The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  Shefford ended, overcome with emotion. In the dusk he could not see the girl’s face, but the white form that had drooped so listlessly seemed now charged by some vitalizing current. He knew he had spoken irrationally; still he held it no dishonor to have told her he loved her as one dead. If she took that love to the secret heart of living Fay Larkin, then perhaps a spirit might light in her darkened soul. He had no thought yet that Fay Larkin might ever belong to him. He divined a crime—he had seen her agony. And this avowal of his was only one step toward her deliverance.

  Softly she rose, retreating into the shadow.

  “Forgive me if I—I disturb you, distress you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you. She was—somehow known to you. I am not happy. And are you happy?… Let her memory be a bond between us.… Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Faintly as the faintest whisper breathed her reply, and, though it came from a child forced into womanhood, it whispered of girlhood not dead, of sweet incredulity, of amazed tumult, of a wondering, frantic desire to run and hide, of the bewilderment incident to a first hint of love.

  Shefford walked away into the darkness. The whisper filled his soul. Had a word of love ever been spoken to that girl? Never—not the love which had been on his lips. Fay Larkin’s lonely life spoke clearly in her whisper.

  * * * *

  Next morning as the sun gilded the looming peaks and shafts of gold slanted into the valley she came swiftly down the path to the spring.

  Shefford paused in his task of chopping wood. Joe Lake, on his knees, with his big hands in a pan of dough, lifted his head to stare. She had left off the somber black hood, and, although that made a vast difference in her, still it was not enough to account for what struck both men.

  “Good morning,” she called, brightly.

  They both answered, but not spontaneously. She stopped at the spring and with one sweep of her strong arm filled the bucket and lifted it. Then she started back down the path and, pausing opposite the camp, set the bucket down.

  “Joe, do you still pride yourself on your sour dough?” she asked.

  “Reckon I do,” replied Joe, with a grin.

  “I’ve heard your boasts, but never tasted your bread,” she went on.

  “I’ll ask you to eat with us some day.”

  “Don’t forget,” she replied.

  And then shyly she looked at Shefford. She was like the fresh dawn, and the gold of the sun shone on her head.

  “Have you chopped all that wood—so early?” she asked.

  “Sure,” replied Shefford, laughing. “I have to get up early to keep Joe from doing all the camp chores.”

  She smiled, and then to Shefford she seemed to gleam, to be radiant.

  “It’d be a lovely morning to climb—’way high.”

  “Why—yes—it would,” replied Shefford, awkwardly. “I wish I didn’t have my work.”

  “Joe, will you climb with me some day?”

  “I should smile I will,” declared Joe.

  “But I can run right up the walls.”

  “I reckon. Mary, it wouldn’t surprise me to see you fly.”

  “Do you mean I’m like a canyon swallow or an angel?”

  Then, as Joe stared speechlessly, she said good-by and, taking up the bucket, went on with her swift, graceful step.

  “She’s perked up,” said the Mormon, staring after her. “Never heard her say more ’n yes or no till now.”

  “She did seem—bright,” replied Shefford.

  He was stunned. What had happened to her? Today this girl had not been Mary, the sealed wife, or the Sago Lily, alien among Mormon women. Then it flashed upon him—she was Fay Larkin. She who had regarded herself as dead had come back to life. In one short night what had transformed her—what had taken place in her heart? Shefford dared not accept, nor allow lodgment in his mind, a thrilling idea that he had made her forget her misery.

  “Shefford, did you ever see her like that?” asked Joe.

  “Never.”

  “Haven’t you—something to do with it?”

  “Maybe I have. I—I hope so.”

  “Reckon you’ve seen how she’s faded—since the trial?”

  “No,” replied Shefford, swiftly. “But I’ve not seen her face in daylight since then.”

  “Well, take my hunch,” said Joe, soberly. “She’s begun to fade like the canyon lily when it’s broken. And she’s going to die unless—”

  “Why man!” ejaculated Shefford. “Didn’t you see—”

  “Sure I see,” interrupted the Mormon. “I see a lot you don’t. She’s so white you can look through her. She’s grown thin, all in a week. She doesn’t eat. Oh, I know, because I’ve made it my business to find out. It’s no news to the women. But they’d like to see her die. And she will die unless—”

  “My God!” exclaimed Shefford, huskily. “I never noticed—I never thought.… Joe, hasn’t she any friends?”

  “Sure. You and Ruth—and me. Maybe Nas Ta Bega, too. He watches her a good deal.”

  “We can do so little, when she needs so much.”

  “Nobody can help her, unless it’s you,” went on the Mormon. “That’s plain talk. She seemed different this morning. Why, she was alive—she talked—she smiled.… Shefford, if you cheer her up I’ll go to hell for you!”

  The big Mormon, on his knees, with his hands in a pan of dough, and his shirt all covered with flour, presented an incongruous figure of a man actuated by pathos and passion. Yet the contrast made his emotion all the simpler and stronger. Shefford grew closer to Joe in that moment.

  “Why do you think I can cheer her, help her?” queried Shefford.

  “I don’t know. But she’s different with you. It’s not that you’re a Gentile, though, for all the women are crazy about you. You talk to her. You have power over her, Shefford. I feel that. She’s only a kid.”

  “Who is she, Joe? Where did she come from?” asked Shefford, very low, with his eyes cast down.

  “I don’t know. I can’t find out. Nobody knows. It’s a mystery—to all the younger Mormons, anyway.”

  Shefford burned to ask questions about the Mormon whose sealed wife the girl was, but he respected Joe too much to take advantage of him in a poignant moment like this. Besides, it was only jealousy that made him burn to know the Mormon’s identity, and jealousy had become a creeping, insidious, growing fire. He would be wise not to add fuel to it. He rejected many things before he thought of one that he could voice to his friend.

  “Joe, it’s only her body that belongs to—to.… Her soul is lost to—”

  “John Shefford, let that go. My mind’s tired. I’ve been taught so and so, and I’m not bright.… But, after all, men are much alike. The thing with you and me is this—we don’t want to see her grave!”

  Love spoke there. The Mormon had seized upon the single elemental point that concerned him and his friend in their relation to this unfortunate girl. His simple, powerful statement united them; it gave the lie to his hint of denseness; it stripped the truth naked. It was such a wonderful thought-provoking statement that Shefford needed time to ponder how deep the Mormon was. To what limit would he go? Did he mean that here, between two men who loved the same girl, class, duty, honor, creed were nothing if they stood in the way of her deliverance and her life?

  “Joe Lake, you Mormons are impossible,” said Shefford, deliberately. “You don’t want to see her grave. So long as she lives—remains on the earth—white and gold like the flower you call her, that’s enough for you. It’s her body you think of. And that’s the great and horrible error in your religion.… But death of the soul is infinitely worse than death of the body. I have been thinking of her soul.… So here we stand, you and I. You to save her life—I to save her soul! What wil
l you do?”

  “Why, John, I’d turn Gentile,” he said, with terrible softness. It was a softness that scorned Shefford for asking, and likewise it flung defiance at his creed and into the face of hell.

  Shefford felt the sting and the exaltation.

  “And I’d be a Mormon,” he said.

  “All right. We understand each other. Reckon there won’t be any call for such extremes. I haven’t an idea what you mean—what can be done. But I say, go slow, so we won’t all find graves. First cheer her up somehow. Make her want to live. But go slow, John. And don’t be with her late!”

  * * * *

  That night Shefford found her waiting for him in the moonlight—a girl who was as transparent as crystal-clear water, who had left off the somber gloom with the black hood, who tremulously embraced happiness without knowing it, who was one moment timid and wild like a half-frightened fawn, and the next, exquisitely half-conscious of what it meant to be thought dead, but to be alive, to be awakening, wondering, palpitating, and to be loved.

  Shefford lived the hour as a dream and went back to the quiet darkness under the cedars to lie wide-eyed, trying to recall all that she had said. For she had talked as if utterance had long been dammed behind a barrier of silence.

  There followed other hours like that one, indescribable hours, so sweet they stung, and in which, keeping pace with his love, was the nobler stride of a spirit that more every day lightened her burden.

  The thing he had to do, sooner or later, was to tell her he knew she was Fay Larkin, not dead, but alive, and that, not love nor religion, but sacrifice, nailed her down to her martyrdom. Many and many a time he had tried to force himself to tell her, only to fail. He hated to risk ending this sweet, strange, thoughtless, girlish mood of hers. It might not be soon won back—perhaps never. How could he tell what chains bound her? And so as he vacillated between Joe’s cautious advice to go slow and his own pity the days and weeks slipped by.

  One haunting fear kept him sleepless half the nights and sick even in his dreams, and it was that the Mormon whose sealed wife she was might come, surely would come, some night. Shefford could bear it. But what would that visit do to Fay Larkin? Shefford instinctively feared the awakening in the girl of womanhood, of deeper insight, of a spiritual realization of what she was, of a physical dawn.

  He might have spared himself needless torture. One day Joe Lake eyed him with penetrating glance.

  “Reckon you don’t have to sleep right on that Stonebridge trail,” said the Mormon, significantly.

  Shefford felt the blood burn his neck and face. He had pulled his tarpaulin closer to the trail, and his motive was as an open page to the keen Mormon.

  “Why?” asked Shefford.

  “There won’t be any Mormons riding in here soon—by night—to visit the women,” replied Joe, bluntly. “Haven’t you figured there might be government spies watching the trails?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, take a hunch, then,” added the Mormon, gruffly, and Shefford divined, as well as if he had been told, that warning word had gone to Stonebridge. Gone despite the fact that Nas Ta Bega had reported every trail free of watchers! There was no sign of any spies, cowboys, outlaws, or Indians in the vicinity of the valley. A passionate gratitude to the Mormon overcame Shefford; and the unreasonableness of it, the nature of it, perturbed him greatly. But, something hammered into his brain, if he loved one of these sealed wives, how could he help being jealous?

  The result of Joe’s hint was that Shefford put off the hour of revelation, lived in his dream, helped the girl grow farther and farther away from her trouble, until that inevitable hour arrived when he was driven by accumulated emotion as much as the exigency of the case.

  He had not often walked with her beyond the dark shade of the pinyons round the cottage, but this night, when he knew he must tell her, he led her away down the path, through the cedar grove to the west end of the valley where it was wild and lonely and sad and silent.

  The moon was full and the great peaks were crowned as with snow. A coyote uttered his cutting cry. There were a few melancholy notes from a night bird of the stone walls. The air was clear and cold, with a tang of frost in it. Shefford gazed about him at the vast, uplifted, insulating walls, and that feeling of his which was more than a sense told him how walls like these and the silence and shadow and mystery had been nearly all of Fay Larkin’s life. He felt them all in her.

  He stopped out in the open, near the line where dark shadow of the wall met the silver moonlight on the grass, and here, by a huge flat stone where he had come often alone and sometimes with Ruth, he faced Fay Larkin in the spirit to tell her gently that he knew her, and sternly to force her secret from her.

  “Am I your friend?” he began.

  “Ah!—my only friend,” she said.

  “Do you trust me, believe I mean well by you, want to help you?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Well, then, let me speak of you. You know one topic we’ve never touched upon. You!”

  She was silent, and looked wonderingly, a little fearfully, at him, as if vague, disturbing thoughts were entering the fringe of her mind.

  “Our friendship is a strange one, is it not?” he went on.

  “How do I know? I never had any other friendship. What do you mean by strange?”

  “Well, I’m a young man. You’re a—a married woman. We are together a good deal—and like to be.”

  “Why is that strange?” she asked.

  Suddenly Shefford realized that there was nothing strange in what was natural. A remnant of sophistication clung to him and that had spoken. He needed to speak to her in a way which in her simplicity she would understand.

  “Never mind strange. Say that I am interested in you, and, as you’re not happy, I want to help you. And say that your neighbors are curious and oppose my idea. Why do they?”

  “They’re jealous and want you themselves,” she replied, with sweet directness. “They’ve said things I don’t understand. But I felt they—they hated in me what would be all right in themselves.”

  Here to simplicity she added truth and wisdom, as an Indian might have expressed them. But shame was unknown to her, and she had as yet only vague perceptions of love and passion. Shefford began to realize the quickness of her mind, that she was indeed awakening.

  “They are jealous—were jealous before I ever came here. That’s only human nature. I was trying to get to a point. Your neighbors are curious. They oppose me. They hate you. It’s all bound up in the—the fact of your difference from them, your youth, beauty, that you’re not a Mormon, that you nearly betrayed their secret at the trial in Stonebridge.”

  “Please—please don’t—speak of that!” she faltered.

  “But I must,” he replied, swiftly. “That trial was a torture to you. It revealed so much to me.… I know you are a sealed wife. I know there has been a crime. I know you’ve sacrificed yourself. I know that love and religion have nothing to do with—what you are.… Now, is not all that true?”

  “I must not tell,” she whispered.

  “But I shall make you tell,” he replied, and his voice rang.

  “Oh no, you cannot,” she said.

  “I can—with just one word!”

  Her eyes were great, starry, shadowy gulfs, dark in the white beauty of her face. She was calm now. She had strength. She invited him to speak the word, and the wistful, tremulous quiver of her lips was for his earnest thought of her.

  “Wait—a—little,” said Shefford, unsteadily. “I’ll come to that presently. Tell me this—have you ever thought of being free?”

  “Free!” she echoed, and there was singular depth and richness in her voice. That was the first spark of fire he had struck from her. “Long ago, the minute I was unwatched, I’d hav
e leaped from a wall had I dared. Oh, I wasn’t afraid. I’d love to die that way. But I never dared.”

  “Why?” queried Shefford, piercingly.

  She was silent then.

  “Suppose I offered to give you freedom that meant life?”

  “I—couldn’t—take it.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, my friend, don’t ask me any more.”

  “I know, I can see—you want to tell me—you need to tell.”

  “But I daren’t.”

  “Won’t you trust me?”

  “I do—I do.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “No—no—oh no!”

  The moment had come. How sad, tragic, yet glorious for him! It would be like a magic touch upon this lovely, cold, white ghost of Fay Larkin, transforming her into a living, breathing girl. He held his love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them. What might it not become with a lightning flash of revelation? He dreaded, yet he was driven to speak. He waited, swallowing hard, fighting the tumultuous storm of emotion, and his eyes dimmed.