Robber's Roost (1989)

by Grey, Zane

  There had been a trail here once, as was proved by a depressed line on the gravelly earth. When Jim surmounted this barren divide he suddenly was confronted by an amazing and marvelous spectacle.

  "Blue Valley!" he ejaculated.

  Below him opened a narrow, winding valley, green as emerald with its cottonwoods and willows. Only in the distance did it shine blue under the hot sun. Through it the Dirty Devil wound a meandering course, yellow as a bright ribbon. It was bank full in swirling flood. And from where it left the valley, which point Jim could not see, a dull chafing of waters came to his ears.

  "Blue Valley! . . . Helen, we're out of the brakes! . . . Safe!

  Mormons live here."

  She heard him, for she smiled up into his face, glad for his sake, but in her exhaustion beyond caring for her own.

  There was no sign of habitations, nor any smoke. But Jim knew this was Blue Valley. It was long, perhaps fifteen miles, and probably the farms were located at the head, where irrigation had been possible. How could even Mormon pioneers utilize that ferocious river?

  The startling beauty of this lost valley struck Jim next. It resembled a winding jewel of emerald and amethyst, set down amid barren hills of jasper and porphyry, and variegated mosaics of foothills waving away on the left, and golden racks of carved rocks, and mounds of brown clay and dunes of rusty earth. All these were stark naked, characterized by thousands of little eroded lines from top to bottom. The purple butte to the west dominated this scene, so magnificent in its isolation and its strange conformation, that it dwarfed a yellow mesa looming over the valley.

  Jim followed the lead pack-horse down into gumbo mud. The floor of the valley supported a mass of foliage besides the stately cottonwoods. Sunflowers burned a riot of gold against the green.

  Willows and arrowweed and grass, and star-eyed daisies sprang in luxuriant profusion out of the soil. And at every step a horse hoof sank deep, to come forth with a huge cake of mud.

  At midday Jim passed deserted cabins, some on one side of the river, some on the other. They did not appear so old, yet they were not new. Had Blue Valley been abandoned? Jim was convinced it could not be so. But when he espied a deserted church, with vacant eyelike windows, then his heart sank. Helen must have rest, care, food. He was at the end of his resources.

  An hour later he toiled past a shack built of logs and stones, and adjoining a dugout, set into the hill. People had lived there once, but long ago. Old boots and children's shoes lying about, the remains of a wagon, a dismantled shovel and a sewing-machine, gave melancholy manifestation of the fact that a family had abode there.

  Jim's last hope fled. He was still far from the head of the valley, but apparently he had left the zone of habitation behind.

  The afternoon waned. The horses plodded on, slower and slower, wearying to exhaustion. Helen was a dead weight. Despair had seized upon him, when he turned a yellow corner between the slope and the cottonwoods, to be confronted by a wide pasture at the end of which a log-cabin nestled among cottonwoods. A column of blue smoke rose lazily against the foliage. And behind this transfiguring sight loomed the purple butte, commanding in its lofty height, somehow vastly more to Jim than a landmark.

  The horses labored out of the mud to higher ground. Jim rode up to the cabin. Never in all his life had he been so glad to smell smoke, to see a garden, to hear a dog bark. His ever-quick eye caught sight of a man who had evidently been watching, for he stepped out on the porch, rifle in hand. Jim kept on to the barred gate. There were flowers in the yard and vines on the cabin--proof of feminine hands. And he saw a bed on the porch.

  "Hello!" he shouted, as he got off carefully, needing both hands to handle Helen.

  "Hullo, yourself!" called the man, who was apparently curious but not unfriendly. Then as Jim let down a bar of the gate with his foot, this resident of Blue Valley leaned his rifle against the wall and called to some one within.

  Jim hurried on to the porch and laid Helen on the bed. She was so exhausted that she could not speak, but she smiled at Jim. Her plight was evident. Then Jim straightened up to look at the man.

  Friend or foe--it made no difference to Jim--because here he would see that Helen received the care and food that she needed. Jim could deal with men. His swift gaze, never so penetrating, fell upon a sturdy individual of middle age--a typical pioneer of the Mormon breed, still-faced and bearded. The instant Jim looked into the blue eyes, mildly curious, he knew that, whoever the man was, he had not heard of the abduction of Herrick's sister.

  "Howdy, stranger!"

  "My name's Wall," said Jim, in reply, slowly reckoning for words.

  "Mine's Tasker. Whar you from?"

  "Durango. . . . My--my wife and I got lost. She wasn't strong.

  She gave out. I'm afraid she's in bad shape."

  "She shore looks bad. But the Lord is good. If it's only she's tuckered out."

  "What place is this?"

  "Blue Valley."

  "And where is Blue Valley?"

  "Sixty miles from Torrey."

  "Torrey? Never heard of it."

  "It's a Mormon settlement, friend. Yes, I've stuck it out here, but I'll be givin' up soon. No use tryin' to fight thet Dirty Devil River. Five years ago there was eighty people livin' hyar.

  Blue Valley has a story, friend--"

  "One I'd be glad to hear," interrupted Jim. "Will you help me? I have money and can pay you."

  "Stay an' welcome, friend. An' keep your money. Me an' my womenfolks ask nothin' fer good will toward those in need."

  "Thank--you," Jim replied, huskily. "Will you call them to look after my--my wife?"

  Helen was staring up at Jim with wondering, troubled eyes.

  "Is everything all right?" she asked, faintly.

  "Yes, if to find friends an' care is that," replied the Mormon, kindly. Then he stepped to the door to call within. "Mary, this rider was not alone. It was his wife he was carryin'. They got lost in the brakes an' she gave out. We must take them in."

  Chapter 18

  That night, after the good Mormons assured Jim that Helen was just worn out and she had smiled a wistful guaranty of that, Jim went to sleep under the cottonwoods and never moved for seventeen hours.

  When he awoke it seemed to be a transfigured world. The Dirty Devil had ceased its rumble. There was a sunset glory crowning the purple butte--a light that seemed not of the earth. Some day soon Jim promised himself the reward of climbing high where he could see this challenging sentinel that had so guided him. It had done more-- what, he could not tell, any more than he understood the thing that had come to him in the fury and thunder of the storm. But he felt almost free of terrible fetters, of a past that had gone.

  At supper the Mormon bowed his head and prayed: "O Lord, bless this food to our use. Bless this good stranger within our gates.

  Heal his wife and send them on their journey rejoicin' in Thy name.

  Amen."

  That night Jim heard the sad story of Blue Valley and the brief conquest of the Dirty Devil. Yet, singularly, this settlement had ever been given a wide berth by the rustlers and robbers of Utah.

  At least, when strange riders went through, as used to happen in former days, they left only pleasant recollection. The Mormon, accustomed to loneliness and loving men, loosed his tongue; and when Jim went to bed that night he knew where and how to go out of the country.

  Helen sat up the second day, white and shaky indeed, but recovering with a promise that augured well. Her eyes hung upon Jim with a mute observance. They haunted him in his walks along the river, under the cottonwoods where the sunflowers followed the sun with their faces, and at night when he watched the stars. He never went far from the cabin. He had never yet climbed to make his in memory forever that grand purple butte. Factory Butte the Mormon called it, and there was where he dug the coal he burned. No blade of grass or bit of shrub grew upon this mountain. It would not sustain life. Even the eagles shunned it.

  Next morning while
the women were at work in the fields and Tasker was away somewhere, Jim approached Helen on the porch. She sat in a home-made rocking-chair, and she had marvelously improved, considering the short space of time. Her hair, once again under care, shone like burnished gold.

  "Well, you look wonderful this morning," he said. "We must begin to think of getting away from this haven of rest."

  "Oh, I'm able to start," she replied, eagerly. "We mustn't overdo it. Tomorrow, perhaps. And then, if we're lucky, in three days you'll be back at Star Ranch. . . . And I--"

  His evident depression, as he broke off, checked her vivid gladness.

  "You will never go back to--to your old life?" she questioned, quickly.

  "No, so help me God! This I owe to you alone, Helen. It will be possible now for me even to be happy. But enough of myself. . . .

  You are gaining daily. Oh, you have such beauty! . . . But--we are still in the wilds of Utah, with its strange secret, underground channels. With its Dirty Devils! . . . I have traded two of the horses for Tasker's light wagon. I will take you to the stage line and soon you will be at Grand Junction."

  Jim ceased. Her hands slipped from her eyes, to expose them wide, filmed with tears, through which shone that which made him flee.

  "Wait--please wait!" she called after him as he made with giant strides for the gate. But he did not go back. If she pitied him he did not want to see it.

  This time he made for the bluff which he had promised himself he would climb. He had to walk far to cross the deep gully out in the level floor of the valley. And he found the bluff farther away and much higher than it had looked from the ranch. And then what had appeared the top was only a rim of a slope, rising gradually to a rock-studded summit.

  At last, hot and wet, with his heart thumping audibly against his ribs, and his breath coming in whistling pants, he surmounted the ridge.

  Then he stood transfixed and gasping. The wild brakes, the mysterious canyon country, the illimitable, lilac-hued escarpments, the grand, black-sloped, white-peaked Henry Mountains--these lost incomparably to the scene unrolled before his rapt eyes.

  Far out there on a plain rose the butte which had influenced him from afar. But he had seen only its crown. This pyramid towered alone and its effect was staggering. Jim had spent days and weeks in the silence and solitude of the brakes; and now he recognized the top of this butte as the one he had so many times watched with longing, as the loftiest and farthest point from his prison in Robbers' Roost. It had typified not only freedom, but for him the unattainable. His idle, dreaming thoughts, gaining a foothold now and then in the interstices of his plans of blood and capture, had made of this rock thing a goal.

  And now not only was it a possession of magnifying vision, but something he had attained symbolically.

  From the bluff a gulf yawned at his feet leagues wide in every direction, dominated by this phenomenon of nature in the center.

  It was a naked plain. Beginning under him the rust-colored rocks, ragged as a stubblefield, marched in an endless circle round the margin of that vast plain. Barren threaded soil and stone, deceiving the eye, stretched on and on, for miles and miles, to the first rise of the base of this incredible butte. Ridged and traced, the slow upheaval of the mountain burned to flaming saffron, which merged into blue, and that to violet, and through all the darker shades, up and up the swelling slopes, with their millions of tiny irregular lines of cleavage, to the great wall of purple-black that crowned the peak.

  The creation which had built this stupendous edifice of isolation and grandeur, flaunting its millions of years, yet melancholy with the evidence of decay and erosion that would sometime lay it flat on the plain--the Nature or the Omniscience that had made it was responsible for him, for his unwelcomed birth, his wayward boyhood, his footsteps that partook of evil, and the maturity that had seen his moral collapse and his victory. He had looked upon a physical thing that typified his conception of himself. And the future held the same for both.

  But inscrutably, though none the less surely, he felt that he had arisen out of that whorled and traced rock, alive, with beating heart, with mind and soul and will, and in that he was incalculably more. He had risen out of the depths, he had found love, the greatness of which might be denied better men.

  In the moonlit hour that night, late, when the good Taskers had gone to well-earned rest, Jim heard his name called. He ran with swift, noiseless feet to Helen's bedside.

  "You did not come back," she whispered. "I cannot sleep. . . .

  There is something I--want to say."

  He sat down upon the bedside and clasped her hand in his, to look down into the white face, with its unfathomable, midnight eyes.

  "Is your real name Jim Wall?" she asked, with more composure.

  "No. I will tell it, if you wish."

  "Are you a free man?"

  "Free? What do you mean? Yes, free--of course!"

  "You called me your--your wife to these kind people."

  "I thought that best. They would be less curious."

  "I was not offended--and I understood. . . . I want you to go back to Star Ranch with me."

  "You ask me--that!" he exclaimed incredulously.

  "Yes, I do."

  "But you will be perfectly safe. Some one will drive you from Grand Junction."

  "Perhaps. Only I'll never FEEL safe in Utah again--unless you are near. I've had too great a shock, Jim. I suppose one of your Western girls could have stood this adventure. But this was my first rough experience. It was a--a little too much."

  "I can never go back to Star Ranch," he replied, gravely.

  "Why not? Because you are--you WERE a member of a robber gang? I had an ancestor who was a robber baron. To be a robber is not such a degradation--provided he be great--like you."

  "That's not the reason," he said.

  "What is it--then?"

  "If I leave you now--soon as I've placed you in good hands--I can ride off in peace--go to Arizona, or somewhere, and be a cowboy-- and be happy in the memory of having served you and loved you--and through that having turned my back on the old life. . . . But if I went back to Star Ranch--to see you every day--to--to--"

  "To ride with me," she interfered, softly.

  "Yes--to ride with you," he went on, hoarsely. "That'd be like what you called your rough experience--a little too much. It would be terribly too much. I'm only human."

  "Faint heart never won fair lady," she whispered, averting her face and withdrawing her hand. "Jim, I believe if I were you, I'd risk it."

  Jim gazed down at the clear-cut profile, at the shadowed eyes, hair silvered in the moonlight; then stricken and mute, he rushed away.

  Chapter 19

  Before dawn Jim had beaten his vain and exalted consciousness into a conviction that the heaven Helen hinted at for him was the generosity of a woman's heart. She could not yet be wholly herself. He must not take advantage of that. But to reassure her he decided he would conduct her to Star Ranch, careful never to reopen that delicate and impossible subject, and after she was safely there and all was well, he would ride away in the night, letting his silence speak his farewell.

  At sunrise Jim acquainted Tasker with his desire to leave for Torrey, provided Helen felt recovered sufficiently.

  "Reckon I'd better see you through Capital Wash an' as fur as Torrey," replied the Mormon.

  That was a relief to Jim. A whole day with its endless scenes and incidents, and the companionship of the Mormon, might make it possible for him to stand by his resolve.

  At breakfast and in the bustle of departure he was sure Helen felt something aloof and strange in him, and he dared not meet her thoughtful eyes.

  Soon they were on the way, Helen comfortably settled in the back of the two-seated wagon, and Jim riding beside Tasker in front.

  Factory Butte furnished a fascinating hour for Jim, and from that on the scenery lost nothing by its vicinity to this grand monument.

  The Mormon was talkative and told the sto
ry of Blue Valley, and other narratives relative to the region. Capital Wash was a rent through a high ridge of red rock and the road was a stream bed, running free with muddy water. Toward the end, this passage grew to be a splendid canyon.

  A Mormon rancher, at whose place Tasker stopped, invited them to pass the night at his house, and next morning take the road from there to Grand Junction, which could be reached in a long day's drive. Jim accepted both invitation and advice. In the morning Tasker bade them good-by and Godspeed.

  "Thank you, Mr. Tasker," replied Helen. "I shall remember your kindness. And I'd like to buy back the two horses Jim traded you."

  "I'll fetch them, if you'll tell me where," replied the Mormon.

  "Star Ranch, north of Grand Junction."

  "I've heerd of thet. Wal, you may expect me some day, though I had taken a likin' to your bay hoss."

  Jim drove off in the clear cold air of a mountain autumn morning before the sun had come up.

  "Helen, you shouldn't have asked him to fetch the horses," said Jim, reprovingly. "He'll find out I lied."

  "Lied! What about?"

  "I told Tasker you were my wife."

  "Oh, that!" laughed Helen, and turned away a scarlet face. "It can be explained easily--if necessary. . . . Look!--This glorious country! . . . No, I don't ever want to leave it."

  Somehow Jim got through that long ride of suspense, fear, and thrills, and when they reached Grand Junction just after dark, it was none too soon for him. Fortunately, he got Helen into the little inn before she was recognized, and then returned to put the tired horses in the care of a stable-boy. Jim did not risk entering store or saloon. Hays had secret friends there. Yet Jim was keen to hear the gossip about Star Ranch. He was late for supper, having taken time to shave and change his shirt.

  To his surprise, he found Helen radiant.

  "What do you think Bernie has done?"

  "Bernie!" ejaculated Jim.

  "Yes. My brother. This good woman told me. . . . Jim, you are the richer by ten thousand dollars."

  "Richer? . . . Me!"

  "Indeed. Bernie offered ten thousand dollars for my safe return."