by Zane Grey
“What’s happened?” said the former.
“It’s Bess,” said David, his face pallid with contrition. “I hope to God she’s not hurt. Up, Bess, there! Up on your feet, old girl!”
At her master’s voice the docile brute made a second attempt to rise, but again sank down, her sides panting, her head strained up.
Leff leaped off his horse.
“Damn her, I’ll make her get up,” he said, and gave her a violent kick on the ribs. The mare rolled an agonized eye upon him, and with a sudden burst of fury he rained kick after kick on her face.
David gave a strange sound, a pinched, thin cry, as if wrung from him by unbearable suffering, and leaped over the wheel. He struck Leff on the chest, a blow so savage and unexpected that it sent him staggering back into the stream, where, his feet slipping among the stones, he fell sprawling.
“Do that again and I’ll kill you,” David cried, and moving to the horse stood over it with legs spread and fists clinched for battle.
Leff scrambled to his knees, his face ominous, and Courant, who had been looking at the mare, apparently indifferent to the quarrel, now slipped to the ground.
“Let that hound alone,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s all up with Bess.”
David turned and knelt beside her, touching her with hands so tremulous he could hardly direct them. His breath came in gasps, he was shaken and blinded with passion, high-pitched and nerve-wracking as a woman’s.
Leff rose, volleying curses.
“Here you,” Courant shifted a hard eye on him, “get out. Get on your horse and go,” then turning to Bess, “Damn bad luck if we got to lose her.”
Leff stood irresolute, his curses dying away in smothered mutterings. His skin was gray, a trickle of blood ran down from a cut on his neck, his face showed an animal ferocity, dark and lowering as the front of an angry bull. With a slow lift of his head he looked at Susan, who was still in the wagon. She met the glance stonily with eyes in which her dislike had suddenly crystallized into open abhorrence. She gave a jerk of her head toward his horse, a movement of contemptuous command, and obeying it he mounted and rode away.
She joined the two men, who were examining Bess, now stretched motionless and uttering pitiful sounds. David had the head, bruised and torn by Leff’s kicks, on his knees, while Courant with expert hands searched for her hurt. It was not hard to find. The left foreleg had been broken at the knee, splinters of bone penetrating the skin. There was nothing to do with Bess but shoot her, and Courant went back for his pistols, while Daddy John and the doctor came up to listen with long faces. It was the first serious loss of the trip.
Later in the day the rain stopped and the clouds that had sagged low with its weight, began to dissolve into vaporous lightness, float airily and disperse. The train debouched from the gorge into one of the circular meadows and here found Leff lying on a high spot on the ground, his horse cropping the grass near him. He made no remark, and as they came to a halt and began the work of camping, he continued to lie without moving or speaking, his eyes fixed on the mountains.
These slowly unveiled themselves, showing in patches of brilliant color through rents in the mist which drew off lingeringly, leaving filaments caught delicately in the heights. The sky broke blue behind them, and clarified by the rain, the shadows brimmed high in the clefts. The low sun shot its beams across the meadow, leaving it untouched, and glittering on the remote, immaculate summits.
In exhaustion the camp lay resting, tents unpitched, the animals nosing over the grass. David and Daddy John slept a dead sleep rolled in blankets on the teeming ground. Courant built a fire, called Susan to it, and bade her dry her wet skirts. He lay near it, not noticing her, his glance ranging the distance. The line of whitened peaks began to take on a golden glaze, and the shadows in the hollow mounted till the camp seemed to be at the bottom of a lake in which a tide of some gray, transparent essence was rising.
“That’s where Lucy’s gone,” he said suddenly without moving his head.
Susan’s eyes followed his.
“Poor Lucy!” she sighed.
“Why is she poor?”
“Why?” indignantly. “What a question!”
“But why do you call her poor? Is it because she has no money?”
“Of course not. Who was thinking of money? I meant she was unfortunate to run away to such a life with a half-breed.”
“She’s gone out into the mountains with her lover. I don’t call that unfortunate, and I’ll bet you she doesn’t. She was brave enough to take her life when it came. She was a gallant girl, that Lucy.”
“I suppose that’s what you’d think.”
And in scorn of more words she gave her attention to her skirt, spreading its sodden folds to the heat. Courant clasped his hands behind his head and gazed ruminantly before him.
“Do you know how she’ll live, that ‘poor Lucy’?”
“Like a squaw.”
He was unshaken by her contempt, did not seem to notice it.
“They’ll go by ways that wind deep into the mountains. It’s wonderful there, peaks and peaks and peaks, and down the gorges and up over the passes, the trails go that only the trappers and the Indians know. They’ll pass lakes as smooth as glass and green as this hollow we’re in. You never saw such lakes, everything’s reflected in them like a mirror. And after a while they’ll come to the beaver streams and Zavier’ll set his traps. At night they’ll sleep under the stars, great big stars. Did you ever see the stars at night through the branches of the pine trees? They look like lanterns. It’ll seem to be silent, but the night will be full of noises, the sounds that come in those wild places, a wolf howling in the distance, the little secret bubbling of the spring, and the wind in the pine trees. That’s a sad sound, as if it was coming through a dream.”
The girl stirred and forgot her skirt. The solemn beauty that his words conjured up called her from her petty irritation. She looked at the mountains, her face full of a wistful disquiet.
“And it’ll seem as if there was no one else but them in the world. Two lovers and no one else, between the sunrise and the sunset. There won’t be anybody else to matter, or to look for, or to think about. Just those two alone, all day by the river where the traps are set and at night under the blanket in the dark of the trees.”
Susan said nothing. For some inexplicable reason her spirits sank and she felt a bleak loneliness. A sense of insignificance fell heavily upon her, bearing down her high sufficiency, making her feel that she was a purposeless spectator on the outside of life. She struggled against it, struggled back toward cheer and self-assertion, and in her effort to get back, found herself seeking news of less picturesque moments in Lucy’s lot.
“But the winter,” she said in a small voice like a pleading child’s, “the winter won’t be like that?”
“When the winter comes Zavier’ll build a hut. He’ll make it out of small trees, long and thin, bent round with their tops stuck in the ground, and he’ll thatch it with skins, and spread buffalo robes on the floor of it. There’ll be a hole for the smoke to get out, and near the door’ll be his graining block and stretching frame to cure his skins. On a tree nearby he’ll hang his traps, and there’ll be a brace of elkhorns fastened to another tree that they’ll use for a rack to hang the meat and maybe their clothes on. They’ll have some coffee and sugar and salt. That’s all they’ll need in the way of eatables, for he’ll shoot all the game they want, les aliments du pays, as the fur men call it. It’ll be cold, and maybe for months they’ll see no one. But what will it matter? They’ll have each other, snug and warm way off there in the heart of the mountains, with the big peaks looking down at them. Isn’t that a good life for a man and a woman?”
She did not answer, but sat as if contemplating the picture with fixed, far-seeing gaze. He raised himself on his el
bow and looked at her.
“Could you do that, little lady?” he said.
“No,” she answered, beating down rebellious inner whisperings.
“Wouldn’t you follow David that way?”
“David wouldn’t ask it. No civilized man would.”
“No, David wouldn’t,” he said quietly.
She glanced quickly at him. Did she hear the note of mockery which she sensed whenever he alluded to her lover? She was ready at once to take up arms for David, but the face opposite was devoid of any expression save an intent, expectant interest. She dropped her eyes to her dress, perturbed by the closeness of her escape from a foolish exhibition which would have made her ridiculous. She always felt with Courant that she would be swept aside as a trivial thing if she lost her dignity. He watched her and she grew nervous, plucking at her skirt with an uncertain hand.
“I wonder if you could?” he said after a pause.
“Of course not,” she snapped.
“Aren’t you enough of a woman?”
“I’m not enough of a fool.”
“Aren’t all women in love fools—anyway for a while?”
She made no answer, and presently he said, his voice lowered:
“Not enough of a woman to know how to love a man. Doesn’t even for a moment understand it. It’s ‘poor Susan.’”
Fury seized her, for she had not guessed where he was leading her, and now saw herself not only shorn of her dignity but shorn of her woman’s prerogative of being able to experience a mad and unreasonable passion.
“You’re a liar,” she burst out before she knew what words were coming.
“Then you think you could?” he asked without the slightest show of surprise at her violence, apparently only curious.
“Don’t I?” she cried, ready to proclaim that she would follow David to destruction and death.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I’ve been wondering.”
“What business have you got to wonder about me?”
“None—but,” he leaned toward her, “you can’t stop me doing that, little lady; that’s one of the things you can’t control.”
For a moment they eyed each other, glance held glance in a smoldering challenge. The quizzical patronage had gone from his, the gleam of a subdued defiance taken its place. Hers was defiant too, but it was openly so, a surface thing that she had raised like a defense in haste and tremor to hide weakness.
David moved in his blanket, yawned and threw out a languid hand. She leaped to her feet and ran to him.
“David, are you better?” she cried, kneeling beside him. “Are you better, dear?”
He opened his eyes, blinking, saw the beloved face, and smiled.
“All right,” he said sleepily. “I was only tired.”
She lifted one of the limp hands and pressed it to her cheek.
“I’ve been so worried about you,” she purred. “I couldn’t put my mind on anything else. I haven’t known what I was saying, I’ve been so worried.”
CHAPTER VI
South Pass, that had been pictured in their thoughts as a cleft between snow-crusted summits, was a wide, gentle incline with low hills sweeping up on either side. From here the waters ran westward, following the sun. Pacific Spring seeped into the ground in an oasis of green whence whispering threads felt their way into the tawny silence and subdued by its weight lost heart and sank into the unrecording earth.
Here they found the New York Company and a Mormon train filling up their water casks and growing neighborly in talk of Sublette’s cut off and the route by the Big and Little Sandy. A man was a man even if he was a Mormon, and in a country so intent on its own destiny, so rapt in the calm of contemplation, he took his place as a human unit on whom his creed hung like an unnoticed tag.
They filled their casks, visited in the two camps, and then moved on. Plain opened out of plain in endless rotation, rings of sun-scorched earth brushed up about the horizon in a low ridge like the raised rim on a plate. In the distance the thin skein of a water course drew an intricate pattern that made them think of the thread of slime left by a wandering snail. In depressions where the soil was webbed with cracks, a livid scurf broke out as if the face of the earth were scarred with the traces of inextinguishable foulness. An even subdual of tint marked it all. White had been mixed on the palette whence the colors were drawn. The sky was opaque with it; it had thickened the red-browns and yellows to ocher and pale shades of putty. Nothing moved and there were no sounds, only the wheeling sun changed the course of the shadows. In the morning they slanted from the hills behind, eagerly stretching after the train, straining to overtake and hold it, a living plaything in this abandoned land. At midday a blot of black lay at the root of every sage brush. At evening each filigreed ridge, each solitary cone rising detached in the sealike circle of its loneliness, showed a slant of amethyst at its base, growing longer and finer, tapering prodigiously, and turning purple as the earth turned orange.
There was little speech in the moving caravan. With each day their words grew fewer, their laughter and light talk dwindled. Gradual changes had crept into the spirit of the party. Accumulations of habit and custom that had collected upon them in the dense life of towns were dropping away. As the surface refinements of language were dying, so their faces had lost a certain facile play of expression. Delicate nuances of feeling no longer showed, for they no longer existed. Smiles had grown rarer, and harder characteristics were molding their features into sterner lines. The acquired deceptiveness of the world of men was leaving them. Ugly things that they once would have hidden cropped out unchecked by pride or fear of censure. They did not care. There was no standard, there was no public opinion. Life was resolving itself into a few great needs that drove out all lesser and more delicate desires. Beings of a ruder make were usurping their bodies. The primitive man in them was rising to meet the primitive world.
In the young girl the process of elimination was as rapid if not as radical as in the case of the men. She was unconsciously ridding herself of all that hampered and made her unfit. From the soft feminine tissue, intricacies of mood and fancy were being obliterated. Rudimentary instincts were developing, positive and barbaric as a child’s. In the old days she had been dainty about her food. Now she cooked it in blackened pans and ate with the hunger of the men. Sleep, that once had been an irksome and unwelcome break between the pleasures of well-ordered days, was a craving that she satisfied, unwashed, often half-clad. In Rochester she had spent thought and time upon her looks, had stood before her mirror matching ribbons to her complexion, wound and curled her hair in becoming ways. Now her hands, hardened and callous as a boy’s, were coarse-skinned with broken nails, sometimes dirty, and her hair hung rough from the confining teeth of a comb and a few bent pins. When in flashes of retrospect she saw her old self, this pampered self of crisp fresh frocks and thoughts moving demurely in the narrow circle of her experience, it did not seem as if it could be the same Susan Gillespie.
All that made up the little parcel of her personality seemed gone. In those days she had liked this and wanted that and forgotten and wanted something else. Rainy weather had sent its ashen sheen over her spirit, and her gladness had risen to meet the sun. She remembered the sudden sweeps of depression that had clouded her horizon when she had drooped in an unintelligible and not entirely disagreeable melancholy, and the contrasting bursts of gayety when she laughed at anything and loved everybody. Hours of flitting fancies flying this way and that, hovering over chance incidents that were big by contrast with the surrounding uneventfulness, the idleness of dropped hands and dreaming eyes, the charmed peerings into the future—all were gone. Life had seized her in a mighty grip, shaken her free of it all, and set her down where she felt only a few imperious sensations, hunger, fatigue, fear of danger, love of her father, and— She pulled her thoughts t
o obedience with a sharp jerk and added—love of David and hatred of Courant.
These two latter facts stood out sentinel-wise in the foreground. In the long hours on horseback she went over them like a lesson she was trying to learn. She reviewed David’s good points, dwelt on them, held them up for her admiration, and told herself no girl had ever had a finer or more gallant lover. She was convinced of it and was quite ready to convince anybody who denied it. Only when her mental vision—pressed on by some inward urge of obscure self-distrust—carried her forward to that future with David in the cabin in California, something in her shrank and failed. Her thought leaped back as from an abhorrent contact, and her body, caught by some mysterious internal qualm, felt limp and faintly sickened.
She dwelt even more persistently on Courant’s hatefulness, impressed upon herself his faults. He was hard and she had seen him brutal, a man without feeling, as he had shown when the Mormon boy died, a harsh and remorseless leader urging them on, grudging them even their seventh day rest, deaf to their protests, lashing them forward with contempt of their weakness. This was above and apart from his manner to her. That she tried to feel was a small, personal matter, but, nevertheless, it stung, did not cease to sting, and left an unhealed sore to rankle in her pride. He did not care to hide that he held her cheaply, as a useless futile thing. Once she had heard him say to Daddy John, “It’s the women in the train that make the trouble. They’re always in the way.” And she was the only woman. She would like to see him conquered, beaten, some of his heady confidence stricken out of him, and when he was humbled have stood by and smiled at his humiliation.
