Outcasts of Picture Rocks

by Cherry Wilson

  “Friends,” Revel had explained, seeing his surprise, “old friends, I brought from home.”

  They were friends she had made her children acquainted with, so that René was constantly amazed by Eden’s grasp on things outside her experience, her knowledge of things beyond the range of his. But friends Zion had small love for, except such kindred spirits as Ali Baba and Long John Silver, whose turbulent careers had helped to form his idea of life out there and were about as true to it as the world’s idea of the Picture Rocks.

  But riding, walking, paddling in the old dugout canoe with Eden—the shadow of Shang Haman inevitably falling over them—René never forgot. The girl’s innate honesty, her absolute frankness and trust, brought home the shameful role he was playing here. And he felt like a traitor—hearing the story of old Jerico, a hero to his granddaughter because he had been so loyal, and she thought loyalty the greatest human attribute. He felt like a coyote—standing with Eden under the lone pine on a windswept bluff beside Dave’s grave, with its rude cross, a silent monument to the Jores’ blood feud with Sheriff Dolan and to Zion’s sworn revenge on Shang.

  “Unless,” she said hopefully, “we can rid him of that notion.”

  His heart singing, for all its guilty pain at the way she allied herself with him, René asked: “Is it a notion, Eden?”

  She looked down at the cross and mound, thinking of Dave, who had been scarcely less dear to her than Zion, whose passionate heart, also, had been set on leaving the Picture Rocks, and who had gone.

  “It has to be,” she said desperately. “It’s too horrible, otherwise. If Shang killed Dave, then Zion isn’t safe. Zion’s not safe while he thinks it. Shang might do him some harm. That’s why I don’t dare make an enemy of him.”

  Feeling like a Judas in poor return for all her confidence, he told her of his existence on the racetracks, stretching out his two years there to embrace all his life, and she was so glad he’d told her.

  “That explains it,” she exclaimed joyously, “the way you ride! Shang’s been telling the rest you’re no tenderfoot. I’ll put him in his place next time.”

  Oh, she was loyal to him.

  * * * * *

  But out on the lake today, a rare June day, three weeks after his coming, he forgot utterly and was happy, drifting with Eden under the painted cliff. Love, long repressed, making itself imperiously felt in thrilling silences and prosaic discussion of the painted rocks.

  “How did anyone ever get up there to paint them?” René wondered, his eyes on the figures, because he dared not look at her, prettier than she had ever been, nestling in the old canoe, her smooth white arms bare to the shoulder, her small, shapely hands holding the idle paddle. “It couldn’t have been done from above. They’re too far down, and the top hangs over. And they’re so high up, it couldn’t have been done from the water.”

  From that store of knowledge that always amazed him, she explained that the lake had been higher then. “This whole basin was a lake once, René. See those seams?” she asked, pointing up at the eroded lines that ran across the face of the bluff. “They’re old shores. Mother says the rocks were painted by a race that lived here when the lake was at that high-water mark just below the pictures. Long, long ago that was … but just a flash of time in the ages water and wind have been slashing and sculpturing these old rims. Think of it.” Never had her face seemed to René as sad as then. “Doesn’t it make the Jores’ little day here unimportant?”

  And his. Generations before he came, these pictured rocks had been here, and would be here, fadeless, generations after he was dust. Of what moment was any act of his? Just a shadow flitting across the old cliff’s face.

  “Shang hates them,” Eden mused.

  “Hates them?” René was shocked that even Shang could fail to love the old picture rocks.

  “He says they scowl at him.”

  “At first they seemed to scowl at me,” owned René. “But now they kinda smile.”

  “Then you’re a Jore!” cried the girl, her eyes like stars. “They only smile at Jores.”

  A Jore! With what a torturing, self-revealing pang did he stare at her. A Jore! And he was endangering the whole clan by holding back that warning, endangering everyone she held dear. Love had made him blind. But now he saw.

  In horror of what he saw, he bent toward her, seized the paddle, and sent the canoe skimming along.

  “Stop, René!” she protested, amazed, anxious. “It makes you breathe too fast. It will bring your cough back.”

  He smiled in a way she never forgot: “I’ve drifted long enough.”

  For he was resolved to seek out Abel Jore and tell him what Race had overheard that day in Trail’s End.

  But when, nearing shore, he saw Shang Haman’s shadow on the water, saw Shang, dapper, devilish, actual, watching them from the trees with that in his eyes which brought back Zion’s cry—“I’ve got to kill him … he pesters Eden!”—he couldn’t deliberately do something that would put him beyond the power to help her and Zion. And so he put it off again.

  Bitterly, while life lasted, René would regret it; would always think that, if he had gone to Abel Jore there and then, that which happened might never have been. He never had another chance. For that night, in the most unfavorable night, it all came out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ON TRIAL

  They were at supper in the big house, all except Yance, who was at the crags, when Abel Jore, eating in thoughtful silence at the head of the table, suddenly put down his fork.

  “Rand,” he asked out of a clear sky, “how long were you in Big Sandy?”

  Though startled by the abrupt query, René managed: “Two hours, more or less.”

  “Hear any mention of us?”

  Realizing that he had drifted into a snag that had ripped the bottom out of everything, René said: “Yes.”

  An absolute hush fell upon the room. Every eye turned on him—Abel’s piercing his very soul; Eden’s wide with apprehension; Revel’s unreadable. Zion’s, fiercely loyal, darted from René to Shang, whose beady eyes reflected his venomous satisfaction at this most surprising turn.

  “Uhn-huh,” drawled the outlaw. “You would. A crow couldn’t light in Arizony and not hear what scalawags we are. Hear anything particular?”

  “I heard,” René said steadily, “that the sheriff’s goin’ to raid the Picture Rocks … that he’s got information about a secret pass.”

  “What?” Abel Jore sprang up violently, but Shang held his chair as if glued there.

  “What’s this,” Abel demanded grimly, “about the pass?”

  “I didn’t get much,” said René, as Race had coached him, “just the drift. The sheriff was talkin’ in Trail’s End with a man, that big racehorse man, Chartres.” A cry, articulate only in its horror, drew his gaze to Revel. Her black eyes were riveted upon him, her hands outspread as if to ward off some monstrous thing. “It seems,” he went on slowly, “somebody’s promised to show Luke Chartres the way in.”

  “It’s a bluff!” Shang was on his feet then, drowning René’s voice with his blustering. “It’s a bluff! Nobody knows where that pass is but us!”

  “Dolan don’t make loose talk,” said Abel Jore curtly. And, turning back to René, his face as hard and expressionless as rock, he asked coldly: “So you knew where you were comin’ when you headed up here?”

  It was the question René dreaded. “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t come for health?”

  “I sure did!”

  “And what else?”

  With a hesitation that went against him, the young fellow said evasively: “To warn you, for one thing.”

  “You sure took your time! You’ve been here three weeks. Why ain’t you spoke up?”

  “I was afraid to,” René owned with that game grin. “You’d accused me of bein’ a spy for Dol
an. I was afraid you wouldn’t believe I was with you. Afraid you’d make me go.”

  “And you liked our society so well, you risked us all? That’s flatterin’. Just what’s the big attraction?”

  Reddening at the biting sarcasm in Abel’s tone, René’s eyes involuntarily sought Eden, white, stricken at this cross-examination, at his damaging admissions. That glance told the story. In fury, Shang turned expectantly to Abel Jore. But the outlaw seemed to be beyond the power to do then whatever it was Shang expected of him, and dismissed René with a gesture.

  The young man went out and, with a deeper sense of isolation than ever the Jores suffered from a world’s ostracism, sat down on his cabin steps to await the verdict. It was easy now to realize that he was in an outlaws’ nest; in the hands of the Jores, against whom the whole state warred, whose greatest weapon was the dread their name inspired, and who survived the unequal conflict only by reason of the fact that they would never let that weapon grow blunt, but kept it keen by striking unhesitatingly and with all their savage force at any invasion of the basin, as any freeborn citizen defends, to the last drop of his heart’s blood, an enemy’s intrusion of his home. They had let the bars down once, had dared to hesitate, had showed human feeling. And they might have paid for it with their lives, or with what they valued more, their freedom.

  Well did René realize, sitting there alone, with the big hound’s nose thrust consolingly beneath his palm, and purple twilight falling, that the Jores were deciding what to do with him, and that mercy would be excluded from that decision. Nor did he blame them. He was a stranger, and they took him in, sick, and they … Killing was too good for him. Through his black sense of shame, but one bright ray shone. The Jores were warned in time, and would be prepared for whatever came. So far he had done what Race had asked, although from now on …

  “Well,” he said to Capitán, shrugging, “there won’t likely be any ‘from now on.’”

  A chance for life the stakes had been, or a quick exit. A quick exit, then. He had lost, but he had won—had won weeks of real living back in God’s country, where the wind blew clean, and the sun didn’t have to wallow through clouds of dust and smoke to get to you, and a man had elbow room. He had lived more in his three weeks here than in all his twenty-one years before, had lived to love Eden Jore.

  What was she thinking of him? Did she understand why he had risked them all? She thought the best thing a man could be was loyal. Did she know how hard it was sometimes to know to whom to be loyal? Did she know that he had kept silent because he wanted to repay her and Revel and Zion? For what?

  Into his worried thoughts broke a light footstep. Lifting his head, he saw Zion coming up, his face as wild, as perplexed as when he’d seen it first at Sentry Crags, his weird blue eyes probing as he sat down beside him, twisting the fringe of his buckskin in painful doubt about something.

  Zion suddenly laid an uncertain hand on René’s sleeve. “Pard, you mean that … about bein’ with us?”

  Hot tears stung René’s eyes. He gripped that brown hand in his own. “Yes, Zion.”

  The cloud passed in an instant. “I knowed it! All along I knowed it … in my heart. But they say you can’t trust hearts.”

  So that’s what they were saying in there.

  “They say Jores mustn’t have hearts. They say heads is what …” Zion broke off, heat lightning flashing in his eyes as Shang Haman burst out of the big house and tore down the corral trail.

  A moment more and both, listening with unconscious intensity, heard him galloping away. To the pass, René thought.

  “He’s goin’ to town!” blazed Zion with that dangerous hostility he always displayed toward Shang. “He’s goin’ to try and get something on you.”

  Going to Big Sandy, where a dozen people might have seen Race with him. “But how can he?” cried René. “Dolan will arrest him, if he shows up in Big Sandy.”

  Zion laughed bitterly. “Not Shang! They got nothin’ on him. He’s too slick. Shang’s the only one who’s free to go and come. He …”

  “Zion!” Abel Jore was now loudly calling.

  The young fellow left, and René sat on alone. He saw Zion saddle and ride off toward the crags. Before long Yance Jore galloped in. He could hear Yance and Abel heatedly discussing something in there, but, lacking Race’s trained hearing, no syllable reached him. He sat on while night spread over the basin, layer upon layer of velvety black, and great silvery stars pierced it; still sat—a time as long as all the time since the Picture Rocks had been—in suspense, waiting to know his fate. But he was not to know it that night.

  One by one the cabin lights went out. The Jores slept. René slept, by fits and starts, hearing, toward morning, a horse coming in, dogs clamoring, and a voice cursing them. Shang was back.

  Breakfast time came. But René couldn’t go in. He couldn’t eat the Jores’ bread, when they felt like this about him, but if he didn’t go, they’d think he was afraid to. Well, he’d risk that. He’d fix his own breakfast out of the provisions in his pack. He was undoing the straps, when Revel came in. She saw his intention at a glance.

  “No,” she said sorrowfully, “you’ll breakfast with us.”

  Silently, he went into the cabin with her.

  Shang was already in his chair. He didn’t look like a man who had spent the night in the saddle. He looked as dapper as ever. His pale gray shirt was guiltless of speck or crease. His jowls were blue from a recent shave. His “silverware,” as Zion contemptuously termed his heavy belt buckle, filigreed boot tops, and other glittering niceties of costume, was as bright as if he’d spent the night polishing them. His eyes, however, had no gleam, but the filmy look of an animal feasting, and he seldom took them from René.

  René was making a brave show of eating, although every morsel choked him, watching the door for Eden, wild to see what she was thinking of him, and painfully aware that Yance and Abel, the only others there, thought even less of him than at supper. They were courteous still, but with a deadly quality, the ominous politeness of an executioner toward the condemned. He knew they had called a truce until this meal was at an end. Impatient to have it over, he pushed back his chair.

  As if this was what they were waiting for, Abel rose. “Now,” he instructed Shang, “tell him what you just told us.”

  In a vicious, explosive breath, sinister as a rattler’s hiss, Shang flung at René: “I’ve been to Big Sandy!”

  “Yeah?” coolly René rejoined.

  “Yeah! And I learned all about your little game! Oh, it was a slick one, shammin’ sick to get in here for Race Coulter!”

  Strange the fire that name struck from the flinty eyes of the Jores. What had they against Race, except the attempted theft of a horse? A horse they let run like any mustang and didn’t value enough to brand.

  “Rand,” Abel finished what Shang seemed unable to do through the very excess of his desire to, “Shang says Race Coulter met you at the train in Big Sandy. He says Race bought your outfit. Is that true?”

  The young man replied scornfully: “Shang says so.”

  “We’ve heard Shang,” said the outlaw quietly. “Now we want to hear you.”

  Something told René he could deny it and the Jores would believe him. He was cruelly tempted. But he said, although it might sign his death warrant: “It’s true.”

  Hardly had the words left his lips, when he realized it was not. Not all that Shang had accused him of, not true he’d been playing sick. And he cried: “It’s true Race staked me, but …”

  “That’s plenty,” said Abel Jore.

  “But I can’t leave it there!” the young fellow insisted wildly. “You’ve got to know …”

  “That’s plenty!”

  They weren’t giving him a chance to defend himself. They thought he was low enough for that. Furious at this injustice, René swung on his heel and left the room. He went
out into the bright sunshine of early morning, his soul crying out against the accusation that he had shammed his condition. He was in agony lest Eden and Revel think that, after all they’d done for him.

  Down at the corral he hung around, hoping against hope that Eden would see him and come out so he could tell her what little there was to be said on his side. When she didn’t come, he was sure she thought … that.

  As if running from that thought, he saddled his cayuse and galloped up the lake trail, riding furiously, aimlessly, for a while, bringing up by Dave’s grave beneath the pine. Finding himself here, a spot hallowed to him for moments there with Eden, he slipped down and, breathless from the exertion, flung himself in the grass beside the cross, his dark eyes on the pictured rocks, his black thoughts far off on a muddy racecourse, with a man asking him what life was worth.

  “They don’t know,” he moaned, “the fix I was in.”

  Then wild hoofbeats on the slope jerked him around to see Eden galloping toward him, a distracted figure, her black hair wind-tossed about her face that was robbed of all color.

  He leaped up as she reared to a stop beside him, and put out his hand to help her down. But she waved him back.

  “I can’t stay, René. They’ll miss me. I … I sneaked away. I couldn’t let you hear it first from them … that way. I had to tell you myself. They … they …” But the tears came, and she couldn’t tell him.

  Gently, he said to help: “I know, Eden. I’m to leave the Picture Rocks … by this route—” laying his hand upon the cross.

  She flinched as from a blow. “Not that!” she cried, tears in her eyes. “No. But they say you’ve got to go. They say”—the wet blue eyes flashed indignantly—“you’re able to.”

  “I am,” said René smiling, although this sentence seemed the harder to bear—to live and be banished from her. “I’m as good as I was when shiftin’ for myself on the tracks.”