The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  He summoned one particular liveryman, not a favorite at the fashionable hotel, and to him gave especial injunctions about the horses. The girths Glover himself went over at starting, and in the riding he kept near Marie.

  Lighted by the stars, they left the hotel in the early evening. “How are you to find your way, Mr. Glover?” asked Marie, as they threaded the path He led her into after they had reached the mountain. “Is this the road we came on?”

  “I could climb Pilot blindfolded, I reckon. When we came in here I ran surveys all around the old fellow, switchbacks and everything. The line is a Chinese puzzle about here for ten miles. The path you’re on now is an old Indian trail out of Devil’s Gap. The guides don’t use it because it is too long. The Gap is a ten-dollar trip, in any case, and naturally they make it the shortest way.”

  For thirty minutes they rode in darkness, then leaving a sharp defile they emerged on a plateau.

  Across the Sinks the moon was rising full and into a clear sky. To the right twinkled the lights of Glen Tarn, and below them yawned the unspeakable wrench in the granite shoulders of the Pilot range called Devil’s Gap. Out of its appalling darkness projected miles of silvered spurs tipped like grinning teeth by the light of the moon.

  “There are a good many Devil’s Gaps in the Rockies,” said Glover, after the silence had been broken; “but, I imagine, if the devil condescends to acknowledge any he wouldn’t disclaim this.”

  Gertrude stood beside her sister. “You are quite right,” she admitted. “We have spent our month here and missed the only overpowering spectacle. This is Dante.”

  “Indeed it is,” he assented, eagerly. “I must tell you. The first time I got into the Gap with a locating party I had a volume of Dante in my pack. It is an unfortunate trait of mine that in reading I am compelled to chart the topography of a story as I go along. In the ‘Inferno’ I could never get head or tail of the topography. One night we camped on this very ledge. In the night the horses roused me. When I opened the tent fly the moon was up, about where it is now. I stood till I nearly froze, looking—but I thought after that I could chart the ‘Inferno.’ If it weren’t so dry, or if we were going to stay all night, I should have a camp-fire; but it wouldn’t do, and before you get cold we must start back.

  “See,” he pointed, far down on the left. “Can you make out that speck of light? It is the headlight of a freight train crawling up the range from Sleepy Cat. When the weather is right you can see the white head of Sleepy Cat Mountain from this spot. That train will wind around in sight of this knob for an hour, climbing to the mining camps.”

  Doctor Lanning called to Marie. Gertrude stood with Glover.

  “Is that the desert of the Spanish Sinks?” she asked, looking into the stream of the moon.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that where you were lost two days?”

  “My horse got away. Have you hurt your hand?”

  She was holding her right hand in her left. “I tore my glove on a thorn, coming up. It is not much.”

  “Is it bleeding?”

  “I don’t know; can you see?”

  She drew down the glove gauntlet and held her hand up. If his breath caught he did not betray it, but while he touched her she could very plainly feel his hand tremble; yet for that matter his hand, she knew, trembled frequently. He struck a match. It was no part of her audacity to betray herself, and she stepped directly between the others and the little blaze and looked into his face while he Inspected her wrist. “Can you see?”

  “It is scratched badly, but not bleeding,” he answered.

  “It hurts.”

  “Very likely; the wounds that hurt most don’t always bleed,” he said, evenly. “Let us go.”

  “Oh, no,” she said; “not quite yet. This is unutterable. I love this.”

  “Your aunt, I fear, is not interested. She is complaining of the cold. I can’t light a fire; the mountain is all timber below—”

  “Aunt Jane would complain in heaven, but that wouldn’t signify she didn’t appreciate it. Why are you so quickly put out? It isn’t like you to be out of humor.” She drew on her glove slowly. “I wish you had this wrist—”

  “I wish to God I had.” The sudden words frightened her. She showed her displeasure in half turning away, then she resolutely faced him. “I am not going to quarrel with you even if you make fun of me—”

  “Fun of you?”

  “Even if you put an unfair sense on what I say.”

  “I meant what I said in every sense, either to take the pain or—the other. I couldn’t make fun of you. Do you never make fun of me, Miss Brock?”

  “No, Mr. Glover, I do not. If you would be sensible we should do very well. You have been so kind, and we are to leave the mountains so soon, we ought to be good friends.”

  “Will you tell me one thing, Miss Brock—are you engaged?”

  “I don’t think you should ask, Mr. Glover. But I am not engaged—unless that in a sense I am,” she added, doubtfully.

  “What sense, please?”

  “That I have given no answer. Are you still complaining of the cold, Aunt Jane?” she cried, in desperation, turning toward Mrs. Whitney. “I find it quite warm over here. Mr. Glover and I are still watching the freight train. Come over, do.”

  Going back, Glover rode near to Gertrude, who had grown restless and imperious. To hunt this queer mountain-lion was recreation, but to have the mountain-lion hunt her was disquieting.

  She complained again of her wounded hand, but refused all suggestions, and gave him no credit for riding between her and the thorny trees through the cañon. It was midnight when the party reached the hotel, and when Gertrude stepped across the parlor to the water-pitcher, Glover followed. “I must thank you for your thoughtfulness of my little sister to-night,” she was saying.

  He was so intent that he forgot to reply.

  “May I ask one question?” he said.

  “That depends.”

  “When you make answer may I know what it is?”

  “Indeed you may not.”

  CHAPTER XV

  NOVEMBER

  They walked back to the parlors. Doctor Lanning and Marie were picking up the rackets at the ping-pong table. Mrs. Whitney had gone into the office for the evening mail.

  Passing the piano, Gertrude sat down and swung around toward the keys. Glover took music from the table. Unwilling to admit a trace of the unusual in the beating of her heart, or in her deeper breathing, she could not entirely control either; there was something too fascinating in defying the light that she now knew glowed in the dull eyes at her side. She avoided looking; enough that the fire was there without directly exposing her own eyes to it. She drummed with one hand, then with both, at a gavotte on the rack before her.

  Overcome merely at watching her fingers stretch upon the keys he leaned against the piano.

  “Why did you ask me to come up?”

  As he muttered the words she picked again and again with her right hand at a loving little phrase in the gavotte. When it went precisely right she spoke in the same tone, still caressing the phrase, never looking up. “Are you sorry you came?”

  “No; I’d rather be trod under foot than not be near you.”

  “May we not be friends without either of us being martyred? I shall be afraid ever to ask you to do anything again. Was I wrong in—assuming it would give you as well as all of us pleasure to dine together this evening?”

  “No. You know better than that. I am insanely presumptuous, I know it. Let me ask one last favor—”

  The gavotte rippled under her fingers. “No.”

  He turned away. She swung on the stool toward him and looked very kindly and frankly up. “You have been too courteous to all of us for that. Ask as many favors as you like, Mr. G
lover,” she murmured, “but not, if you please, a last one.”

  “It shall be the last, Miss Brock. I only—”

  “You only what?”

  “Will you let me know what day you are going, so I may say good-by?”

  “Certainly I will. You will be at Medicine Bend in any case, won’t you?”

  “No. I have fifteen hundred miles to cover next week.”

  “What for—oh, it isn’t any of my business, is it?”

  “Looking over the snowsheds. Will you telegraph me?”

  “Where?”

  “At the Wickiup; it will reach me.”

  “You might have to come too far. We shall start in a few days.”

  “Will you telegraph me?”

  “If you wish me to.”

  Eight days later, when suspense had grown sullen and Glover had parted with all hope of hearing from her, he heard. In the depths of the Heart River range her message reached him.

  Every day Giddings, hundreds of miles away at the Wickiup, had had his route-list. Giddings, who would have died for the engineer, waited, every point in the repeating covered, day after day for a Glen Tarn message that Glover expected. For four days Glover had hung like a dog around the nearer stretches of the division. But the season was advanced, he dared not delegate the last vital inspection of the year, and bitterly he retreated from shed to shed until he was buried in the barren wastes of the eighth district.

  The day in the Heart River mountains is the thin, gray day of the alkali and the sage. On Friday afternoon Glover’s car lay sidetracked at the east end of the Nine Mile shed waiting for a limited train to pass. The train was late and the sun was dropping into an ashen strip of wind clouds that hung cold as shrouds to the north and west when the gray-powdered engine whistled for the siding.

  Motionless beside the switch Glover saw down the gloom of the shed the shoes wringing fire from the Pullman wheels, and wondered why they were stopping. The conductor from the open vestibule waved to him as the train slowed and ran forward with the message.

  “Giddings wired me to wait for your answer, Mr. Glover,” said the conductor.

  Glover was reading the telegram:

  “I may start Saturday.

  “G. B.”

  There was one chance to make it; that was to take the limited train then and there. Bidding the conductor wait he hastened to his car, called for his gripsack, gave his assistant a volley of orders, and boarded a Pullman. Not the preferred stock of the whole system would have availed at that moment to induce an inspection of Nine Mile shed.

  There were men that he knew in the sleepers, but he shunned acquaintance and walked on till he found an empty section into which he could throw himself and feast undisturbed on his telegram. He studied it anew, tried to consider coolly whether her message meant anything or nothing, and gloated over the magic of the letters that made her initials: and when he slept, the word last in his heart was Gertrude.

  In the morning he breakfasted late in the sunshine of the diner, passed his friends again and secluded himself in his section. Never before had she said “I”; always it had been “we.” With eyes half-closed upon the window he repeated the words and spoke her name after them, because every time the speaking drugged him like lotus, until, yielding again to the exhaustion of the week’s work and strain, he fell asleep.

  When he woke the car was dark; the train conductor, Sid Francis, was sitting beside him, laughing.

  “You’re sleepy to-day, Mr. Glover.”

  “Sid, where are we?” asked Glover, looking at his watch; it was four o’clock.

  “Grouse Creek.”

  “Are we that late? What’s the matter?”

  The conductor nodded toward the window. “Look there.”

  The sky was gray with a driving haze; a thin sweep of snow flying in the sand of the storm was whitening the sagebrush.

  Glover, waking wide, turned to the window. “Where’s the wind, Sid?”

  “Northwest.”

  “What’s the thermometer?”

  “Thirty at Creston; sixty when we left MacDill at noon.”

  “Everything running?”

  “They’ve been getting the freights into division since noon. There’ll be something doing to-night on the range. They sent stock warnings everywhere this morning, but they can’t begin to protect the stock between here and Medicine in one day. Pulling hard, isn’t she? We’re not making up anything.”

  The porter was lighting the lamps. While they talked it had grown quite dark. Losing time every mile of the way, the train, frost-crusted to the eyelids, got into Sleepy Cat at half-past six o’clock; four hours late.

  The crowded yard, as they pulled through it, showed the tie-up of the day’s traffic. Long lines of freight cars filled the trackage, and overloaded switch engines struggled with ever-growing burdens to avert the inevitable blockade of the night. Glover’s anxiety, as he left the train at the station, was as to whether he could catch anything on the Glen Tarn branch to take him up to the Springs that night, for there he was resolved to get before morning if he had to take an engine for the run.

  As he started up the narrow hall leading to the telegraph office he heard the rustle of skirts above. Someone was descending the stairway, and with his face in the light he halted.

  “Oh, Mr. Glover.”

  “Why—Miss Brock!” It was Gertrude.

  “What in the world—” he began. His broken voice was very natural, she thought, but there was amazement in his utterance. He noticed there was little color in her face; the deep boa of fur nestling about her throat might account for that.

  “What a chance that I should meet you!” she exclaimed, her back hard against the side wall, for the hall was narrow and brought them face to face. She spoke on. “Did you get my—?”

  “Did I?” he echoed slowly; “I have travelled every minute since yesterday afternoon to get here—”

  Her uneasy laugh interrupted him. “It was hardly worth while, all that.”

  “—and I was just going up to find out about getting to Glen Tarn.”

  “Glen Tarn! I left Glen Tarn this afternoon all alone to go to Medicine Bend—papa is there, did you know? He came yesterday with all the directors. Our car was attached for me to the afternoon train coming down.” She was certainly wrought up, he thought. “But when we reached here the train I should have taken for Medicine Bend had not come—”

  “It is here now.”

  “Thank heaven, is it?”

  “I came in on it.”

  “Then I can start at last! I have been so nervous. Is this our train? They said our car couldn’t be attached to this train, and that I should have to go down in one of the sleepers. I don’t understand it at all. Will you have the car sent back to Glen Tarn in the morning, Mr. Glover? And would you get my handbag? I was nearly run over a while ago by some engine or other. I mustn’t miss this train—”

  “Never fear, never fear,” said Glover.

  “But I cannot miss it. Be very, very sure, won’t you?”

  “Indeed, I shall. The train won’t start for some time yet. First let me take you to your car and then make some inquiries. Is no one down with you?”

  “No one; I am alone.”

  “Alone?”

  “I expected to have been with papa by this time. It takes so little time to run down, you know, and I telegraphed papa I should come on to meet him. Isn’t it most disagreeable weather?”

  Glover laughed as he shielded her from the wind. “I suppose that’s a woman’s name for it.”

  The car, coupled to a steampipe, stood just east of the station, and Glover, helping her into it, went back after a moment to the telegraph office. It seemed a long time that he was gone, and he returned covered with snow. Sh
e advanced quickly to him in her wraps. “Are they ready?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid you can’t get to Medicine to-night.”

  “Oh, but I must.”

  “They have abandoned Number Six.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The train will be held here to-night on account of the storm. There will be no train of any kind down before morning; not then if this keeps up.”

  “Is there danger of a blockade?”

  “There is a blockade.”

  “Then I must get to papa to-night.” She spoke with disconcerting firmness.

  “May I suggest?” he asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “Would it not be infinitely better to go back to the Springs?”

  “No, that would be infinitely worse.”

  “It would be comparatively easy—an engine to pull your car up on a special order?”

  “I will not go back to the Springs to-night, and I will go to Medicine Bend,” she exclaimed, apprehensively. “May I not have a special there as well as to the Springs?”

  Until that moment he had never seen anything of her father in her; but her father spoke in every feature; she was a Brock.

  Glover looked grave. “You may have, I am sure, every facility the division offers. I make only the point,” he said, gently, “that it would be hazardous to attempt to get to the Bend to-night. I have just come from the telegraph office. In the district I left this morning the wires are all down to-night. That is where the storm is coming from. There is a lull here just now, but—”

  “I thank you, Mr. Glover, believe me, very sincerely for your solicitude. I have no choice but to go, and if I must, the sooner the better, surely. Is it possible for you to make arrangements for me?”