Outcasts of Picture Rocks

by Cherry Wilson

  Soft in the hush: “Yes,” said Revel Jore, “you’re honor-bound. You’ve got to pay.”

  She savvied. She would. She was made that way. “Son,” crossing to René, Abel laid a hand on his arm, “you ain’t told us much we didn’t guess. We figgered you’d come for the horse. We knew Race Coulter was holdin’ some kind of a club over you.”

  Abel savvied, too. Hungrily, René’s eyes sought Eden’s. But she had turned to the window again.

  “So you see,” he said, in white misery, “why you can’t trust me. You could some … before I told you. There was some things I couldn’t do even for Race … livin’ with you like this. But now I’m leavin’. When I get out there, I’ll have to do whatever Race asks. Anything but take Black Wing from Zion while he’s out of the basin. I promise you I won’t do that.”

  “I’d have gambled on it,” Abel endorsed heartily. “But about leavin’ … you don’t savvy, son. You’d be arrested and tried on serious charges. You helped a Jore escape. You wounded a man doin’ it. You fought for us at the pass. The world classes you with us. I’m mighty sorry that had to happen, but it’s facts we’re facin’. You couldn’t do Race no good in jail. And it won’t be workin’ ag’in’ him to watch the Picture Rocks till we bring Zion and Black Wing back.”

  René saw this. Race had said himself that the only safe place for the horse was in the basin, guarded by the Jores, until Luke Chartres gave up the chase. Again, the interests of the Jores and Race were the same.

  “I’d like to stay,” said René wistfully, “if you still trust me.”

  “Fine.” Abel wrung his hand. “It’s goin’ to be a tough job for one man. We hate to ask it, but it needs must be when the devil drives. There’s plenty of ammunition. And Eden will spell you off.”

  “But you and Yance?” René’s fears were all for them. “You’ll be takin’ your lives in your hands. How’ll you get past that camp? They’re watchin’ for just such a break.”

  “We’ll have to risk that. We know every inch of the pass … every rock and bush, no matter how dark it is. If we’re seen, we’ll run for it. There ain’t many horses in these parts can beat ours.”

  Nevertheless, he admitted it was a dangerous mission. And the gravity of it weighed on them with the worry and heat. They were leaving that night. Revel and Eden went out to prepare a cold supper for René, so he could go right to the crags and relieve Yance, who would need to catch a few hours’ sleep before the start.

  The meal over, René stepped out on the porch. Abel stood there, eyes scanning the sky. Black clouds were rolling over the rims.

  “Looks like ol’ Jupe Pluvius is with us,” he grinned. “If the storm only holds off till dark, we’ll make our break when it gets goin’ strong.”

  Down at the corral, cinching his saddle on Stonewall, René looked up to see Eden standing beside him. “I’ve put you up a lunch,” she said, holding it out to him. “It will be a long time until morning.”

  He took it and thanked her. His smile was a happy one. Eden had spoken to him. True, her voice didn’t say anything. He might have been a total stranger to whom she’d made some comment on the weather. No, for she’d have been friendly then. But she had spoken to him. Now she was going.

  Quickly, he stepped up to her. “Ain’t there something I can say on my side to you, Eden?”

  She looked away. “What is there to say?”

  “A lot, girl.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, quietly. “But nothing I want to hear. Nothing that will change … oh”—bravely lifting her blue eyes to him—“I want you to know I don’t blame you for trying to get Black Wing. You couldn’t help it. Anyone would have done that. You were just true to the man who gave you your chance. Why, I … I’d have helped you steal Black Wing myself from my own folks. But what I can’t forget …”

  “What, Eden?”

  “That you sacrificed Zion for him. When you knew he was … when I told you he must not leave the Picture Rocks. You took him from us.”

  “I didn’t do that!” René protested. “It’s the truth. I didn’t. You must know it, Eden. You do know it, don’t you, girl?”

  She looked into his face, so earnest, so honest, her blue eyes filling. She looked off at the storm-capped rims, and she cried, in pitiful confusion: “I … can’t! Oh, I don’t know! Zion’s gone!”

  Zion was gone. The Jores were risking their lives to bring him back, and René Rand was standing guard over the Picture Rocks.

  * * * * *

  Up there in the spires where, so often, Zion had sat with the spreading world calling, until in his mighty longing it seemed he must just let go all “holts” and “float” down, René now crouched with ready gun, waiting for dark when the Jores would make their break. Far down he saw the winding thread of the trail up which he had toiled a few weeks before, expecting a challenge from the sentinel. Now he was the sentry, sworn to enforce the strict taboo of trespass; sworn to shoot anyone who tried to break it; to shoot these men camped below him, should they attempt it, although they represented the law, all the things he had ever stood for, still stood for—although he was an outlaw.

  The sun had gone down, dragging its light with it. When the dusk got too thick for sure aim, he slipped down to the barricade to watch. Night brought no coolness. Heat seemed rather to increase. The air became more oppressive. The very earth seemed to have caught and held its breath. The storm still threatened. Endless, black hours passed.

  Shortly after midnight, René heard a muttering in the south. Rapidly it neared, and, crouched behind that bulwark of rock, tense, listening, he heard muffled hoofbeats coming from within the basin. In a blinding bolt that split the blackness, as the rims resounded deafeningly with thunder, as the wind came in a rush like the breath of the world released and water fell in sheets, the Jores rode up.

  “The rain will wash out our tracks,” said Abel in a whisper. “They won’t dream we’re gone, if the lightnin’ don’t show us up.”

  Noiselessly, they tore a hole in the barricade and slipped their horses through. Then, before mounting, they turned to say good-bye. Yance wrung René’s hand in silence. There was no need to say anything. Their actions spoke for them. They had placed their lives in René’s hands. For they had not only to get past Dolan’s camp but, after they found Zion, must get back in. And they trusted to René Rand that they would return to a refuge and not a trap.

  Abel long held the young fellow by both arms, while the wind, the rain, and the thunder crashed about them. “If we don’t come back,” he said, “take care of her, son.” And René saw on his face in the lightning flash a look that haunted him for years.

  Then they were gone, in their rash attempt to slip through the enemy’s camp as, in days past, their father had slipped through the camp of the fierce Apaches. Gone, in the crashing blackness, and René listened with his heart in his mouth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  UNLOOSED

  The wind, the thunder, and lightning rolled away into the night, but the rain kept up until dawn, a warm, steamy dawn. Mists rose from the basin as from a mighty cauldron. Out of the mists at sunrise came Eden. She was off her horse and standing beside him before he saw her. Then he had to look twice to make sure. For her short fawn-colored skirt and blouse blended right in with the dun crags and sunbrowned grass. But her face was like a patch of snow against the rocks and her eyes, shadowed from an all-night vigil, startlingly purple.

  “They got through?” she asked in a drab little voice.

  “You bet.” René grinned. “At least, I didn’t hear anything to the contrary. And the camp’s goin’ on as usual.”

  She took a step to the brink of the cliff and looked down through the crags of rocks. Guards were busy about the tents, nursing a smoky campfire, hunting dry fuel, and spreading out things that had been left out last night and got soaked by the rain.

  S
he turned back to René: “I’ll watch, now. Go down and get some sleep.”

  He said unsteadily: “Reckon that I had as much sleep as you, Eden.”

  She gave no sign of hearing and probably didn’t, noticing that his sombrero was limp and his buckskin sodden. “And get out of those damp clothes. You’ll be sick again.”

  She cared. Transformed by the thought, he told her he wasn’t sleepy a bit. He could stay up a year. Besides, this was no job for a girl. He couldn’t bear to leave her.

  “Don’t be silly.” She reached for his rifle. “There’s no telling how long you’ll have to watch. You must keep up your strength.”

  He turned away, suddenly weary.

  Down at the big house, he breakfasted alone at the long table. Revel came and went like a ghost. She had always been silent, but not like this—as if she’d never been anything else. She had got hold of herself, a hold that worried René. He wished that she’d let go, wished that she would cry, anything but this stoniness, as if the heart had been torn from her breast, as the heart had been torn from the big house, so empty and still now—nothing but a shell, for all its appearance of cozy cheer.

  “Come on up to the crags,” he begged her, after three hours of sleep, as he was starting back to Eden. “Its lonesome for you down here. Come on up and watch for them.”

  She didn’t then, but in time she did, seeing that he was worried about her. She would walk up and stay with him and Eden, her black eyes bent to the world she had abandoned, but which had robbed her of husband and son. There, she would sit by the hour, her thin hands monotonously plaiting her black dress with thoughts they could only guess.

  But for the most part, René watched alone. Day after day, vigilant as ever Abel had been, he watched to see that no one came in. Day after day, relentlessly, Dolan’s men made sure, as they thought, that no one went out. René would smile to himself, picturing Dolan’s chagrin if he had known the Jores were gone. He looked for Dolan among the guards, and although the distance he encompassed was too great to distinguish faces, he was sure he would recognize the tall form of the sheriff. But he never saw it. Nor could he see Shang. He would grin, imagining Shang’s state of mind if he should learn that the Jores were free to settle their score with him. As for Race and Chartres, he never looked for them. They wouldn’t be here, now that Black Wing was gone.

  It was, for René, a long and weary grind, but when Dolan’s men tired of the waiting game, others replaced them. The trail was seldom bare of riders, coming or going. Those who stayed had many amusements. René would watch them pitching horseshoes or squatting about a blanket, playing cards, shooting at a target—the crags, often as not—or racing their horses from the tents to the mouth of the pass, a pastime that kept his finger quivering on the trigger of his cocked gun, lest it be a ruse to break in.

  For he never forgot that, when the Jores came with Zion and Black Wing, the basin must be sanctuary. Whether they came by day on the run, or at night, stealthily, as they had slipped out, it must be to safety. By day, he watched for them. By night, he listened. They should be back.

  “They’d never have gone,” cried Eden, one twilight, “if they’d known they’d be away this long.”

  René worried, too. But, curiously, he seemed to thrive on the strain. For up there, drenched in the hot sunshine, breathing the untainted wind, always in the open, always resting, he made miraculous gains. It was as if he drew strength from the very ground he lay upon. Seeing him there, his slim figure, sinewy and hard-muscled, the sparkle of health in his fine dark eyes, his young face bronzed, it was hard to believe that this was the pale, thin youth who had been dying by inches on the Eastern racetracks. René could hardly believe it himself. He felt so good, he could scarcely contain himself. All this new life that sang in his veins rebelled at inaction. He wanted to be doing something real, something that would command all his powers, such as Yance and Abel were doing out there, risking everything, hunting for Zion. And something seemed to be calling him, as it had Zion. It seemed he must drop everything and respond.

  Then, this sunset, three weeks after he took up his watch, he came back to the crags to see Eden flying to meet him, in an apprehension that could mean but two things—Dolan was trying to break in or the Jores were coming.

  But she cried, as he swung down hard at her side: “The camp’s leaving!”

  “What?” René couldn’t credit it.

  “They took the tents down and have packed everything.”

  He rushed past her and looked down at the pass. Sure enough, Dolan’s crew had pulled up stakes and were riding off. “Oh, what’s happened?” the girl appealed wildly to him. “Something must have happened to my uncles or Zion, else they wouldn’t be going.”

  René feared it. But he didn’t let Eden see it. “Dolan’s give up,” he assured her. “That’s it. Dolan seen it wasn’t any use, and he give up. No, we’re all right. They’ll bring Zion back, and everything will be like it was.”

  He succeeded in making her believe what he didn’t believe himself. When she had left, the very absence of tents at Sentry Crags, the silence, the loneliness, seemed a menace. That night he watched from the barricade, lest this be a ruse to throw him off guard. But nothing happened.

  Dawn found him on the rims again, straining his eyes for sight of the guards returning. He saw no one. But, an hour after sunup, a rider lifted above the sage and turned into the Picture Rocks trail. In suspense, René watched him coming nearer, praying it was a Jore. But it was not. It was Race Coulter.

  For weeks René Rand had watched the Picture Rocks, steeled to take life if he must, to hold the Jore refuge. In all that time, no one had tried to enter. Now the one man on earth who would call it treason, if he were refused anything, was coming.

  As Race climbed the last steep rise to the pass, René ran to Stonewall, tied back in the brush. For this issue with Race must be met face to face. Mounting, he turned back to scan all approaches to the basin. Certain that no other human being was within miles, he put spurs to his horse, plunging down the steep cliff at almost as mad a pace as Zion had taken that day he came, dodging the same obstacles, leaping the same fissures, outriding the avalanching shale to the floor of the pass.

  Here, he dismounted and ran up to the barricade of rocks, just as Race rounded the trail, his roan shying violently as it sighted René. Race started, too, in more than surprise. Long and hard he stared at the young fellow standing behind the wall, hands resting on it, and steady in them, a businesslike Winchester.

  “Kid!” he gasped. “Kid … is it you or your ghost?”

  René answered tensely: “It’s me, Race.”

  The man drew a long breath. “Yeah,” he admitted with a jerky laugh. “I reckon it is. But it’s hard to believe. You here … fit as seventeen fiddles, when I thought you was dead. Shang swore he’d let daylight through you. And knowin’ the shape you was in, I reckoned you’d turned up your toes. Figgered I’d lost my investment, and would have to go this alone. But I see Shang was lyin’.”

  “No,” said René. “Not about that.”

  “Then,” Race laughed, all his aplomb back, “hot lead was the medicine you needed all right. You look great!” He couldn’t get over it, his small, selfish eyes appraising the young fellow’s physical fitness, exulting in it, as he had in his weakness, because, he explained: “This just doubles my chances to get that stallion.”

  His face flamed to that lusty gleam that always came over it at mention of Black Wing, but more marked than ever, absolutely unrestrained, wholly fanatical. “I got no chance out there,” he confided to René. “No use tryin’ to stick to the tail of a comet. So I come up here to wait. Sooner or later that young stallion will make a break for the basin, now the guards is gone. And I aim to be that Johnny-on-the-spot when that happens. So throw down them rocks and let me in.”

  René’s hands tensed on the gun. “You can’t come
in.”

  “Can’t?” Still Race didn’t tumble. “Why can’t I? What’s to stop me? Not the Jores. I know that.”

  Did Race know the Jores were gone? Sick with a dread he dare not analyze, René said firmly: “I’m stoppin’ you, Race.”

  “You?” cried Race with ludicrous dismay. “But you’re workin’ for me!”

  “Not on this. I’m holdin’ this pass for the Jores. I got orders to let nobody in. And that means you, Race.”

  Understanding at last, fully alive to the potency of that gun, when backed by the driven intensity he saw in René’s eyes, Race’s face went livid with rage. “I see.” His lips drew back in a sneer. “Horatio at the bridge, huh? So that’s the stripe you are? I pick you up back there, out of the gutter … worse, just waitin’ for the hearse … and I bring you West, make a man of you, and you go over to the Jores. You go over to them outlaws, when you owe me …”

  “I ain’t forgotten what I owe you,” René stated. “But I owe the Jores as much and more. And I can pay a little on what I owe them by holdin’ this pass.”

  “And I can whistle, I suppose.” Race was furious. “Oh, I’ve been deaf, dumb, and blind. You’ve been workin’ for the Jores all along. You coulda turned Black Wing over to me that mornin’ I was talkin’ to you in camp. But I didn’t tumble. I even figured, when you helped Zion Jore get away with him, that you’d done it to get him back in the basin … away from Chartres. But I see now … you was gettin’ him away from me. Then, when he got cut off, you sneaked back to watch things, while the Jores went after him.”

  Pale through all his tan, trembling for all his strength, the boy cried: “How do you know that, Race?”

  “Oh, that ain’t half.” Never had the rims returned a sound more grim than Race’s laugh. “What’s more, they ain’t comin’ back!”