to steal a horse, to rob the Jores to pay Race. And he owed the Jores most. Or did he? He owed them everything. But the cold fact remained that, but for Race, he would never have seen them. In his despair to know to whom his first loyalty was due, he wished that Zion had let him die at Sentry Crags. No. For then he would never have seen Eden Jore. And but one thought was more unbearable—that he might have to leave her to bear alone this well-founded anxiety about Zion, with her uncles blind to the black trouble brewing between him and Shang Haman.

  This thought made him delay doing the Jores the one service in his power while still remaining true to the instructions of Race Coulter. He couldn’t tell them that the sheriff had knowledge of the secret pass and planned to raid the basin without involving himself. Already the Jores were suspicious of him. Shang had accused him of complicity with Dolan. Far from making him solid with the clan, as Race had forecast, it might cost his life. Yet he had to warn them.

  Day by day he put it off, although any day or night gunfire might rake the basin, although his debt to the Jores grew hourly. He would think of Revel, who had given him a mother’s care, of Zion, who had defended him—who called him partner. Then he would think of Race, bringing him from certain death back East, and that now life was worth far, far more than he had ever dreamed it could be. Thus, his debt to Race grew hourly likewise.

  Remember, you’ll owe your life to me, he could hear Coulter say, and the debt ain’t paid till I get that horse.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DRIFTING

  Black Wing might have been a myth for anything René had heard of him since coming to the basin. He didn’t want to hear anything—overwhelmed as he was by gratitude to the Jores. He could have at any time, for Zion had no reticence where he was concerned. In their frequent chats, he might easily have led the conversation to the stallion. But when the young fellow seemed liable to veer in that quarter, René would divert him with talk of life “out there.”

  He knew now how justified was Eden’s fear that Zion might leave the Picture Rocks. He had come to share it, to see how hopeless it was to discourage him. Oh, Zion listened to him. With hunger insatiable, taut, on the low stool by René’s bunk, or prone on the bearskin rug before it, he would listen to René, telling of life outside the basin. True to his promise to Eden, René would strip it of all glamour, emphasizing its harsher aspects, its snares and pitfalls, its complex social order, of which he was—René would smile wanly—a “good example.”

  But when he was done, Zion would jerk up, eager to give his own version, a version made up of his unbounded imagination, of what he had heard of that dark side of life that had been the experience of the Jores, a version that made René’s blood run cold. For to Zion, life out there was one swift succession of violent deeds, hairbreadth escapes, crimes that were not crimes to him but feats of cunning, valor, enviable excitement.

  “But things ain’t like that,” René protested earnestly one afternoon when the sun and leaves made the cabin a checkerboard of green and gold. “Oh, they happen. But just once in a blue moon. So seldom they cause a really big commotion.”

  “A big commotion.” Zion hugged his knees, chuckling gleefully. “Honest, do they?”

  Appalled to see that he was merely firing the boy’s enthusiasm, René explained: “Most men are too busy workin’. For every man who holds up a stage or robs a train, a million men is slavin’ day in and day out just for a livin’.”

  “They’re crazy.” Thus with a shrug did Zion Jore dismiss the workers of the world. “Livin’s free!”

  “Not out there!” cried René. “Out there you gotta pay.”

  “I hear that.” Zion nodded, eager to agree. “I hear you gotta pay for everything but the air you breathe.”

  “You bet.” René was relieved to think he had made some impression. “Money’s what makes the world go ’round.”

  “I hear,” pressed the young fellow in buckskin, his expressive face bewildered, as if he could not believe this, “I hear they lock the money up in banks and places so folks can’t get at it.”

  “That’s right, Zion.”

  “No,” slowly Zion replied, “it ain’t right. Not when it’s to live on. Suppose Uncle Abel, say, or Shang, locked everything to eat away from us?” His wild laugh told eloquently what he would do then.

  René looked helplessly at him. How explain property rights to one who had lived as Zion Jore had lived, wild as any mustang?

  “Pard, tell me,” the young fellow demanded in his hot, fierce way, “what’s to stop a man from bustin’ in and takin’ what he needs?”

  René cried, with all the strong force of dread this tameless spirit roused in him: “The law! It would run him down, catch him, lock him up.”

  “Like Dad,” Zion cut in soberly. “But suppose”—his dark face clearing—“suppose he had a horse so fast … the fastest horse in all the world, I reckon.” In his eyes blazed the sun of some mysterious worship. “Suppose he could shoot like I can?”

  A shudder swept René, remembering how Zion Jore could shoot. His problem seemed nothing to the one the Jores would face if ever this son of the house left the Picture Rocks. It seemed to René that even the treacherous part he was pledged to play here might be condoned if only he could prevent that, and he could prevent that only as long as he was here. But if he followed Race’s instructions, followed his own inclination to do, now, what seemed a greater service to the Jores, he might not be here. For he couldn’t tell them without admitti
ng that he knew he was coming to the basin, and being already suspicious, the Jores would think his collapse at the crags had been a trick to get in. But they must be warned. He would find some way. Time passed, and he did not.

  He was able to be up and about, feeling “fine,” and looking, perhaps, better than he was. For the constant sun had covered his pallor with a deceptive coat of tan, and rest had eased his cough. He sat at table with the clan, tolerated by the Jore men, openly hated by Shang Haman—a table over which the gentle, sad-eyed Revel presided with a ceremony that brought to mind the high estate from which she was said to have fallen. Now he was strong enough to take short walks beneath the cottonwoods or to the corrals in company with Capitán always, and with Zion, when the young fellow was not off on his solitary ramblings, working with stock, or on sentry duty at the crags. Still, René could think of no way to warn the Jores without revealing that he had another motive in coming to the basin.

  Had Yance or Abel shown the slightest confidence in him, given him the least opening, he would have warned them, regardless of consequences. But they did not. Although courteous always, they kept up between themselves and their guest a wall of reserve against which René felt powerless.

  Times there were, although few and far between, when he could put aside this gnawing insistence, and lose himself in the tranquility of his new life, could believe that Race’s imagination, fired by his craze for Black Wing, had put its own sinister construction upon what had been an innocent conversation between Chartres and Dolan; that, anyhow, there was the well-known slip between cup and lip; even that the whole thing might have fallen through before this.

  There were times when he forgot that this was an outlaw’s nest. For the harmony that prevailed here, despite Shang Haman, would have shamed many a home not shadowed by the disgrace of a world’s ostracism; shamed the home of his own upbringing, which a niggardly, surly stepfather had made a purgatory. The big house seemed the furthest thing from a cradle of crime with its quaint handmade furnishings, its picturesque litter of wild heads and horns and skins, its shelves of books with yellowed leaves and faded bindings—more books than René’s eyes had embraced in all his cowboy life.