“Then Dolan will bring one,” said Abel grimly. “Oh, we ain’t fooled ourselves none. We’ve known all along that even a hideout like the Picture Rocks couldn’t hold out long, if they really wanted us. But the sheriffs up till Dolan ain’t wanted us bad. It wasn’t policy to. We’ve got altogether too many friends in the county.
“But Dolan don’t give a hoot about local votes. He wants to dangle our scalps at his belt. And he wants the glory for himself, which is why he ain’t asked for outside help. Anyhow, it wasn’t much use, as long as we had the other pass. While they was comin’ in here, we could crawl out there. Shang rung our knell, when he told where the pass was. Dolan knows that. And he won’t quit till he has Yance and me under lock and key. He’ll call in the state militia, if he has to. But not till he’s dead sure he has to. And,” Abel added grimly, “by that time, there’ll be plenty more charges ag’in’ us.”
Soberly, René looked down at the shadowy pass, of which every tortuous inch was visible from here—from the tents of Dolan’s camp, pitched near the opening, to the barricade constructed near the very spot where he had fallen, from which point the pass was watched at night. He could see armed men lounging about, breaking the monotony now and then by firing at the crags, on the long chance of picking the sentry off. And for the first time, they really struck him as a genuine menace.
“However,” said Abel, shifting his position but never letting the rifle out of his hands, “I ain’t thinkin’ about Dolan. What’s worryin’ me is Zion.”
His dark face turned to René, the sunlight starkly revealing the deep grooves worry had cut. He cried, almost in appeal, a revelation of his love for his brother, whom Dolan had imprisoned: “How’ll I answer to Joel for him … if Revel’s right, and Joel comes back?”
Hard on that thought, another thing that worried him, he asked: “How’ll I settle with Shang Haman?”
While René sat mute, awed by this revelation of hate, Abel said, his face hard and set: “I can’t settle till I know how much I owe him. If it’s as much as I’m thinkin’ …” From under his jet-black brows shot the cold gleam that spelled doom in a Jore’s eyes.
Vividly, in the pulsing silence, a rude pine cross flashed between René and the shadowy pass he watched, the cross that marked the grave of Dave Jore. Somehow he knew that cross was set up in the man’s mind as well.
With strained calm, Abel broke out, hungry to talk, to share the thoughts stored in the long and lonely watches: “I reckon you’re wonderin’ how a snake like Shang got in with us.”
René was. He had wondered that from the first. But he couldn’t ask. Now Abel was telling him.
“Joel brought Shang in nigh on five years ago. Joel run across him on one of his trips out. Helped him out of a tight jam of some kind. Shang didn’t have no place to go, so Joel brought him home. Can’t say as I ever liked him. But he was handy. We couldn’t go outside … open. And he could. He was our ambassador to a hostile world. That it put a noose on our necks and the rope in his hand did come to us now and then. But we trusted him. Now I’m thinkin’ … Joel went out to Rocky Run to meet Shang, the night he was caught. Dolan ambushed him. He never had a chance. It allus struck us queer Dolan knew he was to be there at just that time. Joel wasn’t one to advertise his moves.”
“What did Joel think?” René asked tensely.
“We never saw him after his arrest. He didn’t talk on the stand. And he didn’t have a chance to talk alone with Eden, when she went down to the trial. Zion says my son Dave accused Shang of double-crossin’ Joel. Zion says Dave was goin’ out to try and talk with his uncle, when he was killed just outside the basin. Shang swore Dolan’s men shot him. Zion swore it was Shang. Dave was gone. So it was Shang’s word ag’in’ Zion’s. And we had to take Shang’s, for Zion wasn’t responsible. But now”—again his eyes flashed that cold glitter—“I ain’t so sure.”
“But what was Shang’s object?” cried René. “Why would he double-cross Joel?”
Abel said shortly, “Eden.”
Eden? “But I don’t see,” insisted René. “Joel was her father.”
Briefly, the outlaw explained: “Shang had been shinin’ up to her for some time. Joel didn’t like it. Zion says Dave overheard him callin’ Shang for it … just before he was caught. It’s comin’ to me that Shang tipped Dolan off to get Joel out of the way. And that he wanted to get rid of Yance and me for the same reason.
“You see, son, after Joel was sent up, we stood in the light of a father to her and watched mighty careful. Not so long before you come on the scene, Yance had occasion to tell Shang plain that Eden wasn’t for him. I think that’s when he decided to squeal on us. Likely, Chartres got hold of him about that time and made it worth his while to. And he figgered with Joel and us out of the way …”
Starved for an audience, he resumed talking, and hungrily René listened. “Joel’s kids,” Abel mused, his brooding eyes on the long drop, “has mighty good blood. Oh, not the Jore blood, although it’s good enough. But Zion and Eden are … waal, something extry through their mother. Joel didn’t think much about it when they were little. But as they growed up, he worried a lot. He seen what a crime it was to keep them in the basin, especially Eden. He wanted she should have her chance. He asked me and Yance to help … to do nothin’ that would call attention to the Picture Rocks till he could take his family and my boy out to some far place, where they could start life fresh under a new name.
“And that”—with scarcely a break in his voice, he raised the rifle and fired a warning at a man straying too near the pass—“that’s why he let Black Wing run. The horse was only a colt then. Joel was just waitin’ for him to grow to his full size and power to make the break. For he was countin’ on the fortune Black Wing was worth to make a new start when he left the Picture Rocks. He watched the horse close. Wouldn’t let a rope be throwed on him … lest some accident happen. ‘It ain’t a horse,’ he used to say, ‘but a dream of heaven.’”
That’s what he had pledged himself to steal for Race, thought René, not just a horse, but …
Through René’s horror ran Abel’s laugh, a brittle thing that broke in his throat. “Dreams!” he laughed again. “Dreams ain’t for folks in our fix. Oh,” he owned, as if it were a crime, “I had mine. Long as I can recollect. I wanted to be a cattleman. I dreamed of ridin’ through my herds, a free man that it was a credit to know. I never even dreamed of inflictin’ myself on the world outside. Right here in the Picture Rocks was good enough. I tried it. But even with friends outside to help, it was too hard to sneak my stock to market. But I got start enough to help Joel’s dream. For my cattle’s kept us goin’ these last five years. Goin’ till I learned better than to dream.”
Again, he ceased. Both stared into the pass. Clouds scudded over their heads. The wind wailed through the spires. Then, again, desolate as its mourn, Abel’s voice spoke: “A man don’t dream for hisself. He’s got to have someone to hitch his dreams to. I had Nance, then … my wife. She died when Dave was small. Died on the trail. I was takin’ her out to a doctor. Kind folks buried her. I … I could just kiss her dead lips and smooth her brown hair the way she liked it. In a loose braid around her head, she allus wore it, with soft little rings peekin’ out. I could … just kiss her and smooth her hair and … Then I had to hunt my hole, one jump ahead of the law. But I had Dave. My dreams died when I laid him in his grave.”
The pass and everything in it swam in René’s eyes. His dark face working, Abel muttered: “When I think how Joel’s dream turned out … with him in prison, his wife eatin’ her heart out for him, and now Zion …”
Mockingly, as if it were the expression of the world’s indifference to a Jore’s feelings, a bullet smacked the crags above them.
“An honest life for a Jore,” Abel stated. “A pipe dream, sure. A Jore couldn’t be honest. At least, nobody would believe he was. Oh, I ain’t kickin’. It’s th
e way things is. We have been honest for five years. And that”—pointing the rifle at the brown tents—“is the wages of honesty.”
But, as if he must be honest with himself, he took it back. “ No! It’s the wages of sin we’re payin’! And you know what that is?”
Fatefully, to René flashed: “The wages of sin is death!”
“Us Jores,” Abel’s face was deadly earnest, his piercing eyes veiled in thought, “are payin’ for a lot of sins that ain’t ours. It’s a habit to credit sins other folks walk out on up to us. But what’s th’ odds? Our father paid for his. But they tacked ’em on me and Yance. As ours will be tacked on Zion, and so on, as long as there’s a Jore.”
He seemed to grow resolute again, to be strong and grim as the rocks about him. “It can’t go on! It’s got to stop right here. Me and Yance has got to pay in full, so they won’t come back on Zion. He’s runnin’ up an account of his own. God only knows how high it’s run. But they’ll see he ain’t responsible. They won’t hold him to account, even if he is a Jore. Not,” he added, with worry shared by René, “if they wait … to see that.”
If …
* * * * *
For two days René brooded over this talk. Two days of shame that seared his soul as the fierce heat scorched and browned the green of the basin. Abel Jore had shown him his heart, a good heart, with nothing bad to be seen, when it lay wide open, bleeding. But he had kept his own locked on its black deceit. He had vowed that day, riding back to meet Race Coulter, that he would come out in the open. What was his vow worth?
This afternoon, down by the lake with Capitán, he lay in the grass, staring out at the water, hating himself. The heat was almost unbearable, the air so still, the glassy, glaring expanse before him was unmarred by a ripple. A storm was brewing. He wished it would come and get over with. He saw Eden, riding in from somewhere. He heard Abel come out on the porch of the big house and call to her. From that direction came a sound that made the big hound whine, a sound like a woman crying.
He lay there, thinking how a man’s life was ruled by circumstances; seeing life as a trail on which a man set out with every intention of going straight, but was turned aside here and there by little obstacles, deadfalls of destiny, until he had swerved completely out of his intended course—got lost, so to speak.
No. Circumstance was a rope that life threw on you, dragging you into things—as the Jores had been dragged into outlawry before they knew what it was, as their father, old Jerico, had been dragged into crime by a civilization that made criminal his normal existence, as he himself had been dragged into crooked work for Race. He couldn’t go on like this, letting the Jores tell him things which he might have to use for Race. For he owed Race his life. He couldn’t get away from that.
Oh, he felt the rope, then, binding him to treachery, strangling every bit of decency in him. In sudden rebellion he sprang up, his arms outflung, as if to tear the invisible fetters from him.
“I can’t stand it!” he cried to Capitán, his dark eyes aflame. “I’ve got to tell them! I won’t be a traitor no more! I’ll tell them everything. Then I’ll leave here. They’ll think less of me for it. They’ll think I’m goin’ because Black Wing is gone … that I’m goin’ after him. But I can’t help that. I’ll be square with myself.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LEAVIN’ THE BASIN
His resolution firm upon him, René hurried to the big house. He had mounted the steps and was crossing the porch to the open door, when suddenly Abel Jore bulked there.
“You, son?” ejaculated the man with surprise that seemed strange. “I was just goin’ to hunt you up. Come in.” He moved aside for the young fellow to precede him. Odd it seemed now that he had ever spoken of dreams, or ever harbored a dream, towering there in the door, hard-eyed, lean, his dark face strangely set in its careworn seams.
With vague apprehension René stepped past him into the room, but stopped at sight of Eden and Revel on the low couch by the window, open to admit any possible breath of a breeze from the lake, but letting only heat in and the fierce glare of the sun that outlined them, throwing their features in shade. Yet René felt that a storm had raged here, that it wasn’t over, for the air was charged still, and that Revel had borne the brunt of it.
She lay back on the cushions, white, spent, her tragic eyes with their beaten light fixed on Abel. He had crossed to the dead fireplace, which occupied the corner and was flanked by windows, so that anyone sitting on the couch before it could watch red flames leap up its black throat or the shimmering lake, as one chose.
Often, in the weeks of René’s first stay in the basin, he and Eden had made summer rain an excuse for a fire, that they might sit here and talk, while the flames crackled and the storm lashed the waters. Now it was choked with the ashes of dead fires. Abel was staring at the ash, and Revel at him, and Eden anxiously watching both of them. Eden, whom he hadn’t talked to since that day at the crags, didn’t speak to him now. After the first startled glance, she looked away—as if she couldn’t bear the sight of him. A traitor, she’d called him. Now she would know what he was. He’d tell her so. He’d tell them all. Hot words rushed to his lips.
“René,” Abel spoke first, “we’re leavin’ the basin.”
That blunt announcement killed every thought of confession. “You’re givin’ up the Picture Rocks?” cried René.
“No,” Abel said slowly. “Yance and me is goin’ out to find Zion and bring him back home, that is, if you’ll …”
But Revel stopped him. A moment before she had seemed beaten. Now she was on her feet, facing him, crying: “No! No! I tell you …”
“There, Revel,” Abel said gently. “We’ve gone over all that.”
“But I tell you,” she panted, beside herself, “you must not. I told you what would happen, if you went out. The Book said no! It said”—she could only whisper it, but they heard—“it said … ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’”
His heart aching with nameless grief, the young man looked at Eden. She lay against the pillows, her face in her arms, her slim form shaking.
“But you ain’t always right,” Abel reminded the woman steadily. “About Black Wing, you always were afraid of him because the Book said death came to the man that sat on him. But now you see …”
“Oh, it will come,” she moaned. Then she was clinging to him, pleading: “Wait! Wait till Joel gets home! It won’t be long. Snow comes early on the rims!”
It didn’t seem possible to René that anyone could resist that plea. But Abel did. With a sorrowful shake of his head, he said: “We can’t wait. We don’t dare wait. We don’t need no prophecies to tell us what Zion’s doin’. We’ve got to bring him back before it’s too late! Please, Revel, try to get a hold of yourself. Don’t make it harder for us.”
A long moment she searched his face. Then slowly released him and sank down by Eden with a calmness that frightened them, a numb resignation, more heartrending than any pleading. Abel Jore went on telling René what he had been hunting him up to tell him.
“Me and Yance is goin’ out to find Zion. I can’t say how long we’ll be gone, but not a second longer than we can help. For we’ve got to get back before anything breaks … before Dolan figgers out his move. Sure, lad, the Lord must have sent you here. For we couldn’t go, if you hadn’t come. But we know we can trust you to keep Dolan’s men out of the basin, and …”
“You can’t!” In terror of such a trust, René threw up his hand. “You can’t trust me any more than Shang! The Lord didn’t send me here! It was Race Coulter! Lissen! Shang told you Race brought me West and bought my outfit. He told you straight! You know what Race wants! He’d give his soul for Black Wing! He’ll give mine, too! For I’ve promised to steal the horse from you!”
He paused for breath, and the shameful words seemed to ring in the room. He felt Eden’s eyes turn to him, felt the intensity in them, but
, unable to meet the scorn he was sure they held, kept his own on Abel’s that were too hard to show feeling.
“I didn’t know what I was promisin’,” he rushed on. “I thought Black Wing was just a horse that could run races. I didn’t know I was stealin’ Eden’s and Zion’s chances. I didn’t know how good you’d be to me. How much I’d owe you, too. No,” he begged, as Abel seemed about to speak, “don’t stop me. I tried to tell you once, and you wouldn’t let me. I’ve got to tell you why I done it. Why … I’m a traitor. I … I’ve always been on the dead level with everybody before.”
There in the big living room, Dave Jore’s sombrero clenched in his hands, the sun’s glare in his face, his lithe figure taut in its earnestness, backed by the gold-and-brown bindings of books that spoke of Revel’s life before she married a Jore, surrounded by the heads and skins of wild things slain to adorn the den of the Jore she had renounced all for, René told them how he had followed his own horse, Flash, East and given him up when he found him, because he was “makin’ a name for himself” as a polo horse; how he had worked then for a stake to get home, but took sick, and it was all he could do to pick up a living around the racetracks; how the doctor had given him six months to live, unless he went West.
“Then I met Race.” With a helpless gesture, he broke off. “Oh, you don’t follow how homesick I was for the West. That was half the matter with me, I guess. Seemed like I’d rather be dead and be here, than live back there. You can’t see the fix I was in, when Race put it up to me.”
Oh, they saw it—stark naked, terse, as he told it. For they had seen him when Zion carried him into the basin. Now they saw him like that, under sentence of death, on the gleaming track, in the cold rain, with a man tempting, “Your fare West, if you’ll get into the Picture Rocks and get me that horse.”
“I told him I wouldn’t play the Judas. He asked, wasn’t my life worth it? I thought it was then. I know now it ain’t. Life’s worth just what you can do with it. I’d sooner not have it than do this. But I’ve got it, and it belongs to Race. He staked me to a gamble. I won. I’m honor-bound to pay him.”
Outcasts of Picture Rocks Page 11