The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  “The truth, Lang, or I’ll kill you!” he whispered hoarsely.

  And then he asked the question—and as he asked Josephine freed her hands. She tore the cloth from her mouth, but before she could rush forward, through Lang’s mottling lips had come the choking words:

  “It was Miriam’s.”

  Again Philip’s fingers sank in their death-grip in Lang’s throat. Twenty seconds more and he would have fulfilled his pact with Jean. A scream from Josephine turned his eyes for an instant from his victim. Out of that same cover of balsam three men were rushing upon him. A glance told him they were not of the forest people. He had time to gain his feet before they were upon him.

  It was a fight for life now, and his one hope lay in the fact that his assailants, escaping from the Nest, did not want to betray themselves by using firearms. The first man at him he struck a terrific blow that sent him reeling. A second caught his arm before he could recover himself—and then it was the hopeless struggle of one against three.

  Josephine stood free. She had seen Philip drop his pistol and she sprang to the spot where it had fallen. It was buried under the snow. The four men were on the ground now, Philip under. She heard a gasping sound—and then, far away, something else: a sound that thrilled her, that sent her voice back through the forest in cry after cry.

  What she heard was the wailing cry of the dog pack, her pack, following over the trail which her abductors had made in their flight from Adare House! A few steps away she saw a heavy stick in the snow. Fiercely she tore it loose, ran back to the men, and began striking blindly at those who were choking the life from Philip.

  Lang had risen to his knees, clutching his throat, and now staggered toward her. She struck at him, and he caught the club. The dogs heard her cries now. Half a mile back in the forest they were coming in a gray, fierce horde. Only Josephine knew, as she struggled with Lang. Under his assailants, Philip’s strength was leaving him. Iron fingers gripped at his throat. A flood of fire seemed bursting his head. Josephine’s cries were drifting farther and farther away, and his face was as Lang’s face had been a few moments before.

  Nearer and nearer swept the pack, covering that last half mile with the speed of the wind, the huge yellow form of Hero leading the others by a body’s length. They made no sound now. When they shot out of the forest into the little opening they had come so silently that even Lang did not see them. In another moment they were upon him. Josephine staggered back, her eyes big and wild with horror. She saw him go down, and then his shrieks rang out like a madman’s. The others were on their feet, and not until she saw Philip lying still and white on the snow did the power of speech return to her lips. She sprang toward the dogs.

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!” she cried. “Hero—kill! Nipa hao, boys! Beaver—Wolf—Hero—Captain—kill—kill—kill!”

  As her own voice rang out, Lang’s screams ceased, and then she saw Philip dragging himself to his knees. At her calls there came a sudden surge in the pack, and those who could not get at Lang leaped upon the remaining three. With a cry Josephine fell upon her knees beside Philip, clasping his head in her arms, holding him in the protection of her own breast as they looked upon the terrible scene.

  For a moment more she looked, and then she dropped her face on Philip’s shoulder with a ghastly cry. Still partly dazed, Philip stared. Screams such as he had never heard before came from the lips of the dying men. From screams they turned to moaning cries, and then to a horrible silence broken only by the snarling grind of the maddened dogs.

  Strength returned to Philip quickly. He felt Josephine limp and lifeless in his arms, and with an effort he staggered to his feet, half carrying her. A few yards away was a small tepee in which Lang had kept her. He partly carried, partly dragged her to this, and then he returned to the dogs.

  Vainly he called upon them to leave their victims. He was seeking for a club when through the balsam thicket burst John Adare and Father George at the head of a dozen men. In response to Adare’s roaring voice the pack slunk off. The beaten snow was crimson. Even Adare, as he faced Philip, could find no words in his horror. Philip pointed to the tepee.

  “Josephine—is there—safe,” he gasped. As Adare rushed into the tepee Philip swayed up to Father George.

  “I am dizzy—faint,” he said. “Help me—”

  He went to Lang and dropped upon his knees beside him. The man was unrecognizable. His head was almost gone. Philip thrust a hand inside his fang-torn coat—and pulled out a long envelope. It was addressed to the master of Adare. He staggered to his feet, and went to Thoreau. In his pocket he found the second envelope. Father George was close beside him as he thrust the two in his own pocket. He turned to the forest men, who stood like figures turned to stone, gazing upon the scene of the tragedy.

  “Carry them—out there,” said Philip, pointing into the forest. “And then—cover the blood with fresh snow.”

  He still clung to Father George’s arm as he staggered toward a near birch.

  “I feel weak—dizzy,” he repeated again. “Help me—pull off some bark.”

  A strange, inquiring look filled the Missioner’s face as he tore down a handful of bark, and at Philip’s request lighted a match. In an instant the bark was a mass of flame. Into the fire he put the letters.

  “It is best—to burn their letters,” he said. Beyond this he gave no explanation. And Father George asked no questions.

  They followed Adare into the tepee. Josephine was sobbing in her father’s arms. John Adare’s face was that of a man who had risen out of black despair into day.

  “Thank God she has not been harmed,” he said.

  Philip knelt beside them, and John Adare gave Josephine into his arms. He held her close to his breast, whispering only her name—and her arms crept up about him. Adare rose and stood beside Father George.

  “I will go back and attend to the wounded, Philip,” he said. “Jean is one of those hurt. It isn’t fatal.”

  He went out. Father George was about to follow when Philip motioned him back.

  “Will you wait outside for a few minutes?” he asked in a low voice. “We shall need you—alone—Josephine and I.”

  And now when they were gone, he raised Josephine’s face, and said:

  “They are all gone, Josephine—Lang, Thoreau, and the letters. Lang and Thoreau are dead, and I have burned the letters. Jean was shot. He thought he was dying, and he told me the truth that I might better protect you. Sweetheart, there is nothing more for me to know. The fight is done. And Father George is waiting—out there—to make us man and wife. No one will ever know but ourselves—and Jean. I will tell Father George that it has been your desire to have a second marriage ceremony performed by him; that we want our marriage to be consecrated by a minister of the forests. Are you ready, dear? Shall I call him in?”

  For a full minute she gazed steadily into his eyes, and Philip did not break the wonderful silence. And then, with a deep sigh, her head drooped to his breast. After a moment he heard her whisper:

  “You may call him in, Philip. I guess—I’ve got to be—your wife.”

  And as the logs of the Devil’s Nest sent up a pall of smoke that rose to the skies, Metoosin crouched shiveringly far back in the gloom of the pit, wondering if the dogs he had loosed had come to the end of the trail.

  THE EMIGRANT TRAIL, by Geraldine Bonner

  Originally published in 1910.

  PART I

  The Prairie

  CHAPTER I

  It had rained steadily for three days, the straight, relentless rain of early May on the Missouri frontier. The emigrants, whose hooded wagons had been rolling into Independence for the past month and whose tents gleamed through the spring foliage, lounged about in one another’s camps cursing the weather and swapping bits of useful information.

  The year was
1848 and the great California emigration was still twelve months distant. The flakes of gold had already been found in the race of Sutter’s mill, and the thin scattering of men, which made the population of California, had left their plows in the furrow and their ships in the cove and gone to the yellow rivers that drain the Sierra’s mighty flanks. But the rest of the world knew nothing of this yet. They were not to hear till November when a ship brought the news to New York, and from city and town, from village and cottage, a march of men would turn their faces to the setting sun and start for the land of gold.

  Those now bound for California knew it only as the recently acquired strip of territory that lay along the continent’s Western rim, a place of perpetual sunshine, where everybody had a chance and there was no malaria. That was what they told each other as they lay under the wagons or sat on saddles in the wet tents. The story of old Roubadoux, the French fur trader from St. Joseph, circulated cheeringly from mouth to mouth—a man in Monterey had had chills and people came from miles around to see him shake, so novel was the spectacle. That was the country for the men and women of the Mississippi Valley, who shook half the year and spent the other half getting over it.

  The call of the West was a siren song in the ears of these waiting companies. The blood of pioneers urged them forward. Their forefathers had moved from the old countries across the seas, from the elm-shaded towns of New England, from the unkempt villages that advanced into the virgin lands by the Great Lakes, from the peace and plenty of the splendid South. Year by year they had pushed the frontier westward, pricked onward by a ceaseless unrest, “the old land hunger” that never was appeased. The forests rang to the stroke of their ax, the slow, untroubled rivers of the wilderness parted to the plowing wheels of their unwieldy wagons, their voices went before them into places where Nature had kept unbroken her vast and pondering silence. The distant country by the Pacific was still to explore and they yoked their oxen, and with a woman and a child on the seat started out again, responsive to the cry of “Westward, Ho!”

  As many were bound for Oregon as for California. Marcus Whitman and the missionaries had brought alluring stories of that great domain once held so cheaply the country almost lost it. It was said to be of a wonderful fertility and league-long stretches of idle land awaited the settler. The roads ran together more than half the way, parting at Green River, where the Oregon trail turned to Fort Hall and the California dipped southward and wound, a white and spindling thread, across what men then called “The Great American Desert.” Two days’ journey from Independence this road branched from the Santa Fé Trail and bent northward across the prairie. A signboard on a stake pointed the way and bore the legend, “Road to Oregon.” It was the starting point of one of the historic highways of the world. The Indians called it “The Great Medicine Way of the Pale-face.”

  Checked in the act of what they called “jumping off” the emigrants wore away the days in telling stories of the rival countries, and in separating from old companies and joining new ones. It was an important matter, this of traveling partnerships. A trip of two thousand miles on unknown roads beset with dangers was not to be lightly undertaken. Small parties, frightened on the edge of the enterprise, joined themselves to stronger ones. The mountain men and trappers delighted to augment the tremors of the fearful, and round the camp fires listening groups hung on the words of long-haired men clad in dirty buckskins, whose moccasined feet had trod the trails of the fur trader and his red brother.

  This year was one of special peril for, to the accustomed dangers from heat, hunger, and Indians, was added a new one—the Mormons. They were still moving westward in their emigration from Nauvoo to the new Zion beside the Great Salt Lake. It was a time and a place to hear the black side of Mormonism. A Missourian hated a Latter Day Saint as a Puritan hated a Papist. Hawn’s mill was fresh in the minds of the frontiersmen, and the murder of Joseph Smith was accounted a righteous act. The emigrant had many warnings to lay to heart—against Indian surprises in the mountains, against mosquitoes on the plains, against quicksands in the Platte, against stampedes among the cattle, against alkaline springs and the desert’s parching heats. And quite as important as any of these was that against the Latter Day Saint with the Book of Mormon in his saddlebag and his long-barreled rifle across the pommel.

  So they waited, full of ill words and impatience, while the rain fell. Independence, the focusing point of the frontier life, housing unexpected hundreds, dripped from all its gables and swam in mud. And in the camps that spread through the fresh, wet woods and the oozy uplands, still other hundreds cowered under soaked tent walls and in damp wagon boxes, listening to the rush of the continuous showers.

  CHAPTER II

  On the afternoon of the fourth day the clouds lifted. A band of yellow light broke out along the horizon, and at the crossings of the town and in the rutted country roads men and women stood staring at it with its light and their own hope brightening their faces.

  David Crystal, as he walked through the woods, saw it behind a veining of black branches. Though a camper and impatient to be off like the rest, he did not feel the elation that shone on their watching faces. His was held in a somber abstraction. Just behind him, in an opening under the straight, white blossoming of dogwood trees, was a new-made grave. The raw earth about it showed the prints of his feet, for he had been standing by it thinking of the man who lay beneath.

  Four days before his friend, Joe Linley, had died of cholera. Three of them—Joe, himself, and George Leffingwell, Joe’s cousin—had been in camp less than a week when it had happened. Until then their life had been like a picnic there in the clearing by the roadside, with the thrill of the great journey stirring in their blood. And then Joe had been smitten with such suddenness, such awful suddenness! He had been talking to them when David had seen a suspension of something, a stoppage of a vital inner spring, and with it a whiteness had passed across his face like a running tide. The awe of that moment, the hush when it seemed to David the liberated spirit had paused beside him in its outward flight, was with him now as he walked through the rustling freshness of the wood.

  The rain had begun to lessen, its downfall thinning into a soft patter among the leaves. The young man took off his hat and let the damp air play over his hair. It was thick hair, black and straight, already longer than city fashions dictated, and a first stubble of black beard was hiding the lines of a chin perhaps a trifle too sensitive and pointed. Romantic good looks and an almost poetic refinement were the characteristics of the face, an unusual type for the frontier. With thoughtful gray eyes set deep under a jut of brows and a nose as finely cut as a woman’s, it was of a type that, in more sophisticated localities, men would have said had risen to meet the Byronic ideal of which the world was just then enamored. But there was nothing Byronic or self-conscious about David Crystal. He had been born and bred in what was then the Far West, and that he should read poetry and regard life as an undertaking that a man must face with all honor and resoluteness was not so surprising for the time and place. The West, with its loneliness, its questioning silences, its solemn sweep of prairie and roll of slow, majestic rivers, held spiritual communion with those of its young men who had eyes to see and ears to hear.

  The trees grew thinner and he saw the sky pure as amber beneath the storm pall. The light from it twinkled over wet twigs and glazed the water in the crumplings of new leaves. Across the glow the last raindrops fell in slanting dashes. David’s spirits rose. The weather was clearing and they could start—start on the trail, the long trail, the Emigrant Trail, two thousand miles to California!

  He was close to the camp. Through the branches he saw the filmy, diffused blueness of smoke and smelled the sharp odor of burning wood. He quickened his pace and was about to give forth a cheerful hail when he heard a sound that made him stop, listen with fixed eye, and then advance cautiously, sending a questing glance through the screen of leaves. The sou
nd was a woman’s voice detached in clear sweetness from the deeper tones of men.

  There was no especial novelty in this. Their camp was just off the road and the emigrant women were wont to pause there and pass the time of day. Most of them were the lean and leathern-skinned mates of the frontiersmen, shapeless and haggard as if toil had drawn from their bodies all the softness of feminine beauty, as malaria had sucked from their skins freshness and color. But there were young, pretty ones, too, who often strolled by, looking sideways from the shelter of jealous sunbonnets.

  This voice was not like theirs. It had a quality David had only heard a few times in his life—cultivation. Experience would have characterized it as “a lady voice.” David, with none, thought it an angel’s. Very shy, very curious, he came out from the trees ready at once and forever to worship anyone who could set their words to such dulcet cadences.

  The clearing, green as an emerald and shining with rain, showed the hood of the wagon and the new, clean tent, white as sails on a summer sea, against the trees’ young bloom. In the middle the fire burned and beside it stood Leff, a skillet in his hand. He was a curly-headed, powerful country lad, twenty-four years old, who, two months before, had come from an Illinois farm to join the expedition. The frontier was to him a place of varied diversion, Independence a stimulating center. So diffident that the bashful David seemed by contrast a man of cultured ease, he was now blushing till the back of his neck was red.

  On the other side of the fire a lady and gentleman stood arm in arm under an umbrella. The two faces, bent upon Leff with grave attention, were alike, not in feature, but in the subtly similar play of expression that speaks the blood tie. A father and daughter, David thought. Against the rough background of the camp, with its litter at their feet, they had an air of being applied upon an alien surface, of not belonging to the picture, but standing out from it in sharp and incongruous contrast.