West of the Pecos

by Zane Grey

  Terrill appeared coming around the table, upon which she deposited some articles. Pecos did not look up, yet he saw her. It was Terrill and still not Terrill. The same small boots with the worn trousers carelessly tucked in the tops! But instead of the omnipresent loose coat or shirt she wore something white. He caught that without really looking.

  “Pecos, have you another shirt?” she asked, standing thrillingly close beside him, with a hand on his arm.

  “Yes, it’s up in the loft. I’ll put it on after.”

  “This one is gone. Today has shore been rough on our shirts.” She uttered a wonderful little low laugh, deep and rich, that tingled Pecos clear to his toes. What could have made all this difference in a boy he had known so well?

  Terrill cut his ragged bloody sleeve off just below his shoulder.

  “This can’t be a bullet hole,” she said.

  “Cut myself on a snag.”

  With deft capable hands Terrill washed the wound, anointed it with salve, and bound it securely.

  “This one on your haid!—I’m almost afraid to look at it.”

  “Wal, never mind, Terrill, if it’ll sicken yu. Sambo’ll do all right.”

  “I shall dress it.” She wet a towel in hot water and soaked the stiff bandage off and bathed the wound, which Pecos was sure consisted only of a shallow groove. “O my God!” she whispered, very low, as if to her inmost soul. “One inch lower—and life would have been over for me!”

  “But, Terrill, it’s my haid,” said Pecos, rather blankly. That speech of hers would require long cogitation.

  Terrill appeared slow over this task. Her touch was not so sure, so steady. Pecos felt her fingers tremble upon his brow. She hovered over him, from one side to the other. There was a slight soft contact to which his over-sensitive nerves reacted outrageously. He never raised his half-closed eyes. He saw the white garments as a blur, too close for clear vision. But her round arms were bare to the elbows, golden brown at the wrists, then white as milk. Once, as she leaned over him, to work with the difficult bandaging on the far side of his head, she had only to drop her arms a trifle and they would be round his neck. Pecos longed for this so dreamily, so poignantly, that when he awoke to it he thought he was crazy.

  “There! If you don’t roll in your sleep it will stay,” she was saying.

  “Sleep!—I’ll never sleep no more around heah. … Thanks, Terrill. I reckon yore a fair doctor.”

  Pecos stalked out upon the grass without any definite aim. If he had kept on he would have stalked over the bank into the river. But he stopped. The sun was setting in wondrous hues; the river gloomed, a winding purple band with silver edges; the great wall stood up, receiving the golden blast of sunset; and the canyon lay under a canopy of spreading rays and dropping veils.

  Where had it gone—the menace, the peril, the raw wild life that hid behind the beauty, the solitude of the Pecos? A vision came to him, not unlike the dreams of the pioneer, of a time when the hard lives of vaqueros and cattlemen, the brutality of the range, the mingled blood of rustler and avenger, the raid of the Comanche, all would vanish in a sense of security in neighbors up and down the roads, in the tranquillity of homes, in the prosperity of endless herds of cattle. That was the promise of the glory of the sunset. Otherwise all hope and strife toward such an end would be futile.

  But the vast Pecos range must ever be lonely, gray, brooding, hot as a furnace in the summers, cold in winters, when the bitter northers blew, a barren land of scaly ridges for leagues and leagues, a grazing wilderness for numberless cattle, from which the coyote and the buzzard would never disappear. It was what this country was that chained Pecos to it. But for men like Watson and women like Terrill, whose destinies had set them there, Pecos could have foregone the dream of the pioneer to write a bloodier name across that frontier. Better men than he had done no less. Texas had been a battleground, and was blood-soaked from river to river. No Texans but had been born to fight—no Texans ever survived who did not fight! But the best of manhood survived in the longing for homes. This era of guns and nooses, of the burned brand and the hard-eyed outlaw, would pass some day.

  In that moment of exultation Pecos divined he had always been on the right trail. If he had lost the letter of it at times and had veered from it in spirit, yet he had always come back to plant his feet right. His past tracks had had to be bitterly reckoned with; there might be more and worse before the years covered them with dust, but he would never again make a false step.

  A voice called him to supper and it was that same changed voice. As he turned to go back to the cabin he espied a gleam of white moving away from the door. Terrill had been watching him.

  Pecos went in resolved to be natural. If he had been wise and great enough to forestall events, there would never have been any reason to blot out this tragic day. Sambo had put mesquite knots on the fire, as the bright ruddy light and sweet fragrance testified. Terrill sat at the other end of the table, as she had always done. But nothing else could ever have been so different.

  Her hair was parted in the middle. It rippled and shone like the ripples of the river when the sunset fell upon them. Her face was as white as if it had never worn any golden tan. Her eyes were large, dark, luminous, windows of myriads of emotions. And under them shadows as deep and mysterious enhanced their havoc. But her features alone could not have accounted for the disturbing transformation from boy to girl. That white waist! It was old-fashioned—as compared with those Mary Heald had worn—and it fitted Terrill poorly. It had been a girl’s waist and now it graced a budding woman. It was open a little at the top, no doubt because Terrill could not close it, and slightly exposed the graceful swell of her neck. For the rest there was the contour of breast that thrilled Pecos while it stabbed him with the memory of his unintentional sacrilege.

  His prolonged stare, or something in his look, brought the vivid blood to Terrill’s face. She appeared nervous, timid, shy, yet her eyes hung upon him hauntingly. What had she to fear in him? He knew now, and she must never know that he had long been aware of her secret. Then he remembered what Sawtell had said, and there came a break in his feeling.

  “I can’t eat,” she said, after she had tried. “I—I can’t be natural, either. … Pecos, are you shocked—angry?”

  “Don’t think aboot things,” he answered, rather gruffly. He was thinking about things himself. What could he do if she looked at him like that, with such strangely hungry eyes?

  “But, Pecos—if I—if we don’t talk—it’ll be harder,” she rejoined, with singular pathos.

  Sambo, who sat before the fire, came to their rescue. “Boss, I’se powerful curious ’boot whar yo got dat bump on yo’ haid.”

  “Wal, I’ll tell yu,” replied Pecos, never before so willing to talk.

  “Please, Pecos, tell us,” added Terrill, eagerly.

  “Wait till I drink this coffee,” he replied, and presently got up to light a Mexican cigarette, one of the few he had smoked since the trip to Camp Lancaster. “I got down to the Y Canyon aboot sunrise. An’ I found thet outfit camped where Watson said they was. Wal, my idee was to scare them out, if I couldn’t do more. An’ I figgered the way to work it. If you remember it’s a queer-shaped canyon. I shot seven times into thet bunch havin’ breakfast. Long range, but I hit one greaser, anyhow. He squealed like a jack rabbit. Yu should have seen them pilin’ over one another. Then I run back, hopped my hoss, an’ rode like hell as far as I could along the rim. Thet was when I got snagged. Wal, I jumped off with the other rifle an’ made for the rim. Heah, if anythin’, I was even closer than where I first seen them. An’ I began to shoot again, as fast as I could load the old rifle. My idee shore worked. Thet outfit reckoned they’d been set on by men surroundin’ the canyon. Their hosses were ready for the day, an’ they mounted an’ made off through the thicket for the river. An’ they kept shootin’ steady. It was when I was climbin’ along the rim thet one of them hit me. Wal, they shore rustled down the river, an’ I reckon they
won’t come back very soon.”

  “Sambo, is yo’ appetite done gone whar Rill’s an’ Pecos’ is?” asked Mauree. “ ’Cause if it is dis supper am wasted.”

  “Doan trubble, woman, doan trubble,” replied Sambo. “Dar won’t be no grub left. I’se so happy I could eat a hoss.”

  A fugitive happiness seemed to hover over Terrill. One moment she radiated eager young life, and the next she grew blank, as if suspended between hope and fear. Pecos became guiltily aware of her unconscious appeal to him. While he told his story she sat wide-eyed and open-lipped, absorbing every word, betraying her fears and her thrills.

  Presently Pecos, driven by wonder and cruel longing, went out on the porch to sit in the dusk. How serene the canyon! The river moaned low out of the shadow. A coyote wailed from the heights. If avarice and lust and death had stalked there this day, there were no ghosts of them abroad now. He wondered if Terrill would follow him out. What did her actions, her brave and wistful glances, betray? She realized she had failed in faith. Her conscience tortured her. Or was it something else? He might make a pretense of hardening his heart, of holding aloof, but it was sham. How many interminable hours since morning! His head throbbed from the bullet wound. At intervals a slight sigh, almost a gasp, escaped his lips, involuntary regurgitation of that hideous inward clamp on his vitals. Could he listen to the solitude, could he think of the tranquil dusk settling down, could he dwell upon this beautiful girl delivered into his keeping when he had ridden red death that very day? But that was hours, endless hours, past. Life seemed surging on, piling up, swelling to engulf him.

  A light footfall creaked on the porch board. Terrill came out and sat beside him, close to where Sawtell had fallen that day.

  “Pecos.” She spoke low.

  “Yeah.”

  “I—I’m nervous—that old fear of the dark. … Let me sit by you?”

  “Yeah.” He drawled it, but that was a lie, too. She sat down close beside him and gazed out into the gathering dusk. If she had any terrors of the place, of what she had escaped, these were not manifest. Her profile against the black cliff appeared chiseled out of marble, cold, pure, singularly noble, and as sad as her life had been. Pecos could not convince himself of the facts. His wandering rides, his ruthless hand, his unfailing service to the weak and unfortunate—these had landed him there in that lonely canyon, at the side of a girl as lovely as an angel—and as good.

  “Terrill, go to bed,” he broke out, abruptly.

  He startled her. “Must I?” she asked, and the willfulness of the boy Terrill seemed gone forever. There was a suggestion of his word as law, never to be disobeyed.

  “Suit yourself. But yu look so white—so spent. If yu’d sleep ——”

  “Pecos, I cain’t sleep this night unless you—unless I’m near you.”

  He could not reply. It was as hard for him to think clearly as to speak clearly. His nerves were on edge. His heart seemed thawing to an immense pity, and that meant a liberation of his love—which, surrendered to, while she sat so close, so tense and alive, meant only chaos.

  “May I stay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  A bright line tipped the opposite canyon rim. The moon was rising behind them. Terrill edged a little closer to him. Once a timid hand slipped under his arm, to be quickly withdrawn. He caught her glancing up at his face, which he kept rigidly to the fore.

  “Pecos, I’m all tight inside—on fire. … But feel my hands.”

  She put them in his and they were like ice. One lingered in his, and as no nerve or muscle of his responded, it slowly fell.

  “Fever, I reckon,” he said. “Terrill, it’s been a tough day for a—a g— youngster.”

  “Horrible! … And just to think! If I’d had one more shell in my gun I’d have killed him! … I wish to God I had.”

  “Wal, Terrill, thet’s queer. Why do you?”

  “Then he couldn’t have told.”

  “Ahuh.” Pecos believed she meant that Sawtell could not have betrayed her sex. That seemed natural. Terrill over-exaggerated some kind of shame in this dual character she had lived.

  She sat silent awhile and the warmth of her contact with him seemed strange in view of her ice-cold hands.

  Across the canyon the moonlit line had grown to a broad white band creeping down, imperceptibly diminishing the darkness below. An owl hooted in the gloom and the insects kept up their low mournful hum. Sambo and Mauree came out, evidently having finished their work. Mauree bade Terrill good-night while Sambo tarried a moment.

  “Folks, I sho gotta tell yo,” he rolled out. “Yo know mah wife has second sight. An’ she say good is comin’ out of dis turrible day.”

  “Bless her, Sambo,” cried Terrill.

  “Shore there is, Sambo,” drawled Pecos. “ ’Cause there was a lot of bad went under the ground.”

  “Dey sho did, Pecos. Dey sho did. … An’ now good-night Mars Pecos. … An’ Gawd bless an’ keep yo, Missy Rill.”

  Sambo moved away toward his cabin and the moonlight tipped his black head.

  “Oh … he has not called me Missy Rill since I was a child,” murmured Terrill, in mingled joy and pain. Perhaps that chord of the past vibrated in her frozen and inhibited emotions, for suddenly she clutched his arm, she slipped to her knees and crept close and lifted her face. Pecos’ heart leaped up in his breast.

  “Pecos, my only friend—you are angry—cold—you freeze me when I want—I need so much to ——”

  “Yeah, I reckon,” blurted out Pecos. How long could he resist snatching her to him? What would she do? Was he only blind, mad, a blundering vaquero who had never learned to know women?

  “But I can’t endure that,” she wailed, and clung to him. “Is it be-because that beast tore my clothes off—saw that I wasn’t a—a boy?”

  “Yeah,” replied Pecos, dully, as if by rote.

  “But I couldn’t help that, Pecos, any more than I can help being a girl. I was fighting for you—to save your money. I got it, too, and ran. But he caught me by my coat and shirt—and they tore off.”

  “You mebbe wasn’t to blame. But why yu was there an’ he seen yu half-naked. A girl! … Yu cain’t deny he meant to make a hussy of yu then,” declared Pecos, knowing full well how wild and unreasonable his statements were.

  “No, dear Pecos,” she replied, gravely. “I saw too late it would have been far better to let him take the money. But I didn’t. … And you came in time to—to save me.”

  In all Pecos’ life there had never been anything a millionth part so sweet as this moment. What was she pleading for? It must come out. Could he deny her whatever she seemed entreating for, so as to prolong this growing suspicion of her love? Prolong it only to keep back the inevitable truth of her affection for a brother, a protector? After the whirling heights of his hopes, could he bear that? But he must goad her on.

  “What if I hadn’t come in time?”

  “Then, when you did come you would have found me—daid.”

  “Wal, we’re wastin’ breath on thet. I did come an’ yu ain’t daid. … But I’d rather have seen yu daid than to live to believe me a low-down rustler.”

  “Oh, Pecos!” She wailed.

  That was the mark. He had struck home. The thing which flayed him likewise flayed her. Almost rudely he shoved her back. Yet that was of no avail. She swayed again to catch at his hands.

  “Terrill Lambeth, you believed me a thief?” he queried, sternly, and he laid rude hold of her.

  “Yes—yes. I cain’t lie aboot anything so terrible. I did. … But he was so shore. He seemed to know all. He recognized that money—the very bills you had. … He’d paid you, he swore. And God forgive me! I thought it the truth.”

  “Aw!” breathed Pecos, huskily.

  “There! It’s out. It was killing me. … But, Pecos—Pecos, dear Pecos, don’t look so black and fearful. Listen. The minute I saw you again—the very instant—I knew Sawtell was the criminal and not you. I felt it. I saw it in y
our eyes. … Let that plead for me.”

  “But you believed!” he flashed, harshly.

  “I did, but I don’t. Cain’t you be human?”

  “I’m human enough to be powerful hurt.”

  “But what is a hurt?”

  “You went back on me.”

  “Pecos!”

  “You betrayed yore pard.”

  “Not truly.”

  “You double-crosser.”

  “No—no. I deny that. If—if it had been true, I would still have stuck to you.”

  Pecos gazed at her spellbound. The moon had long since topped the rim and had just then come out from behind the corner of the cabin, to shine in its silver radiance upon her face. Something sustained her in spite of the monstrous barrier Pecos had cruelly raised. There was no bottom to the tragic abyss of her eyes, as there was no limit to her loyalty. She belonged to him. She was a leaf in the storm. But her strength consisted in the bough from which she would not be separated. She clung.

  “Yu failed me, Terrill Lambeth,” he went on, hoarsely, and his true pain was easing out forever in these accusations. “In my hour of need yu failed me.”

  “In faith, but never in heart.”

  “I’m a Texan. An’ I hate a cow thief as bad as a hoss thief. I’ve helped to hang both. An’ yu believed I was one.”

  “But I confessed it to you. I could have lied,” she cried, driven desperate.

  “Yu never cared.”

  “O God—hear him! … Pecos Smith, I’ve loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you.”

  “As a big brother, mebbe.”

  “As a girl hungry for she knew not what. As a girl who must hide her longing and her sex. As a girl driven into womanhood. Oh, I could never have learned to love you so well but for my secret.”

  “Terrill, yu’ve been a bogus boy. Yu’ve lived so long untrue thet you cain’t be true.”

  “Pecos, I love—you—now,” she cried, brokenly, her spirit following her spent strength.

  “Yu beautiful fraud!”

  She made one last effort to clasp him in failing arms. “If you—do not—love me—there’s nothing left—but the river.”