The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  So she passed over the empty land under the empty sky, a particle of matter carrying its problem with it.

  It was late afternoon when they encamped by the Big Sandy. The march had been distressful, bitter in their mouths with the clinging clouds of powdered alkali, their heads bowed under the glaring ball of the sun. All day the circling rim of sky line had weaved up and down, undulating in the uncertainty of the mirage, the sage had blotted into indistinct seas that swam before their strained vision. When the river cleft showed in black tracings across the distance, they stiffened and took heart, coolness and water were ahead. It was all they had hope or desire for just then. At the edge of the clay bluff, they dipped and poured down a corrugated gully, the dust sizzling beneath the braked wheels, the animals, the smell of water in their nostrils, past control. The impetus of the descent carried them into the chill, purling current. Man and beast plunged in, laved in it, drank it, and then lay by it resting, spent and inert.

  They camped where a grove of alders twinkled in answer to the swift, telegraphic flashes of the stream. Under these the doctor pitched his tents, the hammering of the pegs driving through the sounds of man’s occupation into the quietude that lapped them like sleeping tides. The others hung about the center of things where wagons and mess chests, pans and fires, made the nucleus of the human habitation.

  Susan, sitting on a box, with a treasure of dead branches at her feet, waited yet a space before setting them in the fire form. She was sunk in the apathy of the body surrendered to restoring processes. The men’s voices entered the channels of her ears and got no farther. Her vision acknowledged the figure of Leff nearby sewing up a rent in his coat, but her brain refused to accept the impression. Her eye held him in a heavy vacuity, watched with a trancelike fixity his careful stitches and the armlong stretch of the drawn thread.

  Had she shifted it a fraction, it would have encountered David squatting on the bank washing himself. His long back, the red shirt drawn taut across its bowed outline, showed the course of his spine in small regular excrescences. The water that he raised in his hands and rinsed over his face and neck made a pleasant, clean sound, that her ear noted with the other sounds. Somewhere behind her Daddy John and Courant made a noise with skillets and picket pins and spoke a little, a sentence mutteringly dropped and monosyllabically answered.

  David turned a streaming face over his shoulder, blinking through the water. The group he looked at was as idyllically peaceful as wayfarers might be after the heat and burden of the day. Rest, fellowship, a healthy simplicity of food and housing were all in the picture either visibly or by implication.

  “Throw me the soap, Leff,” he called, “I forgot it.”

  The soap lay on the top of a meal sack, a yellow square, placed there by David on his way to the water. It shone between Susan and Leff, standing forth as a survival of a pampered past. Susan’s eye shifted toward it, fastened on it, waiting for Leff’s hand to come and bear it away. But the hand executed no such expected maneuver. It planted the needle deliberately, pushed it through, drew it out with its long tail of thread. Surprise began to dispel her lethargy. Her eye left the soap, traveled at a more sprightly speed back to Leff, lit on his face with a questioning intelligence.

  David called again.

  “Hurry up. I want to light the fire.”

  Leff took another considered stitch.

  “I don’t know where it is,” he answered without looking up.

  The questioning of Susan’s glance became accusative.

  “It’s there beside you on the meal sack,” she said. “Throw it to him.”

  Leff raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were curiously pale and wide. She could see the white round the fixed pupil.

  “Do it yourself,” he answered, his tone the lowest that could reach her. “Do it or go to Hell.”

  She rested without movement, her mouth falling slightly open. For the moment there was a stoppage of all feeling but amazement, which invaded her till she seemed to hold nothing else. David’s voice came from a far distance, as if she had floated away from him and it was a cord jerking her back to her accustomed place.

  “Hurry up,” it called. “It’s right there beside you.”

  Leff threw down his sewing and leaped to his feet. Leaning against the bank behind him was his gun, newly cleaned and primed.

  “Get it yourself and be d—d to you!” he roared.

  The machinery of action stopped as though by the breaking of a spring. Their watches ticked off a few seconds of mind paralysis in which there was no expectancy or motive power, all action inhibited. Sight was all they used for those seconds. Leff spoke first, the only one among them whose thinking process had not been snapped:

  “If you keep on shouting for me to do your errands, I’ll show you”—he snatched up the gun and brought it to his shoulder with a lightning movement—“I’ll send you where you can’t order me round—you and this d—d ——— here.”

  The inhibition was lifted and the three men rushed toward him. Daddy John struck up the gun barrel with a tent pole. The charge passed over David’s head, spat in the water beyond, the report crackling sharp in the narrow ravine. David staggered, the projection of smoke reaching out toward him, his hands raised to ward it off, not knowing whether he was hurt or not.

  “That’s a great thing to do,” he cried, dazed, and stubbing his foot on a stone stumbled to his knees.

  The two others fell on Leff. Susan saw the gun ground into the dust under their trampling feet and Leff go down on top of it. Daddy John’s tent pole battered at him, and Courant on him, a writhing body, grappled and wrung at his throat. The doctor came running from the trees, the hammer in his hand, and Susan grabbed at the descending pole, screaming:

  “You’re killing him. Father, stop them. They’ll murder him.”

  The sight of his Missy clinging to the pole brought the old man to his senses, but it took David and the doctor to drag Courant away. For a moment they were a knot of struggling bodies, from which oaths and sobbing breaths broke. Upright he shook them off and backed toward the bank, leaving them looking at him, all expectant. He growled a few broken words, his face white under the tan, the whole man shaken by a passion so transforming that they forgot the supine figure and stood alert, ready to spring upon him. He made a movement of his head toward Leff.

  “Why didn’t you let me kill him?” he said huskily.

  It broke the tension. Their eyes dropped to Leff, who lay motionless and unconscious, blood on his lips, a slip of white showing under his eyelids. The doctor dropped on his knees beside him and opened his shirt. Daddy John gave him an investigating push with the tent pole, and David eyed him with an impersonal, humane concern. Only Susan’s glance remained on Courant, unfaltering as the beam of a fixed star.

  His savage excitement was on the ebb. He pulled his hunting shirt into place and felt along his belt for his knife, while his broad breast rose like a wave coming to its breakage then dropped as the wave drops into its hollow. The hand he put to his throat to unfasten the band of his shirt shook, it had difficulty in manipulating the button, and he ran his tongue along his dried lips. She watched every movement, to the outward eye like a child fascinated by an unusual and terrifying spectacle. But her gaze carried deeper than the perturbed envelope. She looked through to the man beneath, felt an exultation in his might, knew herself kindred with him, fed by the same wild strain.

  His glance moved, touched the unconscious man at his feet, then lifting met hers. Eye held eye. In each a spark leaped, ran to meet its opposing spark and flashed into union.

  When she looked down again the group of figures was dim. Their talk came vaguely to her, like the talk of men in a dream. David was explaining. Daddy John made a grimace at him which was a caution to silence. The doctor had not heard and was not to hear the epithet that had been ap
plied to his daughter.

  “He’s sun mad,” the old man said. “Half crazy. I’ve seen ’em go that way before. How’ll he get through the desert I’m asking you?”

  There were some contusions on the head that looked bad, the doctor said, but nothing seemed to be broken. He’d been half strangled; they’d have to get him into the wagon.

  “Leave him at Fort Bridger,” came Courant’s voice through the haze. “Leave him there to rot.”

  The doctor answered in the cold tones of authority:

  “We’ll take him with us as we agreed in the beginning. Because he happens not to be able to stand it, it’s not for us to abandon him. It’s a physical matter—sun and hard work and irritated nerves. Take a hand and help me lift him into the wagon.”

  They hoisted him in and disposed him on a bed of buffalo robes spread on sacks. He groaned once or twice, then settled on the softness of the skins, gazing at them with blood-shot eyes of hate. When the doctor offered him medicine, he struck the tin, sending its contents flying. However serious his hurts were they had evidently not mitigated the ferocity of his mood.

  For the three succeeding days he remained in the wagon, stiff with bruises and refusing to speak. Daddy John was detailed to take him his meals, and the doctor dressed his wounds and tried to find the cause of his murderous outburst. But Leff was obdurate. He would express no regret for his action, and would give no reason for it. Once when the questioner asked him if he hated David, he said “Yes.” But to the succeeding, “Why did he?” he offered no explanation, said he “didn’t know why.”

  “Hate never came without a reason,” said the physician, curious and puzzled. “Has David wronged you in any way?”

  “What’s that to you?” answered the farm boy. “I can hate him if I like, can’t I?”

  “Not in my train.”

  “Well there are other trains where the men aren’t all fools, and the women——”

  He stopped. The doctor’s eye held him with a warning gleam.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with that boy,” he said afterwards in the evening conference. “I can’t get at him.”

  “Sun mad,” Daddy John insisted.

  Courant gave a grunt that conveyed disdain of a question of such small import.

  David couldn’t account for it at all.

  Susan said nothing.

  At Green River the Oregon Trail broke from the parent road and slanted off to the northwest. Here the Oregon companies mended their wagons and braced their yokes for the long pull across the broken teeth of mountains to Fort Hall, and from there onward to the new country of great rivers and virgin forests. A large train was starting as the doctor’s wagons came down the slope. There was some talk, and a little bartering between the two companies, but time was precious, and the head of the Oregon caravan had begun to roll out when the California party were raising their tents on the river bank.

  It was a sere and sterile prospect. Drab hills rolled in lazy waves toward the river where they reared themselves into bolder forms, a line of ramparts guarding the precious thread of water. The sleek, greenish current ate at the roots of lofty bluffs, striped by bands of umber and orange, and topped with out-croppings of rock as though a vanished race had crowned them with now crumbling fortresses. At their feet, sucking life from the stream, a fringe of alder and willows decked the sallow landscape with a trimming of green.

  Here the doctor’s party camped for the night, rising in the morning to find a new defection in their ranks. Leff had gone. Nailed to the mess chest was a slip of paper on which he had traced a few words announcing his happiness to be rid of them, his general dislike of one and all, and his intention to catch up the departed train and go to the Oregon country. This was just what they wanted, the desired had been accomplished without their intervention. But when they discovered that, beside his own saddle horse, he had taken David’s, their gladness suffered a check. It was a bad situation, for it left the young man with but one horse, the faithful Ben. There was nothing for it but to abandon the wagon, and give David the doctor’s extra mount for a pack animal. With silent pangs the student saw his books thrown on the banks of the river while his keg of whisky, sugar and coffee were stored among the Gillespies’ effects. Then they started, a much diminished train—one wagon, a girl, and three mounted men.

  CHAPTER VII

  It was Sunday afternoon, and the doctor and his daughter were sitting by a group of alders on the banks of the little river called Ham’s Fork. On the uplands above, the shadows were lengthening, and at intervals a light air caught up swirls of dust and carried them careening away in staggering spirals.

  The doctor was tired and lay stretched on the ground. He looked bloodless and wan, the grizzled beard not able to hide the thinness of his face. The healthful vigor he had found on the prairie had left him, each day’s march claiming a dole from his hoarded store of strength. He knew—no one else—that he had never recovered the vitality expended at the time of Bella’s illness. The call then had been too strenuous, the depleted reservoir had filled slowly, and now the demands of unremitting toil were draining it of what was left. He said nothing of this, but thought much in his feverish nights, and in the long afternoons when his knees felt weak against the horse’s sides. As the silence of each member of the little train was a veil over secret trouble, his had hidden the darkest, the most sinister.

  Susan, sitting beside him, watching him with an anxious eye, noted the languor of his long, dry hands, the network of lines, etched deep on the loose skin of his cheeks. Of late she had been shut in with her own preoccupations, but never too close for the old love and the old habit to force a way through. She had seen a lessening of energy and spirit, asked about it, and received the accustomed answers that came with the quick, brisk cheeriness that now had to be whipped up. She had never seen his dauntless belief in life shaken. Faith and a debonair courage were his message. They were still there, but the effort of the unbroken spirit to maintain them against the body’s weakness was suddenly revealed to her and the pathos of it caught at her throat. She leaned forward and passed her hand over his hair, her eyes on his face in a long gaze of almost solemn tenderness.

  “You’re worn out,” she said.

  “Not a bit of it,” he answered stoutly. “You’re the most uncomplimentary person I know. I was just thinking what a hardy pioneer I’d become, and that’s the way you dash me to the ground.”

  She looked at the silvery meshes through which her fingers were laced.

  “It’s quite white and there were lots of brown hairs left when we started.”

  “That’s the Emigrant Trail,” he smothered a sigh, and his trouble found words: “It’s not for old men, Missy.”

  “Old!” scornfully; “you’re fifty-three. That’s only thirty-two years older than I am. When I’m fifty-three you’ll be eighty-five. Then we’ll begin to talk about your being old.”

  “My little Susan fifty-three!” He moved his head so that he could command her face and dwell upon its blended bloom of olive and clear rose, “With wrinkles here and here,” an indicating finger helped him, “and gray hairs all round here, and thick eyebrows, and—” he dropped the hand and his smile softened to reminiscence, “It was only yesterday you were a baby, a little, fat, crowing thing all creases and dimples. Your mother and I used to think everything about you so wonderful that we each secretly believed—and we’d tell each other so when nobody was round—that there had been other babies in the world, but never before one like ours. I don’t know but what I think that yet.”

  “Silly old doctor-man!” she murmured.

  “And now my baby’s a woman with all of life before her. From where you are it seems as if it was never going to end, but when you get where I am and begin to look back, you see that it’s just a little journey over before you’ve got used to the road
and struck your gait. We ought to have more time. The first half’s just learning and the second’s where we put the learning into practice. And we’re busy over that when we have to go. It’s too short.”

  “Our life’s going to be long. Out in California we’re going to come into a sort of second childhood, be perennials like those larkspurs I had in the garden at home.”

  They were silent, thinking of the garden behind the old house in Rochester with walks outlined by shells and edged by long flower beds. The girl looked back on it with a detached interest as an unregretted feature of a past existence in which she had once played her part and that was cut from the present by a chasm never to be bridged. The man held it cherishingly as one of many lovely memories that stretched from this river bank in a strange land back through the years, a link in the long chain.

  “Wasn’t it pretty!” she said dreamily, “with the line of hollyhocks against the red brick wall, and the big, bushy pine tree in the corner. Everything was bright except that tree.”

  His eyes narrowed in wistful retrospect:

  “It was as if all the shadows in the garden had concentrated there—huddled together in one place so that the rest could be full of color and sunshine. And when Daddy John and I wanted to cut it down you wouldn’t let us, cried and stamped, and so, of course, we gave it up. I actually believe you had a sentiment about that tree.”

  “I suppose I had, though I don’t know exactly what you mean by a sentiment. I loved it because I’d once had such a perfect time up there among the branches. The top had been cut off and a ring of boughs was left round the place, and it made the most comfortable seat, almost like a cradle. One day you went to New York and when you came back you brought me a box of candy. Do you remember it—burnt almonds and chocolate drops with a dog painted on the cover? Well, I wanted to get them at their very best, enjoy them as much as I could, so I climbed to the seat in the top of the pine and ate them there. I can remember distinctly how lovely it was. They tasted better than any candies I’ve ever had before or since, and I leaned back on the boughs, rocking and eating and looking at the clouds and feeling the wind swaying the trunk. I can shut my eyes and feel again the sense of being entirely happy, sort of limp and forgetful and so contented. I don’t know whether it was only the candies, or a combination of things that were just right that day and never combined the same way again. For I tried it often afterwards, with cake and fruit tart and other candies, but it was no good. But I couldn’t have the tree cut down, for there was always a hope that I might get the combination right and have that perfectly delightful time once more.”