CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A SPLASH OF COLORS
He looked at her, scarcely hearing, scarcely able to believe that this was Eden, this unstrung, suffering girl, so small up there on the big black, so charged with feeling, her throat pulsing above the careless knot of her crimson scarf, whose ends whipped angrily in the wind, as if sharing her opinion of him, her eyes flashing purple fire beneath her sombrero. Yet those eyes had never looked at him any way but friendly, had looked love but yesterday—looked hate now, hate that was absolute.
“My friends?” René said, stabbed to the heart that she could think that. “Eden, I’m not with them.”
“No?” Her red lips smiled scorn. She tried to ride past him.
But he plunged his own horse before her. “Eden, you’ve got this all wrong. That’s Pat Dolan and his men. Shang’s bringing ’em.”
Her laugh was half-crazed. “Shang’s at the crags!”
“He’s not.” Desperately, René tried to make her understand as he had Zion. “Shang came into town this mornin’ for the sheriff. It’s him that promised to help Chartres. Girl, it’s the raid I warned you of. You’ve got to believe me … this once.”
His deadly sincerity forced her belief. Such reason as she was capable of in her present state bore him out. Shang hadn’t hailed her when she left the basin, and he hadn’t been in sight, although she had looked for him, fearing he would protest her going.
“Oh,” she moaned, with a hopelessness that pierced René’s breast, “isn’t there anyone we can trust? The raid. And Zion.”
“They’ll never catch him on Black Wing,” René stated. “The horse don’t live that can. I’ve seen him run. Zion showed me before I left the basin. Showed me how he’d gentled him.”
“Oh, you played the game well.
“Girl, I swear …”
Suddenly erect, her eyes fixed on something behind him: “Is that,” she asked, pointing back, “more of the sheriff’s men?”
It was Hank Farley’s friends storming over the rise with faint, fierce cries as they sighted him.
René said with a twisted smile: “It ain’t Jores they’re after.”
Something flicked her eyes then. Could it be fear for him? No, for she said coldly: “What did you do to them?”
“I helped Zion.” Pain tortured the truth from him. “He followed me last night. I didn’t know he was comin’. He shot a man and …” he broke off, horrified at his words.
Quietly, fatalistically, with the sorrow that was her heritage, corrected Eden: “He killed a man!”
“But it wasn’t his fault.” René was anxious she should have that comfort, even though the mob was pounding close, with fierce shouts no longer faint. “He was drove to it. He’s safe for the present. But Dolan’s sent men to the other pass. And your uncles …”
The blue eyes widened in awful understanding. “They’re in the hills. They think they’re safe. They think Shang’s on watch. They’ll be trapped, if Dolan’s men get by the crags.”
Seizing her bridle, René swung her horse around. “We’ll stop them, Eden! Come!”
She hesitated but one heart’s beat, her eyes turned in the direction Zion had gone. Then she was racing with him up the winding trail, under the somber rims, with the pack baying after, seeing, just as they dashed between the dark portals, far over the slope to their left, the posse coming back.
“We can’t stop them!” Suddenly, she remembered this. “We’ve nothing to stop them with!”
“I’ve got a gun,” the young fellow promised. “It’s got five shells in it. I’ll hold them till you bring rifles from the cabins.”
But she was slow about going on—although that would take long, although the rims about them wildly rang with the iron song of horses galloping.
René shouted bitterly: “You can trust me!”
She cried in far more bitterness: “I’ve got to!”
Her forced trust tortured him as she raced on. But he was thankful for it. Through it he might win the old trust back.
Half-falling from his horse, he staggered to one of the boulders that all but blocked the narrow pass. The very rock beside which he had fallen on that first trip to the basin, and from which Zion had taken that first cautious, curious look at him. He must not fail this time. He must fight off this weakness. He must hold the pass. One man could stand an army off. Then, he thought, with that slow grin that mocked himself, I oughta handle a squad like this.
One man could hold the pass? Yes, he could—from the crags up there, with the full length of the narrow aisle to operate in, with high-powered rifles and no lack of ammunition. But what could he do down here, his view obstructed by rocks that could be used as advantageously by his foes, with only a six-gun and five shells?
Crouched behind the boulder, René saw the first horse burst around the trail. He aimed at the rider—the big, red-eyed hoodlum who had knelt over Hank Farley’s body at Trail’s End, frantically imploring somebody to do something. Now, red-eyed, reckless, taking the lead himself, he dashed into the pass, unconscious of the bead drawn on his breast.
René didn’t want to kill. He only wanted to prevent these men from taking him, from blazing a trail into the basin for Pat Dolan. He fired high, wasting a bullet in warning. With a startled oath, the rider whirled his horse in the startled faces of the other riders, that, whirling, stampeded with him.
But the warning didn’t hold them long. Their blood was too hot for caution. Spreading out the width of the pass, they plunged toward him, yelling, guns blazing, still led by the big hoodlum. Again René leveled on him, again he couldn’t kill a man, but brought the man’s horse down, sending him scuttling for cover as wildly as the rest. René was victor of this skirmish, but with only three bullets left.
Spent and shaken, he sagged against the boulder, waiting. He could see nothing but shadows, rocks, and the dead horse. He could hear nothing but his own hard heartthrobs, the labored breathing of the bay, standing by, gallant under fire, and the wail of the wind that always blew up here. There was a lulling sound that induced a strange drowsiness. But he fought it off to see the reckless leader, not so reckless now, but as bent on vengeance, crawling from rock to rock in an attempt to get above him and pick him off. René’s bullet kicked gravel in his foe’s face, and, rolling to shelter, the man worked back to figure out another move.
Then for René there followed more silence, more suspense, more trying to fight off the blackness. He was roused this time by a mighty drumming as the rims about him amplified in wild alarm the beat of many horses, running. Louder it swelled in volume, rolling up to a grand finale at the mouth of the pass, where René heard an authoritative voice sternly demanding what was going on, and wolfish voices yapping that the Jores had murdered one man and wounded another in town. They had run one of the killers down and had him cornered in the rocks here. Jores? Zion Jore, was the reply, and his partner. This one was the partner.
He heard Shang laugh contemptuously. “He ain’t a Jore. He’s nothin’ but a sick tenderfoot.”
Then the official voice again, Dolan’s, railing at them for butting in on his game. The Jores might hear this shooting and be warned. No, they couldn’t get out, but they could hole up. He couldn’t waste time on this tenderfoot. There was one of him and fifty of them. Altogether—rush him.
Desperately, René braced himself as they came—fifty determined men, led by a sheriff who was grimly determined to reach the halls of Congress through this pass. That star, flashing in mad gallop, made a fine target. But he couldn’t use it. Just the same, he had to make them think he would. He had been something of a dead shot before he went East. He prayed he still was, waiting until the sheriff was a scant twenty paces. Then his gun blazed. The bullet lifted Dolan’s hat. It raised his respect, likewise, for this tenderfoot Shang had so belittled. For he yanked back into the rocks, ordering a retreat. Then, m
aneuvering around the bend, he went into conference with Shang.
Crouched there, listening, René heard their voices plotting. How long would it take them to concoct something? How long before Eden would return? She’d just about be to the cabins now. He had to hold out till she got back—a long way for one shot to go. But a smile curved his white lips—a shot had gone around the world once. Anyhow, it was heard around the world. Whose shot was it? He couldn’t think. He knew only that it was fired by an American for liberty. A Jore, maybe. Jores had fought in every way there was, Eden had told him one day. Every time their country’s liberty was at stake, the Jores had fought for it. Now the Jores were fighting for their own liberty, and …
He jerked up suddenly, hearing shots from within the basin. One, two, three, four, five, six, he counted. Six shots in fast succession. That was Eden, giving the signal that more men were at the crags than the guard could handle. The Jores would come too late—too late even for Eden to get to him. For they had finished plotting.
Tensely, he watched, braced for another rush, wondering how to turn his last shot to best account. Then the very rock he pressed shook on its base. The earth shuddered beneath him, and a muffled roar ran ’round the rims, as if all the guns on earth rolled into one had been fired off on the other side of the world, as if the old crater were erupting again. He wondered what had happened? Whatever it was, would it hold Dolan back? And then he wondered at the sudden stillness.
For over the pass had settled a deep, unnatural hush. The very wind had ceased its wail to listen. René’s heart stood still while he waited. His every nerve shrieked danger. The smell of danger was in the very air.
Suddenly, he was conscious of the soft brush of cloth on rock, a muffled breath, more felt than heard. Someone was creeping up on him. Glancing wildly around, he saw no one. Then his eyes, drawn to the rocks above, looked into the big black bore of a gun trained squarely on him and in the hands of one who knew this pass far better than René Rand—knew this safe route to him—Shang Haman!
Right then, seeing his doom, René had a fierce urge to kill. His last bullet would be well spent, if he could kill Shang. He had to do it, remembering how Shang had looked at Eden, and that his own passing would open the way for Sheriff Dolan to take the Jores, leaving Eden unprotected in the Picture Rocks. He jerked his gun up, but even as his fingers tensed, Shang’s gun roared.
As the bullet crashed against René’s breast, Shang yelled with hideous triumph, “Got him!”—retracting, however, almost in the same breath, dodging back, cursing, scrambling for cover as René’s bullet ricocheted from the rocks, a scant inch from his face: “No, by the powers!”
But he had. Although shot through, possessed by pain, the fellow remembered they must not know it, and held out to shoot. Now he lay stretched on the ground, his white face to the pass he must defend, his nerveless hand clutching an empty gun, a smile on his lips, because far above, almost out of his consciousness, there poured a torrent of shots, as if the very heavens had opened to pour molten death. And the pass was jammed with riders in mad flight—out!
Laboriously, his failing eyes climbed the black walls to the splash of color in the spires—bright, like sunset on the Picture Rocks, like the color that had made one tone of a checkered shirt at Trail’s End, like the bright little river running from him, like Eden’s scarf. There was a guard at Sentry Crags. He could rest.
So deep his rest, nothing broke it—not the plunging hoofs that later stopped beside him, nor the ring of hoofs as they hit the ground, nor the broken cry of a remorseful man: “He ain’t shammin’ this!”
Again in a Jore’s arms, he was borne into the Picture Rocks.
It never disturbed his rest.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ABEL’S STORY
Back in the basin, but it wasn’t heaven. It was just the opposite—a black pit filled to the brim with worry about Zion. They did not know what had happened to him; if dead, how he had died? Or living, how he lived? Imagination filled the gaps, and worry gnawed ever at their hearts, although they seldom spoke of him.
That first week, lying on the porch, between death and life—dead to the beauty of green leaf, blue water, to the painted rocks’ somber grandeur, but cruelly alive to this worry about him—René never ceased to speak of Zion, deliriously babbling the story of the shooting a thousand times to Zion’s mother, so patiently caring for him, telling her that he had tried to keep Zion in the basin. Calling on his own dead mother to witness.
“I know,” Revel would say in a dead voice. “Hush.”
But René could not, wildly insisting: “He’ll tell you so, when he comes back!”
Her haunted gaze would go far from the things that were, fixing on things beyond the range even of fevered vision. Silent tears would flow down her pale cheeks, and she would repeat: “When he … comes back.”
“Tell Eden,” he would implore piteously everyone who came near him. “Tell Eden. I can’t … she don’t come.”
René knew that. Although he felt like a dead stick that is cast into the fire, he would have known her. But she never came.
Growing strong, with that June behind eternally and the hot days pushing halfway through July, he realized that there was something between Eden and him far blacker than the shadow of Shang Haman.
From the day Abel Jore had carried him home, shot through the chest—a high, clean wound, but so dangerous that his life was despaired of—she hadn’t spoken to him. She seldom spoke to anyone. She was seldom at home, for she couldn’t bear the big house, filled as it was with Zion’s trophies—the head and horns of a mountain goat he had trailed to the sheerest rim, now hanging above the fireplace; the pelt of a huge silvertip he had brought down for a couch covering; a hundred things to remind a worried heart of his recklessness and hunting skill. Often René saw her riding in from the direction of Dave’s grave, where, he knew, she had gone to think of Zion, or from the crags, where she had been watching for him.
His heart bled for her. He knew how she loved her brother. She had been closer to Zion than anyone else, and in her deeper knowledge of his wild nature had more to fear. Zion was gone, and she blamed him. Oh, he knew what she thought. She had told him—he had lured Zion out for Black Wing. She thought—in his wretchedness René supplied this—that what he had done at the pass had only been for himself. For she knew that mob was after him, and even a cornered rat fights for its life. He didn’t blame her for what she thought. He didn’t see how she could think anything else. But deep down in his heart, he wished she didn’t.
Back in the Picture Rocks, his position was reversed. Before, the Jore men had barely tolerated him, and Revel, Eden, and Zion had been his friends. Now only Revel was the same. Zion was gone. Eden hated him. While Yance and Abel couldn’t do enough for him, couldn’t blame themselves enough for having listened to Shang, couldn’t pile enough praise on him for what he had done for them.
“It was the nerviest thing I ever heard of,” Yance put it huskily. “You … holdin’ that posse back with nothin’ much but grit till Eden could get on the crags. But for you, me, and Abel … waal, we might be twangin’ harps! We won’t forget. We count you one of us.”
One of them.
“I ain’t,” René told Capitán, again keeping faithful vigil by him. “I can’t be. Even if they do think I am. Even if I do look like a Jore in this buckskin.”
For they had taken his bloodstained garments from him, and Abel had brought a suit of fringed buckskin like Zion’s.
“You’ll be needin’ things,” the man had said in a trembling voice, “so I’m givin’ you Dave’s.” Giving him his dead son’s things.
“I can’t wear ’em,” René had insisted, in far more pain from shame than Shang’s bullet had caused him. “I ain’t fit to.”
For this life, on which he got a stronger grip each day as new blood was built up to replace what he had lost a
nd his old trouble ceased to trouble, as if it had run from his veins at Sentry Crags or been burned out by the fever his wound set up—this life belonged to Race, until Race got Black Wing.
All those weeks, lying on the leaf-roofed porch, watching the painted figures that seemed to wear a broader smile, as if they, too, accepted him as a Jore, he wondered if Race had the horse. Or had the prize fallen to Luke Chartres? Then and after, when able to be in the saddle, riding the bay Dad Peppin had given him—Stonewall he called him, from the way he had stood by him—he would see the wild horse running with a vengeful world behind. In his mind’s eye, also, he would see the wild young creature who had no sense of wrong or right, who could shoot as only Zion Jore could shoot, laughing at the big commotion, raising the big gun; rider and horse, hard-pressed, running for the one sure haven, only to find it barred to them.
René shuddered, for the pass at Sentry Crags had other guards now. Camped just outside were many grimly determined deputies. The Jores were locked in the Picture Rocks. Zion was locked out. For there was no other pass.
That roar René had heard at Sentry Crags had been the echo of a terrific blast that had destroyed the secret pass. That’s what the Jores had been doing in the hills, planting dynamite, stored in the basin for just such an emergency. They hadn’t told Zion or Shang. And, warned by Eden’s signal shots, seeing men climbing to that pass, they had set off the blast and raced for Sentry Crags. Tons of rock had closed the opening. And Sheriff Dolan had sealed the Jores in the basin until he could find some way to take them.
“And whatever it is,” Abel told René this sultry day, when the young man rode up to the pass where he was watching, that must be watched, now, every moment of the day and night, “whatever it is, it’ll likely be taps for us. Dolan means business. And we can’t hold out ag’in’ the odds he’ll be able to throw ag’in’ us.”
Amazed by this pessimistic note, the first he had ever heard a Jore strike, René said: “Why not? You’ve held out a good many years now. They can’t get in any other way. And it would take an army.”
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