Rogue River Feud

by Zane Grey

  Then out of dim past associations brightened the one that had to do with a fly-fisherman’s jinx—the breaking of hooks on rocks, on the backcast. Keven remembered, after it was too late. Then he essayed to send his backcast high, with the result that he hooked branches over his head. After breaking half a dozen leaders this way, and decorating the trees with gaudy counterfeits of insects, he found himself humiliated by having to climb to recover a fly that was a killer upon the upper Rogue. After hard work he got out on the branch, which promptly broke with him, letting him down ten feet, half in and half out of the water. It was not only his feelings that got hurt.

  The day wore on. So did Keven’s temper. And then to cap the climax he hooked a little steelhead that darted downstream and could not be held. Keven let it run and ran himself. He had long been unused to running over slippery rocks, and he lost his balance. Trying frantically to regain it, he only made the plunge longer and harder, which ended him heels up and head down, crack against a rock.

  He saw stars and had a terrific pain in his jaw. The iron contrivance, which did such poor duty as a lower maxillary, came loose from where it hinged on the bone, causing such pain as he had not suffered in a long while. After a time it eased and Keven went on fishing, discouraged now, hopeless, miserable—the poorest, unluckiest fisherman in the whole world.

  He kept on downstream, casting here and there, hoping for a rise and knowing he would not get it, until he could travel no farther that way. The water was deep, and a cliff impassable. Keven retraced his steps and climbed up the wooded bank, and went on down, searching for a place to get back to the river.

  He had to climb over logs, driftwood, rocks, and he was forever snagging his line. Human nature could endure no more. He became furious. He swore. Not only angry was he when he tore through that thicket, but hot, sweating, and scratched.

  To Keven’s utter amazement he grasped the fact that he had reached the bend at Solitude. The great boulders trooped like huge beasts out into the wide stretch above the rapids.

  Suddenly he espied Beryl. He had absolutely forgotten her, and his first sensation was a thrill of surprise. Something checked his impulse to halloo. He watched.

  “What in the dickens is she doing?” he muttered.

  She stood on a low rock, back from the edge of the eddying pool, apparently quite shallow there, and she was moving the limber rod sidewise toward the shore and below her. Then she whipped the rod, back and forward, to send her fly out a little way. It could hardly be called a cast. Keven laughed under his breath. Poor kid! She was deluding herself. Yet how earnest, how absorbed! She bent forward slightly, every muscle and nerve evidently taut, and she drew that tiny fly sidewise, with delicate, almost invisible vibrations of the rod, across the water. Keven’s eyes were keen. He saw the fly, and it surely resembled some crippled little winged thing struggling to escape. Suddenly Keven saw a boil on the still water, then circles, ever widening. She had raised a trout.

  Keven climbed up on a high, boulder, the better to see. Beryl repeated that queer performance. Incredulous as it appeared, she manifestly had raised a big steelhead and expected to do it again. Her posture, her caution, her delicate manipulation proved that. Then Keven saw a broad bar of white and pink rise out of the shady green water. What a steelhead! He rose, he turned, he poked at the fly, and refusing it he turned back again, sending the telltale circles widening over the eddy.

  “Hey, Beryl,” he yelled, “that’s a lunker. But he won’t rise again. Rest him awhile.”

  Keven jumped down and ran around and over the jumble of rocks to a point near where Beryl was fishing. She stood blankly astounded, her rod up, and she stared at him.

  “Get back. You’ll scare my fish,” she called peremptorily.

  “Scare? He’s already scared. He won’t rise again—not for a while anyway. Come here and let me give you a fly…. Gee, he’s a corker. I saw him,” babbled Keven in his excitement.

  “Will you get back away from the water?” she queried sharply.

  “What?”

  “What! Can’t you hear?” Beryl actually stamped her foot. “Get back! Vamoose! Chase yourself! And hurry before you scare my steelhead.”

  “You poor child,” ejaculated Keven pityingly. “So that’s how you fish? I was afraid——”

  “Get back or I’ll throw a rock at you,” screamed Beryl, suddenly scarlet of face. “You’re deliberately trying to scare my steelhead—so I can’t catch him. He’ll go ten pounds. And you don’t see many that big till October.”

  “All right, throw a rock. Throw two rocks,” retorted Keven, growing exasperated. “I was only trying to help you.”

  “Help nothing, you ninny,” cried Beryl, and stooping suddenly she picked a round stone from beside the boulder and threw it with remarkable speed and precision right at Keven’s feet. He had to jump quickly to escape a crack on the shins.

  “Well, you—you—darned little fool!” burst out Keven. He wanted to swear, but as he could not do that he substituted a wholly inadequate epithet. And he stood stock-still in his tracks.

  Beryl picked up another rock.

  “I’ll hit you next time,” she said, and she looked her threat.

  “Very well, you sweet, gentle, dovelike creature!” exclaimed Keven, and he moved back from such dangerous ground, to a point behind her.

  Quite suddenly he came upon a shallow runway between some stones, in which lay a number of steelhead, showing their rainbow-like sides, curling broad tails, and speckled fins. They had been strung on a forked willow branch. Keven had never been so surprised in all his life along that Rogue River.

  “For heaven’s sake! Where’d these steelhead come from?” he yelped.

  “They’re mine,” replied Beryl, stepping out on the flat boulder.

  “Yours?”

  “Yes, mine!”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “I put salt on their tails,” she rejoined sarcastically.

  “Beryl Aard, do you mean to tell me you caught these fish?”

  “You bet I did.”

  “On that flimsy two-bit rig?”

  “Yes, you darned big fool. And I’ll catch another and the biggest yet—if you go away somewhere.”

  Keven could not believe his eyes. He counted the fish. Nine there were; three around four pounds, and the others graduated up from six and seven, to one almost eight. In all his fishing Keven had never seen a string of trout to beat that. He gazed and gazed; and then when the indubitable fact dawned upon him that these were real fish and that Beryl had certainly caught them he meekly went back and sat down.

  All of a sudden then he recalled their wager, and the bantering which had led up to it. She had made good her boast. Then he was stunned. It was indeed with chastened spirit and wondering awe that he turned his gaze upon Beryl again.

  She was poised precisely as she had been before becoming aware of his presence. Instead of looking ridiculous now she struck him as keen, vibrant, perfectly balanced, and absolutely master of that flimsy rod and trailing fly. She made it dance on the water.

  There came a wave, a smash on the surface—then a sweet, wild, high-pitched cry of elation.

  Keven leaped up, beside himself with excitement, and ran back to the point nearest her. A shuddery, sliddery, tussling sound pierced his ears. He looked in time to see a huge opal-colored steelhead plunge back into the water. Beryl’s rod bent like a buggy whip. The reel screamed and the line hissed. Then out in the middle of the great pool the steelhead began to skyrocket in extraordinary manner. Keven lost his head completely.

  “Hold your rod up,” he bawled. “Let him run…. Don’t give him the butt. You’ll break his off…. Oh, drop your tip! … Wind! Reel in, fast—faster…. Oh, hell, can’t you hear me? You’ll lose that grand fish…. Wind in! Let him run! Elevate your rod! … Drop it quick!”

  “You shut up! You’ll make me lose him!” cried Beryl furiously.

  Keven never heard her, or at least did not heed. No
mere girl could handle a monster steelhead like that on a flimsy little willow wand. He must rush to her assistance. His intentions were indeed chivalrous. But just as he reached the rock his treacherous feet slipped from under him. Again if he had let himself fall and have been done with it, all would have been well. Instead, however, he reeled and swayed to recover balance, with the result that at last he plunged down to collide with Beryl and knock her off the rock.

  When he got to his knees, dizzy with pain, and so furious with himself that he could have yelled, Beryl was climbing back on the rock, drenched to the skin, water pouring from her in little streams.

  Tears, too, were streaming from her eyes. Her hands were outstretched, holding the rod, which was broken in the middle. The line trailed limply on the water behind her.

  “You broke it! My beautiful little rod!” she wailed.

  “I didn’t,” protested Keven, laboriously getting to his feet, his hand to his shaking chin.

  “Yes, you did! You bumped me—off the rock.”

  “That rod was—no good anyhow,” panted Keven, manfully struggling under odds of pain and passion.

  “No good!” she cried, slowly coming out of tragedy into wrath. Her eyes began to burn away her tears. “It was the best rod in the world. You made me break it—you big lummox!”

  “You don’t know how to handle a fish,” avowed Keven heatedly. There was no use to try to be reasonable with this girl.

  “Don’t I? That’s what you think. I’d have landed him—if you hadn’t come butting in here…. A twelve-pounder! But I could bear that, only for my precious yew-wood rod. You broke it—and my heart, too.”

  “I only wanted to help you.”

  “Help? Ha! Ha! A lot of help you’d have been, with your crazy upriver methods. You kept yelling: ‘Wind in! Let him run! Elevate your rod! Drop it quick!’ What kind of talk is that? Idiotic, I call it.”

  “There’s a style of fishing you don’t understand, Miss Aard,” retorted Keven loftily.

  “Thank heaven!” she retorted fervently.

  “There’s a difference between a real pothunting fisherman and a classy fly-fisherman.”

  “You bet there is. You’re that last—and you’d starve to death down here…. Classy? That’s sure the word. You’re a conceited jackass of a fisherman—to make me break my rod, lose my fish, and then blab, blab, blab class to me. That’s funny. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “Don’t you laugh at me, Beryl Aard,” he shouted.

  “I’ll swear at you next—you city fisherman—you dude fisherman,” she raged, evidently wholly unable to express her feelings unless she did resort to profanity.

  “You, you country-jake fisherman!” stammered Keven hoarsely, now quite beside himself.

  “There! You pile insult on injury,” she flashed in ringing, high-pitched voice. Her eyes blazed like glowing coals. Then, swinging a vigorous arm, she gave Keven a terrific slap.

  Not only the violence of it staggered him, but the blow fell on the side of his face which had been hurt twice before that day. The agony struck him almost blind. As he sank to his knees his shaking hands fumbled at his mouth. The bent iron bar, which served as a substitute for the missing section of jawbone, had been knocked loose, to protrude from his lips. He stuck it back, and then shuddering, straining, he fought to keep from fainting.

  Beryl plumped to her knees before him.

  “Kev! What was that,” she asked in slow horror.

  “My—iron—jaw,” he whispered huskily.

  “Oh, my God! I didn’t know…. Kev, you’re white as a sheet. What did I do?”

  She clasped him with strong hands, which lifted his face, suddenly to grow gentle as they felt his cheek. She scanned it with infinite tenderness, and then her eyes, blue-black from shock, pierced his to read the very soul of him.

  “I hurt you terribly,” she said, in awful self-accusation.

  Keven tried to joke. “You hit like the breechblock of that bursting gun.”

  “Oh, why—why didn’t you tell me?” she moaned, in agonized accents. “I’d never have struck you then. No matter how—how brutal you were!”

  “I have a little pride left. God knows, I must have seemed crippled wretch enough.”

  “Hush! Do not talk like that,” she cried, her voice breaking. “I’d have loved you the more.” In a passion of repentance and unutterable tenderness she kissed the bruised and swollen jaw, whispering between her kisses: “Forgive me, Kev, I didn’t know…. You made me see red…. I’d die for you! … Darling! Forgive me…. I love you so.”

  When those warm sweet lips at last pressed his own something loosened within Keven’s cold and sick heart and ran along his veins, swelling and mounting, at last to flood his being with stinging ecstasy. His eyes closed to hide the whirling gold-and-blue world above. He crushed her wet head to him; he bent it back, blindly to seek her lips. “There’s—nothing—to forgive,” he mumbled. “Beryl—darling.”

  She vibrated to that, as if shot through with an all-pervading current. Then she became very still, without breath or quiver.

  “Kev—say that again,” she at last whispered imploringly.

  “Beryl—darling…. I—I didn’t know I loved you.”

  “I was afraid you didn’t—any more…. Oh, Kev—oh, Solitude!”

  Keven opened his eyes to behold her, arms spread wide and high, her rapt face uplifted to the sky.

  Just then a stentorian voice roared down from the trail.

  “Hey, thar!”

  Beryl lowered her arms; she lifted startled eyes; she stared.

  “Oh, Lord! There’s Dad!”

  Keven espied the tall figure of Aard framed in gold-green foliage.

  “Is that how you kids bet on fishin’?” he yelled.

  His big voice, deep with mirth, rolled down the river, to clap against the cliffs and come echoing back.

  “Oh, Dad—I won!” screamed Beryl, waving her broken rod.

  “Won what?” Aard shouted.

  Beryl’s gay, sweet wild laughter rang up to the skies. Then she cried: “Everything!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE October days had come, gray at dawn, etching the leaves with hoarfrost, lifting the clouds of mist, opening to the blue and gold above, windless and still and solemn, wearing through the long smoky hot afternoons to the gorgeous effulgence in the sky, and on to dusk, steeped in the melancholy of solitude.

  Keven and Beryl climbed the trail back of the cabins, she leading the way, silent and pensive, with the spring of the deerstalker in her stride, he following, rifle in hand, with vigor in his step and glowing tan in cheeks no longer hollow.

  The trail took the course of the brook, as it tumbled down, sometimes amber-gleaming in the sunlight and again dark and cool, streaming with mellow murmur under the shade. They reached the waterfall, where the brook leaped out of a gray notch to a wide flat ledge, over which it poured in a white sheet, lacy and snowy at the curve, to thin out into a downward-darkening smoke as it disappeared in the glen.

  Above the fall stood the firs, great brown-barked trees, branchless far up, rising to lofty height, to spread a mingling canopy overhead. They stood far apart on the slanting slope, blackened at the trunks, where forest fire had scorched but failed to burn.

  A hawk sailed in zigzag flight among the treetops, vanishing like a. fading gleam, emphasizing the apparent lifelessness of the forest. The trail climbed to a level bench where the firs thickened and the ferns began to encroach upon the brown-carpeted earth. It swung over to the brow of the ravine, deepening here to a wide timber-choked canyon, up from which floated the music of stone-retarded running water. Far under the grand, dark evergreens flamed the maples, gold-leafed and scarlet and yellow-green, here subdued in shade and there blazing in the rays of sunlight.

  Beryl paused to gaze, and Keven, with eyes roving everywhere, halted to catch his breath. The forest seemed a vast cathedral, a colorful green-roofed hall of the wilderness, giving strange sense of protection, of
age-old watchfulness. The ravine sent up its cool fragrance to mingle with the pungent piny odor of the firs.

  A crash in the brush startled Keven. He wheeled. Beryl was pointing at a gray-blue bounding object that vanished as if by magic. The crack of hoof on dry branch was the last they heard.

  “Buck,” said Beryl. “I’m glad you didn’t shoot.”

  “Gosh, I forgot I had the rifle,” he whispered.

  They climbed on, and the forest grew denser, wilder, blacker, and the underbrush closed above their heads. A gloomy silence prevailed in this primeval forest, where a snapped twig caused a start, and a voice would have been sacrilege. On they walked, and wound through the woods, up and up to a changing region. The firs no longer lorded it over all, though, as if in defiance of their lessening hold, they spread impenetrable thickets of their offspring on the north slopes of ravines. Pines began to appear, and gnarled oaks, and here and there the wondrous smooth-barked red-and-copper madroña, with its wide-spreading branches and its shiny foliage.

  Higher still they entered the zone of the oaks, an open forest, patched with sunlit glades of golden grass, upon which the bronze leaves were rustling down. The ground was dry as tinder and reflected the strong heat of the sun. Manzanita with its yellow berries and myrtle with its faded flowers clustered in favored nooks. Under the trees an intoxicating fragrance floated warm on the still air.

  Keven and Beryl wandered on with lingering, ever-slowing steps, at last to halt upon an open brow of ground, where a monarch oak, noble and old, bleached at the top, invited rest. They sat down, backs to the wide trunk. Far below shone the river, winding along the bottom of the valley, which from this elevation appeared so deep and vast. Its roar soared up, voice of the wilderness, low and continuous.

  There was life in this oak forest. Frost had kissed the acorns. Wild pigeons fluttered among the leaves; robins, halting to rest on their way southward, gave forth plaintive notes, as melancholy as the autumn. Squirrels revealed their cautious movements to keen eyes; jays squalled and crows cawed. And far down through the aisles between the oaks listening deer, sleek and gray, passed with graceful step.