by Zane Grey
But Pecos Smith would not be hospitable to Don Felipe’s outfit, or any other questionable one. And long had Terrill dreaded the day.
Somewhere around this time came her birthday. She knew that it fell upon a Wednesday and that she would be nineteen years old, incredible as it seemed. But she did not know which day Wednesday was. Or was it her twentieth birthday? She had difficulty persuading herself that she was only nineteen, and over and over again she calculated events of the fleeting past. How swift the years! Yet what ages she had lived since the day she rode away from the old Southern home! Whenever she saw moss on a tree she suffered an exquisite pang.
“Mauree, how old am I?” she asked as the negress came by from her cabin.
“Honey, yo is eighteen.”
“No. I’m more than that. Nineteen at least.”
“How come yo tink ob dat, after all dese years?”
“I don’t know. But I feel terribly old.”
“Shucks, Rill, yo ain’t old,” replied Mauree, and then, after a careful glance around, to see if the coast was clear, she whispered, “Honey, is yo gonna keep on forebber bein’ a—a boy when yo’s a gurl?”
Terrill knew she had prompted this broaching of a long-forbidden subject. She could not scold Mauree and be honest, though the mere mention of her secret terrified her. But she had failed herself. After her father was gone she had accepted the deceit as the only defense possible to her. It had become endurable to live perpetually in fear of discovery—until that fateful day when she burst through the broken door of Brasse’s abode prison to look into the face of Pecos Smith. What had she not lived through since then?
“Oh, Mauree! Don’t whisper it! I’d fall dead in my tracks if—if he ever found me out.”
“But, chile, fer de good Lawd’s sake, it ain’t natch-ell. It ain’t right. Why yo’s a woman! How yo gonna hide dat bosom any longer? It’s heavin’ right dis minnit like a plate of jelly.”
Terrill pressed her hands to her tumultuous breast. Without and within that cried her sex. And it seemed to cry more than a physical secret, more than the lie she had lived—the strange emotion that had insidiously, imperceptibly grown upon her, until all-powerful, it had flung at her the terrifying truth of love.
“Mauree, I must hide it—I must,” she cried, and she meant this consuming torture, this thing that made her hot and cold by turns, that toyed with her peace, that ambushed her every mood, that awakened in her longings she had never dreamed of.
“But, yo fool chile, yo cain’t hide it,” ejaculated Mauree. “Yo nebber growed up in mind, but yo sho is a woman in body. I sew till I’se mos blind makin’ yo clothes to hide yo real self. But I can’t do it much mo. Why, if dis Pecos wuzn’t blind himself—a simple-minded boy who nebber knowed woman, he’d ’a’ guessed it long ago.”
“Oh, do—do you think he will—find me out?” faltered Terrill, in despair.
“He sho will, sooner or later.”
“What on earth can I—I do?”
“I dunno. Why yo so scared he’ll find you out?”
“It would be—terrible.”
“Chile, yo lub dis Pecos. Dat’s what ail yo so. De doomsday ob woman has done fell on yo.”
“Hush!” whispered Terrill, and she fled.
In the darkness of her room Terrill suffered an anquish of fact that had been but a dream. Mauree had called her child. If that were true, she grew out of childhood in this hour of realization. And when the wild shame and the nameless pang had eased, Terrill tried to face the crisis of her life. If she confessed to Pecos that her claim of masculinity had been a hoax, that for years she had worn the garb of a boy, first to please her father, and later to protect herself in that wild country—if she confronted him with the truth, would he not be so disgusted and alienated that he would leave her? It seemed to her that he would. And anything would be better than to be abandoned to the old fears, the lonely nights, the dreaded days—and now to this incomprehensible longing to see Pecos, to hear him, to know he was near, to shiver at a chance contact and to burn for more. No—she could not bear to lose him.
She must keep her miserable secret as long as she could, and when the unforseen betrayed her, if Pecos despised her unmaidenly conduct and left her—then there would be nothing to live for.
Terrill went back in retrospect to the last years of the war when her mother had trained her to meet the very part her father had forced her to play. Her mother had divined it. Hence the lessons and the talks and the prayers that had shaped Terrill’s spiritual life, that had kept her a child. Terrill’s sharpened intelligence told her that if she had not hidden her sex in the guise of a boy she never could have lived up to those aloof and noble teachings. To be a boy had earned the solitude she imagined she had hated. Her mother had the wise vision of the dying. Terrill would not have had it different.
But she was a woman now and this love had come upon her. What could she do to avert calamity? She had suffered through love of mother, love of father, and suffered still. This thing, however, was different. And she realized that now, with the scales dropped from her eyes, she would be uplifted to heaven one moment and plunged into hell the next. Still, if she were a woman she could find strength and cunning to hide that. Else what was it to grow into a woman? If she were clever Pecos might never find her out and never leave her.
Then came another startling thought, like a lightning flash in the night, and it was that she wanted him to find out she was a woman. Longed for it almost as terribly as she feared he might! Between these two agonies she must live and fight for what she knew not. A woman’s intuition of hitherto unknown powers of subtlety or reserve, of incalculable possibilities, paralleled in her mind this sense of a tragic suspension between two states.
Outside on the porch a step sounded—a step that had never failed to thrill or shake her, and now set her stiff on her bed, with a heart that seemed to still its beats to listen.
“Mauree, where’s thet darned Terrill?” drawled Pecos, at the door.
“I dunno,” lied the negress, nonchalantly.
“Dog-goneit! Nobody knows nothin’ aboot this hyar shack,” complained Pecos. “Hyar I slave myself damn near daid while Sambo goes gunnin’ around, an’ thet boy sleeps or loafs on me. I’m gonna bust up the outfit.”
Of late Pecos had talked in that strain, something unprecedented. Yet his solicitude, his unfailing watchfulness, and a something indefinable that was so sweet to Terrill—these belied his complaints. Terrill trembled there in the darkness on her little bed.
“Yo is?”
“Yas, I is,” snorted Pecos.
“Pecos, yo done pretty good hyar wid us. Yo be a damnation idgit to throw us away lak rags now.”
“Say, who said thet?”
“Not Mars Rill. No, suh. It was dat no-good yaller niggah of mine. He sed it.”
“Ahuh. Wal, Mauree, it’s true. An’ I’m a liar. Why, I couldn’t no more leave Terrill than go back to thet old life of driftin’, drinkin’, shootin.”
“Mars Pecos, I’se sho glad. For why yo talk dat way, den?”
“Wal, I gotta talk to somebody or I’ll bust. Sambo runs off huntin’ like a canebrake nigger. An’ Terrill lays down on me, all day long.”
“Nobody to lub yo, huh? Mars Pecos, what yo need is a woman.”
“Ha! Ha! Thet’s a good one. … Lord! who’d ever have me, Mauree?”
“Yo’s a blame handsome vaquero, Pecos.”
“Wal, if I am, it never did me any good. Mauree, I never really had a—a woman, in my life.”
“Lawd amercy! Yo is a liar.”
“Honest, Mauree.”
“I believes no man, Pecos, white or black.”
“Yu wouldn’t believe this, either. I’d give my half of our T L cattle to have a decent pretty girl to love me. One yu know thet hadn’t been pawed familiar by some man. I reckon I’d hug an’ kiss her ’most to death.”
“Pecos, I’se sho yo could git some black-eyed greaser wench fer less’n d
at.”
“Hullo, heah’s Sambo,” said Pecos, at the sound of heavy steps on the porch.
“Whar yo been, niggah?”
“I’se been huntin’, woman.”
“What fo’ yo hunt when yo cain’t hit nothin’?”
“Pecos, I’se hung up a fine fat deer.”
“Good. I’m tired of beef. How’s supper comin’?”
“’Mos’ ready. Yo kin call Rill.”
“Sambo, put on some wood so we can see to eat. … Hey, Terrill! … Are you shore he’s in?”
“Yas, Mars Pecos.”
Pecos called again, louder this time. But Terrill, secure in some delicious late-mounting sense of power, lay perfectly silent.
“Terrill!”
Ordinarily such a stentorian yell from Pecos would have scared Terrill out of her boots. All it did now was to send the blood rushing back to her heart.
“Ughh-huh,” replied Terrill, drowsily.
“Yu come out heah.”
Terrill got up, and slipping on a new blouse Mauree had given her that day, she stepped from the darkness of her room into the fire-lit living-room.
“What’s all the hollering aboot, Pecos?” inquired Terrill, demurely, and with a yawn she stretched her arms high, and looked him straight in the eyes, with her new-found duplicity.
But a glance was all he gave her. “I’ve been worried aboot you. An’ supper is ready.”
No meal had ever been so enjoyable as this one to Terrill, so fraught with the delicious peril of her situation, so monstrously intriguing with a consciousness of her falsehood.
“Boy, you don’t eat much. What ails yu?” said Pecos, before they had finished.
“Can’t I fall a little off my feed without worrying you?” demanded Terrill, petulantly.
“I reckon yu cain’t do anythin’ off color without worryin’ me.”
They got up presently. Terrill pulled a rustic armchair closer to the fire, while Pecos filled his pipe. Sambo and Mauree sat down to eat their meal. Pecos took a long look out into the black night, then closed the door.
“Yu hyar thet wind, boy?” queried Pecos, as he drew the other chair up. “Blowin’ the real del norte tonight. Heah thet rain!—Dog-gone if it ain’t nice an’ homey hyar! Fire feels so good. … Terrill, if it wasn’t for them damn rustlers I’m lookin’ for I’d come darn near bein’ happy heah with yu.”
“Same heah,” murmured Terrill, trusting her gaze on the fire. “But I’d ’most forgot Don Felipe’s outfit. … Pecos, will those vaqueros of his dare to steal our stock now?”
“Shore. Even if they did know Pecos Smith was on the job they’d take watchin’. Yu see we’ve a string of old cattle and new branded mavericks for twenty miles an’ more down the river. We’ve put our brand on aboot every maverick in the brakes. Thet’s goin’ to rile Felipe’s outfit. They’ll take to brand-burnin’.”
“But we could recognize any burning out of our brand,” protested Terrill.
“Shore we could—if we ever see it. There’s the rub. Thet outfit won’t burn a strange brand on our cattle an’ turn them out, as has been the custom of brand-burners. They’ll throw a herd together an’ drive it pronto.”
“Oughtn’t we ride down the river and see? They don’t have to come through our place to get down into the brakes.”
“Shore we’ll go, soon as this norther blows out. … Come to think of it, I’d better work some on yore rifle. I saved it from rustin’, but thet darned sand is shore hard to get out.”
“Say, I filled myself full of water and sand that day,” retorted Terrill.
“Pretty close shave, son,” responded Pecos, shaking his head.
Sambo fetched the rifle to Pecos, who worked the action. There was still a grating sound of sand inside.
“I reckon some boilin’ water will do the trick.”
“Pecos, can’t you get me a smaller rifle? This one almost kicks the daylights out of me. Bad as that old Sharps of Dad’s.”
“Shore, when we take thet trip next spring with our herd of cattle.”
“Oh, it’s so terribly long. Let’s go now.”
“An’ leave our stock for those outfits to clean up? Not much. We’ll go next spring after we’ve done some cleanin’ up ourselves.”
When Pecos drawled one of his cool assumptions like that, Terrill had no reply ready. She could not repress a shudder. This vaquero spoke of a fight as carelessly as of a ride. That dampened Terrill’s spontaneity for the time being, and rather than have Pecos see that she was downcast she went to bed. But sleep was not to be soon wooed. She had done nothing to make her tired physically, and her emotions seemed to have transformed her into another creature. Wherefore she lay snug in her warm blankets, wide eyes staring into the blackness, thinking, wondering about the future and Pecos. He filled her whole life now. There was no one else; there was nothing else.
Meanwhile her senses were alive to the del norte. The norther was a familiar thing to Terrill and she hated it, especially at night, when the conformation of the canyon and the structure of the cabin made sounding-boards for the gale. It moaned and shrieked and roared by turns. During these lulls Pecos could be heard talking to Sambo. After a while, however, this sound ceased and the cabin was silent. Then the monstrous loneliness of Lambeth Canyon assailed Terrill as never before, even in the far past, when she had first come there. She was not a man. It was solemn black night, full of weird voices of the storm, fraught with the menace of the wild range, and she had been forced into womanhood, with a woman’s love and hunger, which she must cruelly hide, flooding her wakeful hours with the inexorable and inscratable demands of life.
Next day the norther blew out of a clear sky, and the sheltered sunny spots in the canyon were the desirable ones.
Terrill got around to work again with Pecos, and no task frightened her. Moods were of no use. It had done her no good to brood, to sulk, or dream, unless to incur Pecos’ solicitude, which was at once a torture and a delight to her. When he came searching for her, patient, kind, somehow different, she had to fight a wild desire to throw herself into his arms. She would do that some day; she knew she would. Then—the deluge!
She could do justice to any boy’s labor for a day. And since she had discovered that what little peace of mind she achieved was when she was working with Pecos, she embraced it. She never did anything in moderation. And toward the close of this day she got scolded for overdoing.
“Say, I can pack a log with any boy,” she retorted, secretly pleased at his observation, yet becoming conscious again of a slight difference in him. Perhaps she imagined it. Whereupon she reverted to a former character, just to see if she could rouse him as she used to. But Pecos did not lose his temper; he did not chase her, or slap her on the back, or make any objection to her omissions.
The norther passed and the warm days came again. Then it was delightful weather. Working about the ranch was pleasant. Terrill marveled at the improvements and wished her father had lived to see them. Pecos could turn his hand to anything.
“When are we going to ride down the river?” Terrill asked more than once. But Pecos was evasive about this. And she observed that though he had always been watchful, he seemed to grow more so these late November days.
Time slipped by. And every night Terrill said her prayers—as she had never ceased to do—and wept, and hugged her secret, and dreamed wild and whirling dreams. And every morning when she awakened she made new resolves not to be such a little fool this day and to avoid the crazy incomprehensible things she had done in the past. Only to find that she grew worse!
She could not leave Pecos alone. She was unhappy when he was out of her sight. She was unhappier when she was with him because the sweetness of it, the havoc that threatened, were harder to bear than loneliness. Lastly Terrill detected a new mood in Pecos, or one she had never noticed before. Either he was worried or melancholy, or both, but neither of these states of mind was evinced by him while Terrill was present. It was only when he
thought he was alone that he betrayed them. Terrill got into the habit of peeping through a chink between the logs of her partition, when she was supposed to have gone to bed and when Pecos sat before the fire. Something was wrong with him. Was he growing sick of this tame life around Lambeth Ranch? Terrill grew cold all over, and longed for something to happen, for rustlers to raid their stock, for that horrid Breen Sawtell to come, and even Don Felipe. Everything, however, served only to add fuel to the fire of her love, until she felt that it was consuming her.
For a long while Terrill had kept faith in the belief that it was enough just to have Pecos there. But this grew to be a fallacy. One of her particularly impish moods betrayed this to her. A weakness of Pecos’ had been hard to find but he had one. He simply could not bear to be tickled. Terrill had found it out by accident, and upon divers occasions had exercised the prerogative of a boy to surprise Pecos and dig strong little fingers into his ribs. The effect had been galvanizing; moreover, it proved to be something she could not resist.
Pecos was husking corn and did not know Terrill had stealthily stolen up behind him. He was sitting on a sack back of the corral. Sambo was packing the cornstalks up from the field and depositing them in front of Pecos. Both of them were tremendously proud of the little patch of corn they had raised. It was a fine warm day and Pecos sat in his shirt sleeves, husking the sheaths off the ears and tossing the latter into a golden pile.
Terrill’s step was that of a mouse. She got right behind Pecos before he had the slightest inkling of her presence. Then, extending two brown hands with fingers spread like the claws of an eagle, she shot them out to rake his ribs with a fiendish glee.
Pecos let out a yelp. He fell off the sack in a spasmodic wrestling, with Terrill on top of him.
“You little devil!” he rasped, snatching at her.
Terrill would have been frightened if she had not been in the throes of other sensations. But her usual nimbleness failed her, although she got clear of Pecos. However, before she ran twenty feet she fell upon her face in the grass. Pecos pounced upon her. He knelt astride of her and dug his long steel-like fingers into her ribs. Terrill passed from one paroxysm to another. Even if she had not been exquisitely ticklish, such contact from Pecos’ hands would have driven her well-nigh crazy. He was yelling at her all the time, but she could not distinguish what the words were. Then, letting up on her ribs, Pecos boxed her ears and got up.
