The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  He nodded.

  “You’d rather have carried the things up?”

  “Yes.”

  She laid the sticks one on the other without replying and he said with a touch of pleading in his tone:

  “You understand that, don’t you?”

  She answered quickly:

  “Oh, of course, perfectly.”

  But nevertheless she did not quite. Daddy John’s action was the one she really did understand, and she even understood why Leff swore so violently.

  CHAPTER VIII

  It was Sunday again and they lay encamped near the Little Blue. The country was changing, the trees growing thin and scattered and sandy areas were cropping up through the trail. At night they unfolded the maps and holding them to the firelight measured the distance to the valley of the Platte. Once there the first stage of the journey would be over. When they started from Independence the Platte had shone to the eyes of their imaginations as a threadlike streak almost as far away as California. Now they would soon be there. At sunset they stood on eminences and pointed in its direction, let their mental vision conjure up Grand Island and sweep forward to the buffalo-darkened plains and the river sunk in its league-wide bottom, even peered still further and saw Fort Laramie, a faint, white dot against the cloudy peaks of mountains.

  The afternoon was hot and the camp drowsed. Susan moving away from it was the one point of animation in the encircling quietude. She was not in spirit with its lethargy, stepping rapidly in a stirring of light skirts, her hat held by one string, fanning back and forth from her hanging hand. Her goal was a spring hidden in a small arroyo that made a twisted crease in the land’s level face. It was a little dell in which the beauty they were leaving had taken a last stand, decked the ground with a pied growth of flowers, spread a checkered roof of boughs against the sun. From a shelf on one side the spring bubbled, clear as glass, its waters caught and held quivering in a natural basin of rock.

  As she slipped over the margin, the scents imprisoned in the sheltered depths rose to meet her, a sweet, cool tide of fragrance into which she sank. After the glaring heat above it was like stepping into a perfumed bath. She lay by the spring, her hands clasped behind her head, looking up at the trees. The segments of sky between the boughs were as blue as a turquoise and in this thick intense color the little leaves seemed as if inlaid. Then a breeze came and the bits of inlaying shook loose and trembled into silvery confusion. Small secretive noises came from them as if minute confidences were passing from bough to bough, and through their murmurous undertone the drip of the spring fell with a thin, musical tinkle.

  Nature was dreaming and Susan dreamed with it. But her dreaming had a certain definiteness, a distinct thought sustained its diffused content. She was not self-consciously thinking of her lovers, not congratulating herself on their acquirement, but the consciousness that she had achieved them lay graciously round her heart, gave the soft satisfaction to her musings that comes to one who has accomplished a duty. With all modesty she felt the gratification of the being who approaches his Destiny. She had advanced a step in her journey as a woman.

  A hail from the bank above broke upon her reverie, but when she saw it was David, she sat up smiling. That he should find out her hiding place without word or sign from her was an action right and fitting. It was a move in the prehistoric game of flight and pursuit, in which they had engaged without comprehension and with the intense earnestness of children at their play. David dropped down beside her, a spray of wild roses in his hand, and began at once to chide her for thus stealing away. Did she not remember they were in the country of the Pawnees, the greatest thieves on the plains? It was not safe to stray alone from the camp.

  Susan smiled:

  “The Pawnees steal horses, but I never heard anyone say they stole girls.”

  “They steal anything they can get,” said the simple young man.

  “Oh, David,”—now she was laughing—“so they might steal me if they couldn’t get a horse, or a blanket, or a side of bacon! Next time I go wandering I’ll take the bacon with me and then I’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “Your father wouldn’t like it. I’ve heard him tell you not to go off this way alone.”

  “Well, who could I take? I don’t like to ask father to go out into the sun and Daddy John was asleep, and Leff—I didn’t see Leff anywhere.”

  “I was there,” he said, dropping his eyes.

  “You were under the wagon reading Byron. I wouldn’t for the world take you away from Byron.”

  She looked at him with a candid smile, her eyes above it dancing with delighted relish in her teasing.

  “I would have come in a minute,” he said low, sweeping the surface of the spring with the spray of roses. Susan’s look dwelt on him, gently thoughtful in its expression in case he should look up and catch it.

  “Leave Byron,” she said, “leave the Isles of Greece where that lady, whose name I’ve forgotten, ‘loved and sung,’ and walk in the sun with me just because I wanted to see this spring! Oh, David, I would never ask it of you.”

  “You know I would have loved to do it.”

  “You would have been polite enough to do it. You’re always polite.”

  “I would have done it because I wanted to,” said the victim with the note of exasperation in his voice.

  She stretched her hand forward and very gently took the branch of roses from him.

  “Don’t tell stories,” she said in the cajoling voice used to children. “This is Sunday.”

  “I never tell stories,” he answered, goaded to open irritation, “on Sunday or any other day. You know I would have liked to come with you and Byron could have—have——”

  “What?” the branch upright in her hand.

  “Gone to the devil!”

  “David!” in horror, “I never thought you’d talk that way.”

  She gave the branch a shake and a shower of drops fell on him.

  “There, that’s to cool your anger. For I see you’re angry though I haven’t got the least idea what it’s about.”

  He made no answer, wounded by her lack of understanding. She moved the rose spray against her face, inhaling its fragrance, and watching him through the leaves. After a moment she said with a questioning inflection:

  “You were angry?”

  He gave her a quick glance, met her eyes, shining between the duller luster of the leaves, and suddenly dumb before their innocent provocation, turned his head away. The sense of his disturbance trembled on the air and Susan’s smile died. She dropped the branch, trailing it lightly across the water, and wondering at the confusion that had so abruptly upset her self-confident gayety. Held in inexplicable embarrassment she could think of nothing to say. It was he who broke the silence with a change of subject:

  “In a few days more we’ll be at the Platte. When we started that seemed as if it was half the journey, didn’t it?”

  “We’ll get there just about a month from the time we left Independence. Before we started I thought a month out of doors this way would be like a year. But it really hasn’t seemed long at all. I suppose it’s because I’ve enjoyed it so.”

  This again stirred him. Was there any hope that his presence might have been the cause of some small fraction of that enjoyment? He put out a timid feeler:

  “I wonder why you enjoyed it. Perhaps Leff and I amused you a little.”

  It was certainly a humble enough remark, but it caused a slight stiffening and withdrawal in the young girl. She instinctively felt the pleading for commendation and resented it. It was as if a slave, upon whose neck her foot rested, were to squirm round and recommend himself to her tolerance. David, trying to extort from her flattering admissions, roused a determination to keep the slave with his face in the dust.

  “I just like being out of
doors,” she said carelessly. “And it’s all the more odd as I was always wanting to hurry on and catch up the large train.”

  This was a grinding in of the heel. The large train into which the Gillespies were to be absorbed and an end brought to their independent journeying, had at first loomed gloomily before David’s vision. But of late it had faded from the conversation and his mind. The present was so good it must continue, and he had come to accept that first bright dream of his in which he and Susan were to go riding side by side across the continent as a permanent reality. His timidity was swept away in a rush of stronger feeling and he sat erect, looking sharply at her:

  “I thought you’d given up the idea of joining with that train?”

  Susan raised the eyebrows of mild surprise:

  “Why did you think that?”

  “You’ve not spoken of it for days.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. There are lots of important things I don’t speak of.”

  “You ought to have spoken of that.”

  The virile note of authority was faint in his words, the first time Susan had ever heard it. Her foot was in a fair way to be withdrawn from the slave’s neck. The color in her cheeks deepened and it was she who now dropped her eyes.

  “We had arranged to join the train long before we left Rochester,” she answered. “Everybody said it was dangerous to travel in a small party. Dr. Whitman told my father that.”

  “There’s been nothing dangerous so far.”

  “No, it’s later when we get into the country of the Sioux and the Black-feet. They often attack small parties. It’s a great risk that people oughtn’t to run. They told us that in Independence, too.”

  He made no answer and she eyed him with stealthy curiosity. He was looking on the ground, his depression apparent. At this evidence of her ability to bring joy or sorrow to her slave she relented.

  “You’ll join it, too, won’t you?” she said gently.

  “I don’t know. The big trains move so slowly.”

  “Oh, you must. It would be dreadfully dreary to separate our parties after we’d traveled so long together.”

  “Maybe I will. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “But you must think about it. There’s no knowing now when we may come upon them—almost any day. You don’t want to go on and leave us behind, do you?”

  He again made no answer and she stole another quick look at him. This mastery of a fellow creature was by far the most engrossing pastime life had offered her. There was something about him, a suggestion of depths hidden and shut away from her that filled her with the venturesome curiosity of Fatima opening the cupboards in Bluebeard’s castle.

  “We’d feel so lonely if you went on and left us behind with a lot of strange people,” she said, with increasing softness. “We’d miss you so.”

  The young man turned quickly on her, leaned nearer, and said huskily:

  “Would you?”

  The movement brought his face close to hers, and she shrank back sharply, her hand ready to hold him at a distance. Her laughing expression changed into one of offended dignity, almost aversion. At the same time his agitation, which had paled his cheeks and burst through his shy reserve, filled her with repulsion. For the moment she disliked him. If he had tried to put his hand upon her she would have struck him in quick rage at his presumption. He had not the slightest intention of doing so, but the sudden rush of feeling that her words had evoked, made him oblivious to the startled withdrawal of her manner.

  “Answer me,” he said. “Would you miss me? Am I anything to you?”

  She leaped to her feet, laughing not quite naturally, for her heart was beating hard and she had suddenly shrunk within herself, her spirit alert and angrily defensive in its maiden stronghold.

  “Miss you,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone that laid sentiment dead at a blow, “of course I’d miss you,” then backed away from him, brushing off her skirt.

  He rose and stood watching her with a lover’s hang-dog look. She glanced at him, read his face and once more felt secure in her ascendency. Her debonair self-assurance came back with a lowering of her pulse and a remounting to her old position of condescending command. But a parting lesson would not be amiss and she turned from him, saying with a carefully tempered indifference:

  “And Leff, too. I’d miss Leff dreadfully. Come, it’s time to go.”

  Before he could answer she was climbing the bank, not looking back, moving confidently as one who had no need of his aid. He followed her slowly, sore and angry, his eyes on her figure which flitted in advance clean-cut against the pale, enormous sky.

  He had just caught up with her when from a hollow near the roadside Leff came into view. He had been after antelope and carried his rifle and a hunting knife in his belt. During the chase he had come upon a deserted Pawnee settlement in a depression of the prairie. Susan was instantly interested and wanted to see it and David stood by, listening in sulky silence while Leff pointed out the way. The sun was sinking and they faced it, the young man’s indicating finger moving back and forth across the vagaries of the route. The prairie was cut by long undulations, naked of verdure, save a spot in the foreground where, beside a round greenish pool, a single tree lifted thinly clad boughs. Something of bleakness had crept into the prospect, its gay greenness was giving place to an austere pallor of tint, a dry economy of vegetation. The summits of the swells were bare, the streams shrunk in sandy channels. It was like a face from which youth is withdrawing.

  The Indian encampment lay in a hollow, the small wattled huts gathered on both sides of a runlet that oozed from the slope and slipped between a line of stepping stones. The hollow was deep for the level country, the grassed sides sweeping abruptly to the higher reaches above. They walked through it, examining the neatly made huts and speculating on the length of time the Indians had left. David remembered that the day before, the trail had been crossed by the tracks of a village in transit, long lines graven in the dust by the dragging poles of the travaux. He felt uneasy. The Indians might not be far and they themselves were at least a mile from the camp, and but one of them armed. The others laughed and Susan brought the blood into his face by asking him if he was afraid.

  He turned from her, frankly angry and then stood rigid with fixed glance. On the summit of the opposite slope, black against the yellow west, were a group of mounted figures. They were massed together in a solid darkness, but the outlines of the heads were clear, heads across which bristled an upright crest of hair like the comb of a rooster.

  For a long, silent moment the two parties remained immovable, eying each other across the hollow. Then David edged closer to the girl. He felt his heart thumping, but his first throttling grip of fear loosened as his mind realized their helplessness. Leff was the only one with arms. They must get in front of Susan and tell her to run and the camp was a mile off! He felt for her hand and heard her whisper:

  “Indians—there are six of them.”

  As she spoke the opposite group broke and figures detached themselves. Three, hunched in shapeless sack-forms, were squaws. They made no movement, resting immobile as statues, the sunset shining between the legs of their ponies. The men spoke together, their heads turning from the trio below to one another. David gripped the hand he held and leaned forward to ask Leff for his knife.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he said to Susan. “It’s all right.”

  “I’m not frightened,” she answered quietly.

  “Your knife,” he said to Leff and then stopped, staring. Leff very slowly, step pressing stealthily behind step, was creeping backward up the slope. His face was chalk white, his eyes fixed on the Indians. In his hand he held his rifle ready, and the long knife gleamed in his belt. For a moment David had no voice wherewith to arrest him, but Susan had.

  “Where are you going?”
she said loudly.

  It stopped him like a blow. His terrified eyes shifted to her face.

  “I wasn’t going,” he faltered.

  “Come back,” she said. “You have the rifle and the knife.”

  He wavered, his loosened lips shaking.

  “Back here to us,” she commanded, “and give David the rifle.”

  He crept downward to them, his glance always on the Indians. They had begun to move forward, leaving the squaws on the ridge. Their approach was prowlingly sinister, the ponies stepping gingerly down the slope, the snapping of twigs beneath their hoofs clear in the waiting silence. As they dipped below the blazing sunset the rider’s figures developed in detail, their bodies bare and bronzed in the subdued light. Each face, held high on a craning neck, was daubed with vermilion, the high crest of hair bristling across the shaven crowns. Grimly impassive they came nearer, not speaking nor moving their eyes from the three whites. One of them, a young man, naked save for a breech clout and moccasins, was in the lead. As he approached David saw that his eyelids were painted scarlet and that a spot of silver on his breast was a medal hanging from a leathern thong.

  At the bottom of the slope they reined up, standing in a group, with lifted heads staring. The trio opposite stared as fixedly. Behind Susan’s back Leff had passed David the rifle. He held it in one hand, Susan by the other. He was conscious of her rigidity and also of her fearlessness. The hand he held was firm. Once, breathing a phrase of encouragement, he met her eyes, steady and unafraid. All his own fear had passed. The sense of danger was thrillingly acute, but he felt it only in its relation to her. Dropping her hand he stepped a pace forward and said loudly:

  “How!”

  The Indian with the medal answered him, a deep, gutteral note.

  “Pawnee?” David asked.

  The same man replied with a word that none of them understood.

  “My camp is just here,” said David, with a backward jerk of his head. “There are many men there.”