by Zane Grey
"Jud, I'll bet he does," replied Venters earnestly. "Remember what I say. This Lassiter is something more than a gunman. Jud, he's big... he's great! I feel that in him. God help Tull and Dyer when Lassiter does go after them. Horses and riders and stone walls won't save them."
"Wal, hev' it your way, Bern. I hope you're right. Nat'rully I've been some sore on Lassiter fer Bitten soft. But I ain't denyin' his nerve, or whatever's great in him thet sort of paralyzes people. No later'n this mornin' I seen him come saunterin' down the lane, quiet and slow. An' like his guns he comes black... black, thet's Lassiter. Wal, the crowd on the corner never batted an eye, an' I'll gamble my hoss thet there wasn't one who hed a heartbeat till Lassiter got by. He went in Snell's saloon, an', as there wasn't no gun play, I had to go in, too. An' there, darn my pictures, if Lassiter wasn't standin' at the bar, drinkin' an' talkin' with Oldring."
"Oldring," whispered Venters. His voice, as all fire and pulse within him, seemed to freeze.
"Let go my arm!" exclaimed Judkins. "Thet's my bad arm. Sure it was Oldring. What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? Venters, I tell you something's wrong. You're whiter'n a sheet. You can't be scared of the rustler. I don't believe you've got a scare in you. Wal, now, jest let me talk. You know I like to talk, an', if I'm slow, I allus git there sometime. As I said, Lassiter was talkin' chummy with Oldring. There isn't no hard feelin's. And the gang wasn't payin' no particular attention. But like a cat watchin' a mouse I hed my eyes on them two fellers. It was strange to me, that confab. I'm gittin' to think a lot fer a feller who doesn't know much. There'd been some queer deals lately an' this seemed to me the queerest. These men stood to the bar alone, an' so close their big gun hilts butted together. I seen Oldring was some surprised at first, an' Lassiter was cool as ice. They talked, an' presently at somethin' Lassiter said the rustler bawled out a curse, an' then he jest fell off against the bar, an' sagged there. The gang in the saloon looked around, an' laughed, an' thet's about all. Finally Oldring turned, an' it was easy to see somethin' hed shook him. Yes, sir, thet big rustler... you know he's as broad as he is long an' the powerfulest build of a man. Yes, sir, the nerve hed been taken out of him. Then, after a little he begun to talk, an' said a lot to Lassiter, an' by and by it didn't take much of an eye to see thet Lassiter was gittin' hit hard. I never saw him anyway but cooler'n ice... till then. He seemed to be hit harder'n Oldring, only he didn't roar out thet way. He jest kind of sunk in, an' looked an' looked, an' he didn't see a livin' soul in thet saloon. Then he sort of come to, an', shakin' hands, mind you... shakin' hands... with Oldring, he went out. I couldn't help thinkin' how easy even a boy could hev' dropped the great gunman then! Wal, the rustler stood at the bar fer a long time, an' he was seein' things far off, too, then he came to an' roared fer whisky, an' gulped a drink thet was big enough to drown me."
"Is Oldring here now?" whispered Venters. He could not speak above a whisper. Judkins's story had been so meaningful to him.
"He's at Snell's yet. Bern, I hev'n't told you yet thet the rustlers hev' been raisin' hell. They shot up Stone Bridge an' Glaze, an' fer three days they've been here, drinkin' an' gamblin' an' throwin' gold. These rustlers hev' a pile of gold. If it was gold dust or nugget gold, I'd hev' reason to think, but it's new coin gold, as if it hed jest come from the United States Treasury. An' the coin's genuine. Thet's all been proved. The truth is Oldring's on a rampage. A while back he lost his Masked Rider, an' they say he's wild about thet. I'm wonderin' if Lassiter could hev' told the rustler anythin' about thet little, masked, hard-ridin' devil. Ride! He was 'most as good as Jerry Card. An', Bern, I've been wonderin' if you know...."
"Judkins, you're a good fellow," interrupted Venters. "Someday I'll tell you a story. I've no time now. Take the horses to Jane."
Judkins stared, and then, muttering to himself, he mounted Bells, and stared again at Venters, and then, leading the other horses, he rode into the grove and disappeared.
Once long before, on the night Venters had carried Bess through the canon and up into Surprise Valley, he had experienced the strangeness of faculties singularly, tinglingly acute. Now the same sensation recurred. But it was different in that he felt cold-frozenmechanical-incapable of free thought, and all about him seemed unreal, aloof, remote. He hid his rifle in the sage, marking its exact location with extreme care. Then he faced down the lane and strode toward the center of the village. Perceptions flashed upon himfaint, cold touch of breeze, a cold, silvery trickle of flowing water, a cold sun shining out of a cold sky, song of birds and laughter of children coldly distant. Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. Colder and tighter stretched the skin over his face; colder and harder grew the polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his hands, as he wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low to his gun sheaths. Men, meeting him in the walk, gave him wide berth. In front of Bern's stare a crowd melted apart for his passage and their faces and whispers were faces and whispers of a dream. He turned a corner to meet Tull face to face, eye to eye. As once before he had seen this man pale to a ghastly livid white, so again he saw the change. Tull stopped in his tracks with right hand raised and shaking. Suddenly it dropped, and he seemed to glide aside, to pass out of Venters's sight. Next he saw many horses with bridles down-all clean-limbed, dark bays or blacks-rustlers' horses! Loud voices and boisterous laughter, rattle of dice and scrape of chair and clink of gold burst in mingled din from an open doorway. He stepped inside.
With the sight of smoke-hazed room and drinking, cursing, gambling, dark-visaged men, reality once more dawned upon Venters. His entrance had been unnoticed, and he bent his gaze upon the drinkers at the bar. Dark-clothed, dark-faced men they all were, burned by the sun, bowlegged as were most riders of the sage, but neither lean nor gaunt. Then Venters's gaze passed to the tables, and swiftly it swept over the hard-featured gamesters, to alight upon the huge, shaggy black head of the rustler chief.
"Oldring!" he cried, and to him his voice seemed to split a bell in his ears.
It stilled the din.
That silence suddenly broke to the scrape and crack of Oldring's chair as he rose, and then, while he paused, a great, gloomy figure, the thronged room stilled in silence yet deeper.
"Oldring, a word with you!" continued Venters.
"Ho! What have we here?" boomed Oldring in frowning scrutiny.
"Come outside, alone. A word for you... from your Masked Rider!"
Oldring kicked a chair out of his way and lunged forward with a stamp of heavy boots that jarred the floor. He waved down his muttering, rising men.
Venters backed out of the door and waited, hearing, as no sound had ever before struck into his soul, the rapid, heavy steps of the rustler.
Oldring appeared, and Venters had one glimpse of his great breadth and bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his high-top boots with gold spurs. In that moment Venters had a strange, unintelligible curiosity at seeing Oldring alive. The rustler's broad brow, his large black eyes, his sweeping beard, as dark as the wing of a raven, his enormous width of shoulder and depth of chest, his whole splendid presence so wonder fully charged with vitality and force and strength seemed to afford Venters with an unutterable, fiendish joy because for that magnificent manhood and life he meant cold and sudden death.
"Oldring! Bess is alive! But she's dead to you... dead to the life you made her lead... dead as you will be in one second!"
Swift as lightning Venters's glance dropped from Oldring's rolling eyes to his hands. One of them, the right, swept out, then down toward his gun-and Venters shot him through the heart.
Slowly Oldring sank to his knees, and the hand, dragging at the gun, fell away. Venters's exquisitely acute faculties grasped the meaning of that limp arm, of the swaying hulk, of the gasp and heave of the quivering beard. But was that awful spirit in the black eyes only one of vitality?
"Man! Why... didn't... you... wait! Bess... was...." Oldring's whisper died under his beard, and, with a heavy
lurch, he fell forward.
Bounding swiftly away, Venters fled around the corner, across the street, and, leaping a hedge, he ran through yard, orchard, and garden to the sage. There, under cover of the tall brush, he turned west and ran on to the place where he had hidden his rifle. Securing that, he again set out in a run and, circling through the sage, came up behind Jane Withersteen's stable and corrals. With laboring, dripping chest and pain as of a knife thrust in his side, he stopped to regain his breath, and, while resting, his eyes roved around in search of a horse. Doors and windows of the stable were open wide and had a deserted look. One dejected, lonely burro stood in the near corral. Strange, indeed, was the silence brooding over the once happy, noisy home of Jane Withersteen's pets.
He went into the corral, exercising care to leave no tracks, and led the burro to the watering trough. Venters, although not thirsty, drank till he could drink no more. Then, leading the burro over hard ground, he struck into the sage and down the slope.
He strode swiftly, turning from time to time to scan the slope for riders. His head just topped the level of sagebrush and the burro could not have been seen at all. Slowly the green of cottonwoods sank behind the slope, and at last a wavering, purple line of sage met the blue of the sky.
To avoid being seen, to get away, to hide his trail, these were the sole ideas in his mind as he headed for Deception Pass, and he directed all his acuteness of eye and ear, and the keenness of a rider's judgment for distance and ground, to stern accomplishment of the task. He kept to the sage far to the left of the trail leading into the pass. He walked ten miles, and looked back a thousand times. Always the graceful, purple wave of sage remained wide and lonely, a clear, undotted waste. Coming to a stretch of rocky ground, he took advantage of it to cross the trail, and then continued down on the right. At length he persuaded himself that he would be able to see riders mounted on horses before they could see him on the little burro, and he rode bareback.
Hour by hour the tireless burro kept to his faithful, steady trot. The sun sank and the long shadows lengthened down the slope. Moving veils of purple twilight crept out of the hollows and, mustering and forming on the levels, soon merged and shaded into night. Venters guided the burro nearer to the trail so that he could see its white line from the ridges, and rode on through the hours.
Once down in the pass, without leaving a trail, he would hold himself safe for the time being. When, late in the night, he reached the break in the sage, he sent the burro down ahead of him. Then he descended, loosening and dragging boulders behind him, and started an avalanche that all but buried him at the bottom of the trail. Bruised and battered as he was, he had a moment's elation, for he had hidden his tracks. Once more he mounted the burro and rode on. The hour was the blackest of the night when he made the thicket that enclosed his old camp. There he turned the burro loose in the grass near the spring, and then lay down on his old bed of leaves.
He felt only vaguely, as outside things, the ache and burn and throb of the muscles of his body. But a dammed-up torrent of emotion at last burst its bounds and the hour that saw his release from immediate action was one that confounded him in the reaction of his spirit. He suffered without understanding why. He caught glimpses into himself, into unlit darkness of soul. The fire that had blistered him-the cold which had frozen him-now united in one, torturing possession of his mind and heart and like a fiery steed with ice-shod feet ranged his being, ran rioting through his blood, trampling the resurging good, dragging ever at the evil.
Out of the subsiding chaos came a clear question: What had happened? He had left the valley to go to Cottonwoods. Why? It seemed that he had gone to kill a man-Oldring! The name pivoted his consciousness on the one man of all men on earth who he had wanted to meet. He had met the rustler. Venters recalled the smoky haze of the saloon, the dark-visaged men, the huge Oldring. He saw him step out of the door, a splendid specimen of manhood, a handsome giant with purple-black and sweeping beard. He remembered the inquisitive gaze of falcon eyes. He heard himself repeating-Oldring! Bess is alive! But she's dead to you... dead to the life you made her lead... dead as you will be in one second!-and he felt himself jerk, and his ears throbbed at the thunder of a gun, and he saw the giant sink slowly to his knees. Was that only the vitality of him-that awful light in the eyes-only the hard-dying life of a tremendously powerful brute? A broken whisper, strange as death-Man! Why... didn't... you... wait! Bess... was.... - and Oldring plunged face forward, dead.
"I killed him!" cried Venters in remembering shock. "But it wasn't that. Ah, the look in his eyes, and his whisper!"
Herein lay the secret that had clamored to him through all the tumult and stress of his emotions. What a look in the eyes of a man shot through the heart! It had been neither hate nor ferocity, or fear of man, or fear of death. It had been no passionate, glinting spirit of a fearless foe, willing shot for shot, life for life, but lacking physical power. Distinctly recalled now, never to be forgotten, Venters saw in Oldring's magnificent eyes the rolling of great, glad surprise-softness-love! Then came a shadow, and the terrible superhuman striving of a spirit to speak. Oldring, shot through the heart, had fought and forced back death, not for a moment in which to shoot or curse, but to whisper strange words.
What words for a dying man to whisper! Why had not Venters waited! For what? That was no plea for life. It was regret that there was not a moment of life left in which to speak. Bess was...? Herein lay renewed torture for Venters. What had Bess been to Oldring? The old question, like a specter, stalked from its grave to haunt him. He had overlooked, he had forgiven, he had loved, and he had forgotten, and now, out of the mystery of a dying man's whisper, rose again that perverse, unsatisfied, jealous uncertainty. Bess had loved that splendid, black-crowned giant-by her own confession she had loved him-and in Venters's soul again flamed up the jealous hell. Then into the clamoring hell burst the shot that had killed Oldring, and it rang in a wild, fiendish gladness, a hateful, vengeful joy. That passed to the memory of the love and light in Oldring's eyes and the mystery in his whisper. So the changing, swaying emotions fluctuated in Venters's heart.
This was the climax of his year of suffering, and the crucial struggle of his life. When the gray dawn came, he rose a gloomy, almost heartbroken man, but victor over evil passions. He could not change the past, and, even if he had not loved Bess with all his soul, he had grown into a man who would not change the future he had planned for her. Only, and once for all, he must know the truth, know the worst, stifle all these insistent doubts and subtle hopes and jealous fancies, and kill the past by knowing truly what Bess had been to Oldring. For that matter he knew-he had always known-but he must hear it spoken. Then, when they had safely gotten out of that wild country, to take up a new and an absorbing life, she would forget, she would be happy, and through that, in the years to come, he could not but find life worth living.
All day he rode slowly and cautiously up the pass, taking time to peer around corners, to pick out hard ground and grassy patches, and to make sure there was no one in pursuit. In the night some time he came to the smooth, scrawled rocks dividing the valley, and here set the burro at liberty. He walked beyond, climbed the slope, and the dim starlit gorge. Then, weary to the point of exhaustion, he crept into a shallow cave and fell asleep.
In the morning when he descended the trail, he found the sun was pouring a golden stream of light through the arch of the great stone bridge. Surprise Valley, like a valley of dreams, lay mystically soft and beautiful, awakening to the golden flood that was rolling away its slumberous bands of mist, brightening the walled faces.
While yet far off he discerned Bess, moving under the silver spruces, and soon the barking of the dogs told him they had seen him. He heard the mockingbirds singing in the trees, and then the twittering of quail. Ring and Whitie came bounding toward him, and behind them ran Bess, her hands outstretched.
"Bern! You're back! You're back!" she cried in a joy that rang of her loneliness.
"Yes, I'm back," he said as she rushed to meet him.
She had reached out for him when, suddenly, as she saw him clearly, something checked her, and as quickly all her joy fled and with it her color, leaving her pale and trembling.
"Oh... what's happened?"
"A good deal has happened, Bess. I don't need to tell you what. And I'm played out. Worn out in mind more than body."
"Dear'... you look strange to me," faltered Bess.
"Never mind that. I'm all right. There's nothing for you to be scared about. Things are going to turn out just as we planned. As soon as I'm rested, we'll make a break to get out of the country. Only now, right now... I must know the truth about you."
"Truth about me?" echoed Bess shrinkingly. She seemed to be casting back into her mind for a forgotten key.
Venters himself, as he saw her, received a pang. "Yes... the truth. Bess, don't misunderstand. I haven't changed... that way. I love you still. I'll love you more afterward. Life will be just as sweet... sweeter to us. We'll be... be married as soon as ever we can. We'll be happy. But there's a devil in me. A perverse, jealous devil! Then I've queer fancies. I forgot for a long time. Now all those fiendish little whispers of doubt and faith and fear and hope come torturing me again. I've got to kill them with the truth."
"I'll tell you anything you want to know," she replied frankly.
"Then, by heaven, we'll have it over and done with! Bess... did Oldring love you?"
"Certainly he did."
"Did... did you love him?"
"Of course. I told you so."
"How can you tell it so lightly?" cried Venters passionately. "Haven't you any sense of... of...?" He choked back speech. He felt the rush of pain and passion. He seized her in rude, strong hands and drew her close. He looked straight into her dark blue eyes. They were shadowing with the old, wistful light, but they were as clear as the limpid water of the spring. They were earnest, solemn in unutterable love and faith and abnegation. Venters shivered. He knew he was looking into her soul. He knew she could not lie in that moment, but that she might tell the truth, looking at him with those eyes, almost killed his belief in purity.