by Zane Grey
“Kells,” she said, quickly, “there are men riding up the trail.”
“Good,” he exclaimed, weakly, with a light on his drawn face. “They’ve been long in—getting here. How many?”
Joan counted them—five riders, and several pack-animals.
“Yes. It’s Gulden.”
“Gulden!” cried Joan, with a start.
Her exclamation and tone made Kells regard her attentively.
“You’ve heard of him? He’s the toughest nut—on this border.… I never saw his like. You won’t be safe. I’m so helpless.… What to say—to tell him!… Joan, if I should happen to croak—you want to get away quick…or shoot yourself.”
How strange to hear this bandit warn her of peril the like of which she had encountered through him! Joan secured the gun and hid it in a niche between the logs. Then she looked out again.
The riders were close at hand now. The foremost one, a man of Herculean build, jumped his mount across the brook, and leaped off while he hauled the horse to a stop. The second rider came close behind him; the others approached leisurely, with the gait of the pack-animals.
“Ho, Kells!” called the big man. His voice had a loud, bold, sonorous kind of ring.
“Reckon he’s here somewheres,” said the other man, presently.
“Sure. I seen his hoss. Jack ain’t goin’ to be far from thet hoss.”
Then both of them approached the cabin. Joan had never before seen two such striking, vicious-looking, awesome men. The one was huge—so wide and heavy and deep-set that he looked short—and he resembled a gorilla. The other was tall, slim, with a face as red as flame, and an expression of fierce keenness. He was stoop shouldered, yet he held his head erect in a manner that suggested a wolf scenting blood.
“Someone here, Pearce,” boomed the big man.
“Why, Gul, if it ain’t a girl!”
Joan moved out of the shadow of the wall of the cabin, and she pointed to the prostrate figure on the blankets.
“Howdy boys!” said Kells, wanly.
Gulden cursed in amaze while Pearce dropped to his knee with an exclamation of concern. Then both began to talk at once. Kells interrupted them by lifting a weak hand.
“No, I’m not going—to cash,” he said. “I’m only starved—and in need of stimulants. Had my back half shot off.”
“Who plugged you, Jack?”
“Gulden, it was your side-partner, Bill.”
“Bill?” Gulden’s voice held a queer, coarse constraint. Then he added, gruffly. “Thought you and him pulled together.”
“Well, we didn’t.”
“And—where’s Bill now?” This time Joan heard a slow, curious, cold note in the heavy voice, and she interpreted it as either doubt or deceit.
“Bill’s dead and Halloway, too,” replied Kells.
Gulden turned his massive, shaggy head in the direction of Joan. She had not the courage to meet the gaze upon her. The other man spoke:
“Split over the girl, Jack?”
“No,” replied Kells, sharply. “They tried to get familiar with—my wife—and I shot them both.”
Joan felt a swift leap of hot blood all over her and then a coldness, a sickening, a hateful weakness.
“Wife!” ejaculated Gulden.
“Your real wife, Jack?” queried Pearce.
“Well, I guess, I’ll introduce you… Joan, here are two of my friends—Sam Gulden and Red Pearce.”
Gulden grunted something.
“Mrs. Kells, I’m glad to meet you,” said Pearce.
Just then the other three men entered the cabin and Joan took advantage of the commotion they made to get out into the air. She felt sick, frightened, and yet terribly enraged. She staggered a little as she went out, and she knew she was as pale as death. These visitors thrust reality upon her with a cruel suddenness. There was something terrible in the mere presence of this Gulden. She had not yet dared to take a good look at him. But what she felt was overwhelming. She wanted to run. Yet escape now was infinitely more of a menace than before. If she slipped away it would be these new enemies who would pursue her, track her like hounds. She understood why Kells had introduced her as his wife. She hated the idea with a shameful and burning hate, but a moment’s reflection taught her that Kells had answered once more to a good instinct. At the moment he had meant that to protect her. And further reflection persuaded Joan that she would be wise to act naturally and to carry out the deception as far as it was possible for her. It was her only hope. Her position had again grown perilous. She thought of the gun she had secreted, and it gave her strength to control her agitation and to return to the cabin outwardly calm.
The men had Kells half turned over with the flesh of his back exposed.
“Aw, Gul, it’s whisky he needs,” said one.
“If you let out any more blood he’ll croak sure,” protested another.
“Look how weak he is,” said Red Pearce.
“It’s a hell of a lot you know,” roared Gulden. “I served my time—but that’s none of your business.… Look here! See that blue spot!” Gulden pressed a huge finger down upon the blue welt on Kells’s back. The bandit moaned. “That’s lead—that’s the bullet,” declared Gulden.
“Wall, if you ain’t correct!” exclaimed Pearce.
Kells turned his head. “When you punched that place—it made me numb all over. Gul, if you’ve located the bullet, cut it out.”
Joan did not watch the operation. As she went away to the seat under the balsam she heard a sharp cry and then cheers. Evidently the grim Gulden had been both swift and successful.
Presently the men came out of the cabin and began to attend to their horses and the pack-train.
Pearce looked for Joan, and upon seeing her called out, “Kells wants you.”
Joan found the bandit half propped up against a saddle with a damp and pallid face, but an altogether different look.
“Joan, that bullet was pressing on my spine,” he said. “Now it’s out, all that deadness is gone. I feel alive. I’ll get well, soon.… Gulden was curious over the bullet. It’s a forty-four caliber, and neither Bill Bailey nor Halloway used that caliber of gun. Gulden remembered. He’s cunning. Bill was as near being a friend to this Gulden as any man I know of. I can’t trust any of these men, particularly Gulden. You stay pretty close by me.”
“Kells, you’ll let me go soon—help me to get home?” implored Joan in a low voice.
“Girl, it’d never be safe now,” he replied.
“Then later—soon—when it is safe?”
“We’ll see.… But you’re my wife now!”
With the latter words the man subtly changed. Something of the power she had felt in him before his illness began again to be manifested. Joan divined that these comrades had caused the difference in him.
“You won’t dare—!” Joan was unable to conclude her meaning. A tight band compressed her breast and throat, and she trembled.
“Will you dare go out there and tell them you’re not my wife?” he queried. His voice had grown stronger and his eyes were blending shadows of thought.
Joan knew that she dared not. She must choose the lesser of two evils. “No man—could be such a beast to a woman—after she’d saved his life,” she whispered.
“I could be anything. You had your chance. I told you to go. I said if I ever got well I’d be as I was—before.”
“But you’d have died.”
“That would have been better for you.…. Joan, I’ll do this. Marry you honestly and leave the country. I’ve gold. I’m young. I love you. I intend to have you. And I’ll begin life over again. What do you say?”
“Say? I’d die before—I’d marry you!” she panted.
“All right, Joan Randle,” he rep
lied, bitterly. “For a moment I saw a ghost. My old dead better self!… It’s gone.… And you stay with me.”
7
After dark Kells had his men build a fire before the open side of the cabin. He lay propped up on blankets and his saddle, while the others lounged or sat in a half-circle in the light, facing him.
Joan drew her blankets into a corner where the shadows were thick and she could see without being seen. She wondered how she would ever sleep near all these wild men—if she could ever sleep again. Yet she seemed more curious and wakeful than frightened. She had no way to explain it, but she felt the fact that her presence in the camp had a subtle influence, at once restraining and exciting. So she looked out upon the scene with wide-open eyes.
And she received more strongly than ever an impression of wildness. Even the camp-fire seemed to burn wildly; it did not glow and sputter and pale and brighten and sing like an honest camp-fire. It blazed in red, fierce, hurried flames, wild to consume the logs. It cast a baleful and sinister color upon the hard faces there. Then the blackness of the enveloping night was pitchy, without any bold outline of canyon wall or companionship of stars. The coyotes were out in force and from all around came their wild sharp barks. The wind rose and mourned weirdly through the balsams.
But it was in the men that Joan felt mostly that element of wildness. Kells lay with his ghastly face clear in the play of the moving flare of light. It was an intelligent, keen, strong face, but evil. Evil power stood out in the lines, in the strange eyes, stranger then ever, now in shadow; and it seemed once more the face of an alert, listening, implacable man, with wild projects in mind, driving him to the doom he meant for others. Pearce’s red face shone redder in that ruddy light. It was hard, lean, almost fleshless, a red mask stretched over a grinning skull. The one they called Frenchy was little, dark, small-featured, with piercing gimlet-like eyes, and a mouth ready to gush forth hate and violence. The next two were not particularly individualized by any striking aspect, merely looking border ruffians after the type of Bill and Halloway. But Gulden, who sat at the end of the half-circle, was an object that Joan could scarcely bring her gaze to study. Somehow her first glance at him put into her mind a strange idea—that she was a woman and therefore of all creatures or things in the world the farthest removed from him. She looked away, and found her gaze returning, fascinated, as if she were a bird and he a snake. The man was of huge frame, a giant whose every move suggested the acme of physical power. He was an animal—a gorilla with a shock of light instead of black hair, of pale instead of black skin. His features might have been hewn and hammered out with coarse, dull, broken chisels. And upon his face, in the lines and cords, in the huge caverns where his eyes hid, and in the huge gash that held strong, white fangs, had been stamped by nature and by life a terrible ferocity. Here was a man or a monster in whose presence Joan felt that she would rather be dead. He did not smoke; he did not indulge in the coarse, good-natured raillery, he sat there like a huge engine of destruction that needed no rest, but was forced to rest because of weaker attachments. On the other hand, he was not sullen or brooding. It was that he did not seem to think.
Kells had been rapidly gaining strength since the extraction of the bullet, and it was evident that his interest was growing proportionately. He asked questions and received most of his replies from Red Pearce. Joan did not listen attentively at first, but presently she regretted that she had not. She gathered that Kells’s fame as the master bandit of the whole gold region of Idaho, Nevada, and northeastern California was a fame that he loved as much as the gold he stole. Joan sensed, through the replies of these men and their attitude toward Kells, that his power was supreme. He ruled the robbers and ruffians in his bands, and evidently they were scattered from Bannack to Lewiston and all along the border. He had power, likewise, over the border hawks not directly under his leadership. During the weeks of his enforced stay in the canyon there had been a cessation of operations—the nature of which Joan merely guessed—and a gradual accumulation of idle wailing men in the main camp. Also she gathered, but vaguely, that though Kells had supreme power, the organization he desired was yet far from being consummated. He showed thoughtfulness and irritation by turns, and it was the subject of gold that drew his intensest interest.
“Reckon you figgered right, Jack,” said Red Pearce, and paused as if before a long talk, while he refilled his pipe. “Sooner or later there’ll be the biggest gold strike ever made in the West. Wagon-trains are met every day comin’ across from Salt Lake. Prospectors are workin’ in hordes down from Bannack. All the gulches an’ valleys in the Bear Mountains have their camps. Surface gold everywhere an’ easy to get where there’s water. But there’s diggin’s all over. No big strike yet. It’s bound to come sooner or later. An’ then when the news hits the main-traveled roads an’ reaches back into the mountains there’s goin’ to be a rush that’ll make ’49 an’ ’51 look sick. What do you say, Bate?”
“Shore will,” replied a grizzled individual whom Kells had called Bate Wood. He was not so young as his companions, more sober, less wild, and slower of speech. “I saw both ’49 and ’51. Them was days! But I’m agreein’ with Red. There shore will be hell on this Idaho border sooner or later. I’ve been a prospector, though I never hankered after the hard work of diggin’ gold. Gold is hard to dig, easy to lose, an’ easy to get from some other feller. I see the signs of a comin’ strike somewhere in this region. Mebbe it’s on now. There’s thousands of prospectors in twos an’ threes an’ groups, out in the hills all over. They ain’t a-goin’ to tell when they do make a strike. But the gold must be brought out. An’ gold is heavy. It ain’t easy hid. Thet’s how strikes are discovered. I shore reckon thet this year will beat ’49 an’ ’51. An’ fer two reasons. There’s a steady stream of broken an’ disappointed gold-seekers back-trailin’ from California. There’s a bigger stream of hopeful an’ crazy fortune hunters travelin’ in from the East. Then there’s the wimmen an’ gamblers an’ such thet hang on. An’ last the men thet the war is drivin’ out here. Whenever an’ wherever these streams meet, if there’s a big gold strike, there’ll be the hellishest time the world ever saw!”
“Boys,” said Kells, with a ring in his weak voice, “it’ll be a harvest for my Border Legion.”
“Fer what?” queried Bate Wood, curiously.
All the others except Gulden turned inquiring and interested faces toward the bandit.
“The Border Legion,” replied Kells.
“An’ what’s that?” asked Red Pearce, bluntly.
“Well, if the time’s ripe for the great gold fever you say is coming, then it’s ripe for the greatest band ever organized. I’ll organize. I’ll call it the Border Legion.”
“Count me in as right-hand, pard,” replied Red, with enthusiasm.
“An’ shore me, boss,” added Bate Wood.
The idea was received vociferously, at which demonstration the giant Gulden raised his massive head and asked, or rather growled, in a heavy voice what the fuss was about. His query, his roused presence, seemed to act upon the others, even Kells, with a strange, disquieting or halting force, as if here was a character or an obstacle to be considered. After a moment of silence Red Pearce explained the project.
“Huh! Nothing new in that,” replied Gulden. “I belonged to one once. It was in Algiers. They called it the Royal Legion.”
“Algiers. What’s thet?” asked Bate Wood.
“Africa,” replied Gulden.
“Say, Gul, you’ve been around some,” said Red Pearce, admiringly. “What was the Royal Legion?”
“Nothing but a lot of devils from all over. The border there was the last place. Every criminal was safe from pursuit.”
“What’d you do?”
“Fought among ourselves. Wasn’t many in the Legion when I left.”
“Shore thet ain’t strange!” exclaimed Wood, s
ignificantly. But his inference was lost upon Gulden.
“I won’t allow fighting in my Legion,” said Kells, coolly. “I’ll pick this band myself.”
“Thet’s the secret,” rejoined Wood. “The right fellers. I’ve been in all kinds of bands. Why, I even was a vigilante in ’51.”
This elicited a laugh from his fellows, except the wooden-faced Gulden.
“How many do we want?” asked Red Pearce.
“The number doesn’t matter. But they must be men I can trust and control. Then as lieutenants I’ll need a few young fellows, like you, Red. Nervy, daring, cool, quick of wits.”
Red Pearce enjoyed the praise bestowed upon him and gave his shoulders a swagger. “Speakin’ of that, boss,” he said, “reminds me of a chap who rode into Cabin Gulch a few weeks ago. Braced right into Beard’s place, where we was all playin’ faro, an’ he asks for Jack Kells. Right off we all thought he was a guy who had a grievance, an’ some of us was for pluggin’ him. But I kinda liked him an’ I cooled the gang down. Glad I did that. He wasn’t wantin’ to throw a gun. His intentions were friendly. Of course I didn’t show curious about who or what he was. Reckoned he was a young feller who’d gone bad sudden-like an’ was huntin’ friends. An’ I’m here to say, boss, that he was wild.”
“What’s his name?” asked Kells.
“Jim Cleve, he said,” replied Pearce.
Joan Randle, hidden back in the shadows, forgotten or ignored by this bandit group, heard the name Jim Cleve with pain and fear, but not amaze. From the moment Pearce began his speech she had been prepared for the revelation of her runaway lover’s name. She trembled, and grew a little sick. Jim had made no idle threat. What would she have given to live over again the moment that had alienated him?
