“You mean …?” Numbly, René stared at him.
“Just that! The Jores ain’t comin’ back … no time!”
There was a heartbroken cry behind. René swung. There in the trail were Eden and Revel. Eden, with eyes dazed and dreadful, coming up to cling to the barrier, and Revel as stony as ever, standing beside her daughter, quietly telling Race Coulter: “They’ll come.”
The young man saw Race fighting back his terror of her—the terror she had instilled in him that morning long ago, when she made that prediction about Black Wing.
“You don’t savvy.” Race licked his dry lips nervously. “They can’t come. Not unless they bust through steel, reinforced special for them, past a special guard. Pat Dolan captured ’em yesterday in an old line cabin on the Hondo Ranch. He’s got ’em both locked safe in jail in Big Sandy.”
Sudden darkness seemed to fall over the pass. The wind seemed to wail inconsolable loss. First Joel, now it was Yance and Abel. Every male Jore but one, every Jore but the one of whom Eden was asking. “Zion,” she whispered, “have you heard of him?”
Race stared into the blue eyes lifted to his. Then he said, slowly repeating: “Have I heard of him?” His swarthy face hardened, and he cried with a force that buried the words deep in each breast: “I reckon, girl, everyone on this green earth has heard of Zion Jore.”
As well then, as when Race was done, René knew what was coming. He would have given anything to keep it from Eden.
But she said in a piteous voice that brought tears to his eyes: “We haven’t heard a word since he left us. What have you heard?”
Race threw up his hands in despair of an adequate answer. “Anything,” he told her. “Anything that’s wild and terrible! Things to raise your hair. Reckless things to make the most reckless feel like a piker. Anything you want to hear. Blood-and-thunder tales. Stories of black art. For there’s some as says he ain’t human, but something infernal that changes its form into this and that. That’s how they account for the way he does his disappearin’ act. But I say it ain’t him … it’s his horse that’s half-human. I tell you, that stallion …”
“No! No!” protested the tortured girl. “Tell us about Zion.”
Race frowned. Any subject but Black Wing bored him. “It ain’t pretty!” The prelude showed he wasn’t totally devoid of pity. “He’s killed two men besides Hank Farley. And left his mark on I don’t know how many more. But one pretty deep on one of the Chartres cowboys right after they took up his trail out here. They didn’t follow him far. Who can follow a shootin’ star? And that golden horse …”
“Go on!” pleaded Eden. “Oh, go on about Zion!”
“He got away. Next we heard, he was over in the Navajo country. He’d walked into a restaurant and asked for a meal. When he got it under his belt, he started to walk out. The town marshal happened to be eatin’ there, and the proprietor called on him to collect. He did … whatever he had comin’ to him when he faced it. Saint Pete at the Golden Gate. Zion Jore rode off with half the town on his trail. But that yellow tempest he’s straddlin’ …”
He went on irritably, as again the girl wrenched from him the subject that obsessed him: “Well, then, he broke out again in Big Sandy. Held up Jake Wheeler’s supply store in broad day, and helped himself to grub and cash. The streets was full of people. But he walked out, cool as a cucumber, and ties his loot on that gold … that horse. Then he crosses the street to where some raggedy Mex kids is eyin’ goods in a bakery window. He says … ‘You look hungry.’ They said they was. He says … ‘You needn’t be … livin’s free!’ And he gives them the money he’d took from the store. Wheeler took it away from the kids after Zion had gone, but …”
“Oh! What?”
“Zion heard of it somehow, and that night he come back and robbed him again! Wheeler was on watch and tried to stop him with a shotgun. It was the last thing he ever done. Zion made a clean getaway.”
“But now,” cried Eden desperately, “where is he?”
Race shrugged. “Where is the wind? He’s here, there, and everywhere. He’ll be seen today in a prospector’s cabin in the Rabbit Foot country, and tomorrow there’ll be plenty to swear he’s showed up in a cow camp on the Verde. He’s everywhere … raisin’ red, white, and blue blazes. Every place but where they look for him. Dolan got a tip Zion had holed up in that line cabin. He collected Shang and Chartres and an army of deputies, and hid in the loft to wait for him. But Zion smelled ’em. And Yance and Abel walked into the trap. Dolan is still knocked dumb by his luck.”
Turning to Revel, immobile as marble through this awful recital, Race told her: “The last part of what you predicted has come to pass. Hell has sure followed that horse.”
She never flinched.
But Eden went to pieces then, breaking down and sobbing. “Oh, where will it end? He doesn’t realize what he’s doing. He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s not … any of the terrible things they’re saying. He’s just a child, playing a game. But they’ll … Oh, God, help him!”
Blindly, René tore at the rocks that formed the barrier.
“What are you doin’?” Race Coulter shouted.
“I’m goin’ after Zion.”
“But you’re guardin’ the pass.”
“No need to … after the news you brought. Yance and Abel won’t need it. It doesn’t matter much who comes to the Picture Rocks … till I get Zion back. But nobody’ll come. Dolan will draw the line at women.” Grasping Stonewall’s trailing reins, he led him to the opening.
But Race swung his own horse, blocking the way and blustering: “Are you loco, too? Don’t you know Dolan will clap you in jail, if you go out there? What good would you be to anyone then? Wait here, till Zion Jore comes, if you do aim to pay me.”
René blazed up. “Quit dunnin’ me, will you? There’s things more important than Black Wing. Get out of my way. I’m goin’ after Zion!”
He pushed Race’s horse aside and was leading the bay through, when Revel stopped him and silently held him, her hands on his shoulders, looking at him with those deep, tragic eyes, seeing, he always believed, the horrors that lay before him; seeing him, in that far desert camp with Zion at his red trail’s end and hundreds of hostile miles between them and home; seeing him, at that water hole, with Zion, mad in delirium, striking out at him; seeing him win to the very portals of the Picture Rocks, with Black Wing’s helpless burden, only to find that …
He always believed Revel saw all that was to be, and wanted to make it easier, and that was why she made this great sacrifice. Going up to Race, awing him by the strange force of her nearness, she said: “You must go with him.”
Hoarse in fear and defiance, Race rasped: “Not by a …”
“Wait! You say this young man owes you a debt.”
“You bet! And I aim to collect.”
Stunning them all, Revel Jore said: “I’ll pay it. I’ll pay his debt, Race Coulter. I’ll give you Black Wing. But”—she made this very simple condition—“only if you go with him.”
Hot in Race’s eyes burned that greedy flame. “You’ll give me Black Wing?” he gasped, as if it was too good to be true. And it was. He said harshly: “Black Wing belongs to Luke Chartres.”
“No,” said the woman, her stony calm breaking. “Black Wing is mine. You’ll have a clear title to him. Luke Chartres won’t press his claim, when you tell him the horse came to you from my hands.”
Her words carried conviction. Race was knocked just as dumb by his luck as Dolan had been. But René’s wild protests snapped him out of it in short order.
“Not Black Wing!” René most earnestly begged her. “You know exactly what he means. You know Joel’s dream.”
“I only know,” said the outlaw’s weary wife, “that I must do this. And it is done.”
“Then,” violently Race yanked his roan around, “let’s get goin’. I don
’t want my property rode down … ruined … crippled up. I tell you they’re usin’ that horse for a target.”
But René was detained again. Somehow, Eden was in his arms. It seemed to him that now her tears washed away the barrier that, so long, had been between them, for the blue eyes flashed the old trust. “Oh, I know,” she whispered, as fast he drew her to his breast. “I’ve known all along. I must have been out of my mind. Don’t go, René. Stay with me. I can’t lose you, too.”
This memory would light the blackest hour for him. He smiled happily: “You can’t lose me, Eden. I’ll come back, and I’ll bring Zion.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ZION JORE—OUTLAW
Was this the terrible killer who had thrown half a state in panic? Was this the fiend around whom centered scores of hair-raising, blood-and-thunder adventures? Was this, according to the grisly fancy of the superstitious, the inhuman adept in black magic? He did not look it, this young fellow in buckskin, standing on a high butte overlooking Big Sandy. He did not look terrible. He did not look like a killer. But he looked very, very human—standing there, talking to his horse, a tender, whimsical smile on his lips, his long black hair blowing back from a wild, sweet, restless face that gave no hint of the ferocity and cunning accredited to him. He looked like any young fellow of his own age, but far, far wearier than most.
He didn’t look like an outlaw, any more than his superb, trim-limbed, creamy-skinned stallion looked like the king of a wild mustang band. Yet his cool self-confidence, gained in many victorious encounters, was clearly shown in his standing thus, with no sign of nervousness, only half a mile from the town where a determined sheriff, pilloried by an outraged populace, sought his life.
His weird blue eyes, narrowed against the glare of midafternoon, were on the town that sprawled below him like “a dark-hued lizard on the dark-hued sand.”
“It’s sleepin’,” he told the stallion, his fingers straying down that high-arched golden neck. “But we’ll wake it up. We’ll sure surprise ’em. They don’t think we’re in fifty miles of here. We wasn’t last night. They think we’d be a-scared to come back here anyway in wide open day. But we don’t scare, do we, pony? We go where we like. Nothin’ stops us. When the sun says three … we’ll go. It ain’t much after two yet. We got to wait. We got to time it right. At three. Then, if our scheme works, we’ll get Uncle Yance and Abel out of jail, so they can go home. They come out to find us. They thought I couldn’t take care of myself. But I can. And I’ll take care of them.”
Eyes still on the town and softly chuckling, as any child might envisage the working out of a prank. “We’ll stir it up, you bet,” he assured the horse, that was so tremblingly responsive to every word. “They say nothin’ does it like a bank robbin’. Just like René told me, folks is crazy about money. Store it … like bees do honey. We’ll rob their cache, and they’ll do like wild bees … take after the first movin’ thing. That’ll be me … and you, Black Wing. Somebody’ll git stung. But”—with a wild laugh—“it won’t be us!”
The horse stamped as if eager to be off, but young Zion soothed him. “Not yet, Black Wing. Not till three o’clock … that’s when banks shut up. That’s what that prospector we stayed with told us. Oh, he told us a lot about banks. He thought I was a fool not to know. But he’ll know who the fool was when he hears. He’ll know it was Zion Jore he was talkin’ to. He’ll feel green, the way he talked about me … not knowin’ who I was. Tellin’ me things I done, stretchin’ ’em out of all sense, makin’ up some. But we owe him a lot for tellin’ us how Pat Dolan got my uncles in that ol’ line cabin where I used to stop at. Bet that prospector’ll cuss he didn’t try to get me and get the reward he said was on me. There’s a reward on us, Black Wing.”
Strangely, his tired figure straightened, and his dark face beamed, as if a medal for valor had been pinned on him. “Jores,” proudly he informed Black Wing, “always has rewards on them. I’m worth something, too. Mebbe as much as Jerico.”
But he was glad the old miner hadn’t tried to take him. He’d have had to kill him, and he hated to kill anyone. “But,” he told the horse bewilderedly, “I can’t live out here, and not. I ain’t hurt anybody yet that wasn’t tryin’ to hurt me. Trouble is, everybody does, soon as they find out who I am. Lots of ways”—the words were dragged from him—“it was better in the basin.”
Almost against his will, his eyes were drawn back to the black mountain range, to the great cup against the burnished heavens, and fixed on it with awful longing, longing that had grown all the endless time he had been running wild, that kept the basin always in his mind. In times of peril—and most times were perilous—he would see the Picture Rocks. In comparative security, sheltered for the night by some unsuspecting host or stretched out with Black Wing in some lonely spot, sleep never brought such oblivion that he did not see the basin.
He would see it all green and glowing in the spring. He would see it all summer-tanned and riotous with autumn colors. He would see it when snow lay on the rims and the naked trees were clothed with frosty rime, all silver desolation. By the sun’s light, he would see it, by stars, and moon, and dawn. And when there was no light of any kind, he could see the basin, the blue and shimmering lake that was as variable in its moods as himself, the changeless painted figures. He would miss them and feel they missed him—as if they had the power to feel, the living breath that his imagination had always imbued them with. He would see …
“If I just could see Eden.” He faltered to Black Wing, heartsick for more than the mental image of his sister. “I’d sure listen to her. I’d tell her she was right.”
And his mother … “She’d be proud of me, I bet, if she knowed all the things I’ve done.”
Something hot and wet touched his cheek then. Furiously, he brushed it off with a buckskin sleeve. “You can’t hardly just ride off,” in broken apology to the horse. “Lovin’ folks is strings on a man.”
Wistfully, he thought, waiting there for three o’clock, how quiet and peaceful the basin was. In there he knew every tree and plant and bird, and they loved him. Out here, everything was strange and hated him. There was something wrong with him—some place. He didn’t know what it was. If he did, he could fix it. It hadn’t mattered in there. You had to think every minute out here. And it made his head ache to think. He pressed his hands to it now to ease the throb. It wasn’t fun running—now, he’d got his run out. No fun bein’ chased like a rabbit when the hounds got after it.
My pard’s in there, he thought. Somebody held the pass that day. It musta been René. If it was, Uncle Abel wouldn’t send him away. I could have fun in there with René.
A long moment he stood, his haggard face lifted to the Picture Rocks. Then, his lips quivering, “I’ll bet you’re homesick,” shamefacedly, he accused Black Wing.
Responsive to this, as to all else, the horse tossed his sleek head against Zion’s breast.
“Well,” Zion tried to restrain his eagerness, “we can go back … if you’re homesick. But”—he was firm about this—“not yet! We gotta go back with our tails up. We gotta finish our work out here. We’ll get Yance and Abel out of jail. Then we’ll get Dad out of that prison. Then”—his eyes flashing lightning—“I’ll kill Shang! I don’t mind that. He needs killin’. We’ll do them three things, Black Wing. Then we’ll go home.”
Three tasks as great as ever the twelve labors of Hercules, yet of no moment to him. To Zion Jore, it was as if they were already done. He saw himself riding home in triumph, saw the hounds bounding to meet him, saw himself surrounded by those who loved him.
“We’ll see the folks,” he whispered wearily to the horse, “and the lake, and the ol’ paint’ rocks. Then we’ll just lay down and rest.”
Zion Jore would go back to the Picture Rocks. But not like this.
His time nearly up, he inspected the six-gun at his belt, twirling the cylinders, looking at ev
ery working part. He took up the rifle, leaning on the rock beside him, and, ascertaining that it was in perfect order, slipped it in the scabbard under his stirrup leather. Then he turned his attention to his saddle rigging and, sure that everything was right, reset the saddle and tightened the cinch.
As he put foot in the stirrup, a transformation took place. All the regret, the dream, the tenderness, vanished from his face. His mobile lips were set in lines of terrible purpose. His blue eyes flashed a savage blaze. He looked capable of everything they had accused him of.
As he bounded to the saddle, the stallion reared like the wild king he was, eyes aflame in transformation as startling as Zion’s. Lightly, the young fellow’s spur touched a gleaming flank. With a half-snort, half-scream, the buckskin horse, bearing the young fellow in buckskin, plunged wildly down the slope toward town.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DEAD OR ALIVE
The latest arrival, lounging on the shady veranda of Trail’s End, looked at his watch and yawned. Just a quarter to three? Great Scott! Half a day in this burg, but it seemed like a week. He cast bored eyes back to the street. From the Stockman’s Bank, a block down, to the county jail, a block up, there was nothing but heat and hush, but so much of both.
Turning on the grizzled proprietor of Trail’s End, who was awakening from his siesta in the easy chair beside him, he ungraciously blurted: “I don’t see how you stand it!”
Drowsily, Dad Peppin looked up. “Stand what?”
“This infernal quiet!”
A queer smile quirked the old man’s lips. He said feelingly: “We are thankful for it. We’ve had uproar enough around here to last us for a spell. And we’ll have more.” He drew himself up in his chair. “You’ve heard of the Jores?”
“And little else! Every paper I’ve picked up for weeks has been full of your outlaws. All I’ve heard since I hit Big Sandy is Jores. I feel personally acquainted with the whole clan. Know their history from the year one. Wish I could have been here when all the excitement was going on … though it’s hard to believe anything ever excited this town. And probably never will again, now they’ve got the Jores behind bars.”
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