Among these, there was a poor Mexican wagon tramp, encamped with his wife and numerous offspring at Gila Run. Into their camp rode the young fellow in buckskin on the buckskin horse, demanding food. But they had none to give him, none for themselves even. By all their saints, they swore it. If they had, would their little ones be crying for food? Would not the señor believe? The señor had.
He had gone, but, in departing, had taken one of their horses, the best and strongest. While yet their souls bemoaned their loss, he had returned the animal, groaning under its weight of corn meal, flour, fat slabs of pork, beans, coffee. At their insistence, that they had nothing with which to pay, he had laughed. “Livin’s free!” And such a feast as they had then. Bandido, that one? A thousand times no. Zion Jore was muy caballero!—but not to the Gila Run trader who had been forced to supply the feast.
By Halifax, things had come to a fine pass—held up in his own store by that young killer and, at the point of a gun, forced to take goods from his own shelves and load them on the horse with his own hands, every ounce it would carry. No, he hadn’t tried to reclaim it. Look what happened to Jake Wheeler in Big Sandy, when he tried to take his money away from them Mex kids.
“He’s a fool for luck, and he knows it,” Race told René, when he brought this story back to their camp on the Moqui. “He had a run-in with Zion Jore and lived to tell of it.”
Since the day they had left that camp in the Black Spout, Race had proved a gloomy companion. That still, stark tarpaulin form haunted him. He couldn’t shake it from his mind. Highly superstitious, like all his kind, Revel’s prophecy had sunk deep. Desire for Black Wing had kept it in the background, although he had observed that the last half had come to pass—hell had followed the horse. Now, it seemed true to him in its entirety.
“Suppose he’s jinxed?” Thus, he voiced his morbid thoughts, as they trailed south through the heat and dust. “They’d have to be a hitch some place. He’s too perfect. You can’t get away from it, kid … hoodoos does follow some things. There’s houses that bring bad luck to everyone that lives in ’em. Calamity trails some men. Suppose there’s a jinx on Black Wing? Suppose it is death for anyone to …”
“Zion rides him,” René tried to reassure him.
“Yeah!” Race laughed, without mirth. “And he’s what an insurance company would call a mighty good risk.” And, a morbid half mile farther on, Race added gloomily: “I ain’t such a good risk myself. You seen what happened to Fresno, when he tried to take Black Wing.”
Fear was getting the best of Race. But he stuck. René was forced to admire his singleness of purpose. No matter what hardships they met, he never grumbled. He never murmured about the expense. Nothing mattered to him but Black Wing. But there was a limit to what his nerve would stand. Tonight, it seemed, the last straw was laid on.
He came tearing back from Dine’s Post about midnight, his eyes wild, his face ghostly, as he yanked up in the firelight. “They’re after you, kid!” he cried, and his rein hand shook. “That gang in the Spout figgered you out! They’re huntin’ for you, as hard as for Zion! They say you come out to help him bust in that prison. They’ve heard, somehow, you’re the Reno Kid. And they’ve hung a bad rep on you. Say you’re a gun-toter from Nevada. Kid, you can’t expect me to take the risk! You go on and git the horse! I’m goin’ back to Big Sandy!”
Silently, René stared into the fire. It wasn’t right to make Race run this risk. Race had had nothing to do with helping Zion escape that day in Big Sandy, nothing to do with the fight at the pass. These were the things the law had on him, serious charges, which would reflect on Race, if …
“They’re on the watch for me, too,” Race confessed nervously. “That gang said there was a pair of us. They’ve got me mixed up with the Jores. Why, they described me so good up there at the Post, I recognized myself. Kid, I’d have to keep under cover, too. I couldn’t be any help to you.”
“All right.” René looked up. “You go back.”
But, through the night, visions of Black Wing in the Val Verde stables bolstered Race’s nerve, and he carried on.
A month had passed since they had left the Picture Rocks. September was nearly gone. In the mountains the nights were touched with frost. But down on the desert, where they were now riding, the sun was still merciless. Days, they traveled monotonous wastes of greasewood and cactus, many a day, waterless. Feed was scarce. Even Stonewall, good horse if there ever was one, was leg-weary and worn, while Race’s roan was near the end of its string. Ceaselessly, Race fretted now about what this run was doing to Black Wing.
Deeper the desert closed around them, a white, glaring land, a dead land, slain by the scourging heat and drought, but holding its lovers against the charms of green lands by the promise of its brief and glamorous resurrection, when spring rains brought it to glorious blossoming and the dainty paloverde was blazoned with gold, the giant cactus in white, waxen bloom, and others tipped with flame.
And the hunt was narrowing down. On several occasions when Race or René—for it was as safe now for one as the other—ventured to some remote habitation, they found he was only an hour, a day ahead of him. Once, Race, speechless with rapture and terror, pointed to a cream horse just disappearing over the skyline that had all the appearance of Black Wing.
But they never came up with him. And ever the way grew more perilous, more infested by searchers, more frequently marked by narrow escapes. Race was nearing a nervous break, and René lost heart. Only by great, good fortune could they hope to overtake Zion before he reached the prison town.
Then, one sweltering afternoon, entirely out of provisions in the foothills of the Estrellas, a barren, thinly populated region, where a stranger would be remembered for months, they came upon a prospector’s camp and decided to stop. They even risked riding together up to the hut of logs and mud in the shade of a widespreading cottonwood, where their hail brought an old desert rat to the door.
“How’s chances to buy some grub?” Race asked him.
“Bad,” the old-timer replied, grinning. “And there’s a mighty good reason.”
“How’s that?”
“Zion Jore paid me a call last night!” Although childishly pleasuring in the sensation he had created, he affected to make nothing of it. “Yeah … he cleaned me out. Oh, he paid me for what he took … twice ag’in what it was worth. But that don’t help the ol’ grub box! My pard’s gone over to Mesquite to lay in a supply. He’ll be back before dark. If you care to wait, I’ll fix you up.”
Race turned to René: “How about it?”
“We’ll be time ahead,” the young fellow thought. “And our horses need rest.”
So they stripped their saddles off, nervously aware of the interest with which their host was sizing them up; alarmed, as the old fellow’s curiosity got the best of his manners.
“Come fur?” he quizzed.
René dodged. “Quite a spell.”
“Goin’ fur?”
“That depends.”
The old man chuckled. “Reckon it does. Reckon I know on what. I’ll bet a stack of blue chips, I know who you be.”
“Yeah?” drawled René, his heart at a standstill.
“I’ll bet my hat that you’re some of them fellers on the hunt fur Zion Jore.”
“You win!” René’s tired smile was nothing if not genuine.
But the old man didn’t warm to it. On the contrary he froze up to them. “Waal,” he said coldly, “I wish you luck, though I’m pro-Jore myself. You see, I knowed Jerico. So I’m bound to be prejudiced. But that young fellow’s unbalanced … no two ways about it. And he ain’t safe at large.”
Whereat he retired to the hut, and they relaxed in the shade of the cottonwood. Race slept. But René’s brain wouldn’t let him. It kept whirling, as they say a drowning man’s does, whirling back to every kind, thoughtful thing Zion had ever done for him; eve
ry golden moment with Eden; every dark hour Revel had watched over him. And by all Zion’s countless kindnesses, by all his love for the loyal blue-eyed girl, by every moment of Revel’s faithful watch, her every motherly touch, he longed to halt Zion in this mad expedition, but suddenly knew he could not; suddenly knew that Zion would free his father, for he had utter faith in Revel. She had said Joel would come home. How could that happen unless someone freed him?
Then, when sunset was painting the ridges below them exquisite shades of purple and gold and crimson, the partner showed up, boosting his burro up the trail to the hut, stunning Race and René, already saddling, with the bellowed announcement: “Joel Jore’s broke prison!”
“By Jingo!” cried the desert rat in the door of the hut with curious satisfaction and pride. “The kid done it.”
“By Jingo!” mocked the one pulling up by the steps. “You’re as gullible as the rest! You must think he’s got wings or somethin’ … to do that! He was here last night. Nope”—turning to include Race and René—“the kid hadn’t anything to do with it. Joel broke out on his own hook. They say he had inside help … some guard in sympathy with him. Of course, he’s been hearin’ by the prison grapevine all Zion’s been doin’. And, naturally, made the break to save his son from committin’ some awful crime. They’re turnin’ this country upside down for him!”
The relief was almost more than René could bear. For weeks he had lived in terror of what Zion might do to free his father. Now, in the reaction, a thousand thoughts raced through his brain, kept him from hearing the soft scuff of horses’ hoofs in the sand behind the hut, the cautious steps of the seven armed men creeping up.
For this changed everything. Zion would hear of Joel’s escape and, his mad project no longer necessary, would head back to the Picture Rocks. René felt sure of this. So sure, he resolved to turn back at once. This very night, he and Race would line out for the basin. He was turning to draw Race aside and tell him, when he froze in his tracks at the familiar command: “Hands up!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
STRICKEN
At last something had been done. The sheriff and six deputies congratulated themselves, as they disarmed and bound their prisoners. This catch, of course, wouldn’t stop the howl of criticism going up. Nothing but the capture of Zion Jore would do that. But it would show that the law was still functioning.
It was more than they had expected to do, when they rushed into the Estrellas, following the old prospector’s report that Zion Jore had stopped at his hut the night before. Certainly, they hadn’t expected Zion would be anywhere around there, nor had they hoped much to pick up his trail. For the day-old trail of Zion Jore was about as nonexistent as a sidewinder’s after a sandstorm.
They had been as dumbfounded as their captives, when—approaching the hut, and seeing there the bay and roan described by the Black Spout gang as the animals the Jore confederates were riding—they slipped quietly up and threw their guns on the pair, the Reno Kid, right-hand man of the Jore gang and Zion Jore’s partner, and his associate, Race Coulter, whose connection with the Jores was a mystery, but who must be a bad one to be in such company.
Unceremoniously, they boosted their prisoners into their saddles, roped their feet under their horses, and, in sunset’s red afterglow, began their triumphal procession to the nearest jail, ten miles away.
“Talk up, kid!” The sheriff was questioning the young fellow they jostled among them. “Come on! Where’s Zion Jore? Where was you to meet him? What was your lay for breaking prison? Talk up! Don’t pull any more of that don’t-know stuff.”
“I don’t know,” insisted René.
“Who’s this hombre?” The sheriff hooked his thumb at Race, who was riding with head bowed down like a man on his way to be hanged. “Where does he fit into this picture?”
“No place,” declared René earnestly. “I told you, he just fell in with me. He was goin’ my way.”
“All the way, huh?” an official suggested coldly. “He’s come quite a spell. From ’way back East, I hear. Figger on usin’ him in that break? Come on … talk!” When René wouldn’t, he said shortly: “Waal, don’t then! We’ll find someone more expert in the art of stimulatin’ conversation.”
Giving René a rest, he went after Race. But Race couldn’t talk. He was scared too badly.
Riding along, painfully bound, racked by the jostling, while sunset’s red faded to dusk, René felt mighty sorry for Race. He had been a faithful trail mate through hazardous, heartbreaking weeks. He was a pretty good scout, for all his shortcomings. He just wasn’t accountable where Black Wing was concerned. His longing to possess the horse had grown on him, until it had got to be a craze, one that would never be realized now.
Oh, they’d let Race go eventually. They’d have to. Race had committed no crime. But he would lose Black Wing. For no one but himself could ever induce Zion to give up the horse. He couldn’t do that—behind bars. That’s where he’d be, for no jury would free him, after the things he’d done for the Jores. He’d be locked away in the same prison where Joel Jore had spent five years, in the same cell, maybe. Buried alive, as Joel had been, to eat out his heart with thoughts of the same dear folks in the Picture Rocks.
In steady progress toward that cell, his captors left the ridges and dropped into a narrow arroyo, riding between sheer rock walls that seemed to merge in the gloom, weighing and pressing on him, till he wished they’d spur up and get out of them. For, somehow, they symbolized his whole future—these grim, dark, imprisoning walls that seemed to come together at the bend in the trail just beyond and lock tight, leaving no way out. But he knew there would be a way out. Beyond that shoulder of rock, the arroyo would open up and continue to the smooth country south.
Might it not be so in his case? Might not some sudden turn of events open up a way for him? He despaired of anything like that and, despairing, was hustled around that bend at a fast trot and there his way confronted him.
With a muffled curse, the leaders yanked up, staring. The rest, riding against them, also halted and stared. Race Coulter’s head rose and froze that way, although his trembling body inclined to his captors as to safety. Wild hope filled René’s heart.
For, there in the trail, coolly sitting the golden horse of the Picture Rocks, was Zion Jore—there in the trail, an impregnable barrier, the big rifle at careless ease across his saddle, but so turned that the black muzzle seemed to point to the heart of each man. And seven pairs of hands went up, as if manipulated by one and the same string. And seven pairs of eyes looked to Zion Jore for life, while they watched—afraid to speak, afraid to stir, afraid it wouldn’t make any difference what they did.
Even René’s blood was chilled. For the Zion here in the trail, so dangerously cool, was a sinister being, not the Zion he had known in the basin. Even in the dusk that hid so much—yet did not hide his deadly weariness—René saw the change. There was a hard line to the jaw and in the restless blue eyes a cold blaze. René did not wonder that these men—brave men, they were—awaited his will in mortal fear. Zion had the look of a killer.
But there was, he saw, in that awful pause, no change in Black Wing. The horse was in perfect condition. Months, he had been in constant flight, through ordeals that would have killed an ordinary horse. But he showed no sign of them. That this was due to the care Zion took of him, the way he put Black Wing’s comfort before his own, René was to learn.
But at that moment, he marveled and thrilled to the stallion’s perfections, as he had the day he first saw him in the little green valley in the basin. Bright, in the dusk, gleamed his satiny skin as then. His head was held with the same high pride as when he’d kinged it over the mustang band. Proudly he stamped now, and René heard an iron ring. And wondered how in the world Zion had managed to get him shod?
As for Race, at this, his second close look at the stallion, all his first longing, with interest accrue
d in five years, swept him. But equally keen was his terror of the moment when Zion Jore would recognize him. He wanted to scream that he was René’s friend, so Zion would spare him. But that would identify him with the Jores to these officers. He was between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Zion took no notice of Race. Fastening his gaze on the sheriff, he asked, with a nod at René: “What are you doin’ with him? He ain’t done nothin’. It’s me you’re after … Zion Jore.”
At that cold, metallic tone, Race a thousand times preferred to take his chances with the law.
“You think you can take him to jail?” Zion’s wild laugh intensified that preference. “He’s my pardner!”
They stared, incapable of an answer. After a moment’s cool survey, Zion reined the stallion to one side of the trail, and motioned outward: “Drift!”
The deputy, leading René’s bay, dropped the rope as if it were a live rattlesnake and spurred out. The rest followed, all but the one leading Race’s roan, and he asked, with commendable courage: “How about this one? Does he stay?”
René was about to say yes, but Race got there first, screaming, as Zion’s eyes flicked to him: “No! I go! I go, I tell you! You can’t leave me here! I demand the protection of the law!”
But the deputy was taking his orders from Zion Jore.
Inquiringly, Zion looked at René, but, getting no sign, said shortly: “Take him along.”
René realized this was best. If Race left with Zion and him, he’d be classed with them, would be a fugitive, too, and if they were caught, pay the same penalty. This would convince them he wasn’t mixed up with the Jores, and they’d turn him loose. Race could hunt them, if he chose. Race knew he’d get Black Wing for him, if that could be done.
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