The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  ‘Barbee!’ he cried out angrily, coming on swiftly until he stood over the table. ‘What in hell’s name do you mean by steering Longstreet into a mess like this?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ retorted Barbee hotly. ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘I mean Jim Courtot,’ cut in Howard shortly. ‘You know better than to drag any friend of mine into a game with him.’

  Courtot appeared calm and unconcerned.

  ‘The bet’s made, gents,’ he said briefly. ‘Coming in, Longstreet?’

  Longstreet looked confused. Before he could frame his answer, Howard made it for him. And he directed it straight to Courtot.

  ‘I haven’t had time to tell Mr. Longstreet about all of the undesirable citizens hereabouts,’ he announced steadily. ‘No, he’s not coming in.’

  ‘I imagine you’ll spill an earful when you get going, Alan,’ said Courtot. ‘I’d like to listen in on it.’

  Straightway the two Mexicans rose and left the table. Barbee, though he scorned to do so, pushed his chair back a little and kept his eyes upon the faces of the two men. Longstreet went from confusion to bewilderment. Howard considered the matter briefly; then, watching Jim Courtot while he spoke, he said crisply:

  ‘Mr. Longstreet, you should get acquainted a bit before you play cards out here. Jim Courtot there, who plans to rob you the shortest way, is a crook, a thief, a dirty liar and a treacherous man-killer. He’s rotten all the way through.’

  A man does not fire a fuse without expecting the explosion. On the instant that Jim Courtot’s hand left his pile of coins, Alan Howard’s boots left the floor. The cattleman threw himself forward and across the table almost with his last word. Courtot came up from his chair, a short-barrelled revolver in his hand. But, before he was well on his feet, before the short barrel had made its required brief arc, Howard’s blow landed. With all of his force, with all of the weight of his body, he struck Jim Courtot square upon the chin. Courtot went over backwards, spilling out of the chair that crumpled and snapped and broke to pieces; his gun flew wide across the room. Howard’s impetus carried him on across the table so that he too fell, and across the body of the man he had struck. But when Alan got to his feet, Jim Courtot lay still and unconscious. And, for one, Longstreet thought that he had seen manslaughter done; the man’s look was of death.

  Howard picked up his hat and then what few of the scattered coins he judged were Longstreet’s. Then he took the gaping little man by the arm and led him to the door.

  ‘Miss Helen wanted you,’ he said as they passed outside.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ Longstreet was shuddering.

  ‘No,’ was the cool answer. ‘But it looks as if I’d have to some day. Better not say anything about this to Miss Helen.’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ ejaculated Longstreet. ‘Not a word!’

  CHAPTER IX

  Helen Knew

  Second only to her father’s was Helen’s eager interest in the world about her. The ride back to Desert Valley through the rich moonlight was an experience never to be forgotten. She and Howard alone in what appeared an enchanted and limitless garden of silence and of slumber, their horses’ feet falling without noise as though upon deep carpets, the bright moon and its few attendant stars working the harsh land of the day over into a soft sweet country of subtle allurement—the picture of all this was to spring up vivid and vital in many an idle hour of the days to follow. Little speech passed between them that night: they rode close together, they forgot the wagon which rocked and jolted along somewhere far behind them; they were content to be content without analysing. And at the end of the ride, when she felt Alan’s strong hands aiding her from her saddle, Helen sighed.

  The next morning early she and her father left Desert Valley, going straight to the professor’s destination in the Last Ridge country. They did not see Howard, who had breakfasted and ridden away before dawn, leaving with the kitchen boy a brief note of apology. The note said that his business was urgent and that he would call to see them in a day or so; further that Tod Barstow and Chuck Evans had orders to haul their goods in the wagon for them and to help them pitch camp.

  Their departure was like a small procession. The wagon, carrying all their household goods, went ahead. Longstreet’s two pack-horses were tied to the tail end of the wagon and trotted along with slack tie-ropes. Behind them rode the Longstreets upon saddle-horses, which Chuck Evans had brought to the house for them with his employer’s compliments.

  ‘Al said you was to ride this one, miss,’ said Chuck Evans.

  It was the black mare on which Howard had ridden into their camp the first morning—Sanchia or Helen.

  ‘What is her name?’ asked Helen quite innocently when she had mounted.

  Chuck Evans grinned his characteristic happy grin.

  ‘Funny thing about that mare’s name,’ he conceded brightly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ queried Helen.

  ‘Yesterday,’ he explained, ‘I heard Al talking to her down to the stable. He does talk to a horse more’n any man I know, and what’s more they talk back to him. ‘S a fact, miss. And what he said was, “Helen, you little black devil, I wouldn’t sell you for a couple million dollars; no, not now.” Calling her Helen, understand?’

  ‘Well?’ asked the other Helen.

  ‘And,’ went on Chuck Evans, ‘that mare’s been on the ranch six months and never did I hear him call her another thing than Sanchia.’

  ‘Sanchia?’ she repeated after him. ‘What a pretty name!’ And then, more innocently than ever, ‘I don’t think I ever heard the name before. She was named after somebody, I suppose?’

  ‘Sure,’ laughed Chuck. ‘After a certain lady known in these parts as Mrs. Murray. Her name is Sanchia.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Helen.

  ‘And,’ continued Chuck, ‘that ain’t all. This morning, just like he knew folks was going to ask her name, he tells me: “Say, Chuck; this here mare’s name, if anyone asks you, is Sweetheart. Don’t it just suit her?” he says. And when you come right down to it——’

  ‘Hey, Chuck,’ called Tod Barstow from his high seat. ‘Get a move on. We better get started before it’s hot.’

  So Chuck Evans departed and Helen sat straight in the saddle, her eyes a little puzzled. When her father rode to her side she was adjusting a bluebird’s feather in her hatband. The feather, pointing straight up, gave a stiff, almost haughty look to the young woman’s headgear.

  They crossed the big meadow, wound for an hour among the little hills, and then began a slow, gradual climb along a devious dusty road. Less and ever less fertile grew the dry earth under them, more still and hot and hostile the land into which they journeyed. In three hours, jogging along, they came to Last Ridge.

  ‘There’s only one spot up this way that’s fit to live in for more’n an hour at the stretch,’ Barstow told them. ‘There’s a spring and some shade there. We’ll drive right under it, and from there up we’ll have to finish the job monkey-style.’

  He stopped his horses in a little flat, just under a steep wall of reddish cliff. Here he and Chuck Evans unhitched and here the horses were tethered. Helen looked about her curiously, and at first her heart sank. There was nothing to greet her but rock and sweltering patches of sand and gravelly soil, and sparse, harsh brush. She turned and looked back toward the sweep of Desert Valley; there she saw green fields, trees, grazing stock. It was like the Promised Land compared with this bleak desolate spot her father had chosen. She turned to him, words of expostulation forming. But his eyes were bright, his look triumphant. He had already dismounted and was poking about here and there, examining everything at hand from a sand-storm stratum at the cliff’s foot to loose dirt in the drifts and the hardy, wiry grass growing where it could. Helen turned away with a sigh.

  From here the two Deser
t Valley men went forward on foot to show them the spot which Alan Howard had chosen as the most likely site for a camp. They walked to the end of the flat where the reddish, walls shut in; here was an angle of cliff and in the angle was a cleft some three or four feet wide. They passed into this and found that it offered a steep, winding way upward. But the distance was not great, and in ten minutes they had come to the top. Here again was a level space, a wide tableland, offering less of the desert menace and hostility and something more of charm and the promise of comfort. For a gentle breeze stirred here, and off yonder were scattered pines and cedars and in a clump of trees was a ring of verdure. They went to it and saw the spring. It was but a sort of mud-hole of yellowish, thickish water. But water it was, with green grass growing about it and with the shade of dusty trees over it. Beyond were the strange-shaped uplands, distant cliffs and peaks broken into a thousand grotesque forms, with bands of colour in horizontal strata across them as though they had been painted with a mighty brush.

  ‘What though I have never been here until this second?’ cried Longstreet triumphantly. ‘I know it, all of it, every inch and millimetre of it! I could have made a map of it and laid the colours in. I have read of it, studied it—I have written of this country! Having been right in everything else, am I to be mistaken in the matter of its minerals? I said give me three months to find gold! Why, it’s a matter to wonder at if I don’t locate my mine in three days!’

  The two men grinned readily. Before now they had heard men talk with the gold fever upon them.

  ‘There’s gold pretty near everywhere,’ admitted Barstow, ‘if a man can make it pay. But right now I guess me and Chuck had better start getting your stuff up the rocks. Suit you all right here for a camp?’

  Helen turned and looked toward the south. There, broad and fertile below her, running away across the miles, were the Howard acres. She even made out the clutter of head-quarters buildings. Somehow she fancied that the sweep of homely view snatched from these bleak uplands something of their loneliness. When her father announced that this was just the spot he had longed for, Helen nodded her approval. Here for a time was to be home.

  Throughout the day and until dusk the four of them laboured, making camp. Barstow and Evans lugged the various articles, boxes, rolls of bedding, up through the cleft in the rocks. They had brought in the wagon-bed some loose boards of various sizes; these they made into a rough floor. At the four corners of the floor they erected studding of two-by-four lumber. These they braced and steadied; they nailed other lengths of two-by-four material along the tops, outlining walls; they hacked and sawed and hammered and nailed to such advantage that in the end they had the misshapen frame of a cabin, rafters and all. Then over the rafters and along the sides they secured the canvas destined for the purpose. Doors and windows were canvas flaps; the sheet-iron stove was set up on four flat stones for legs; the stovepipe was run through a hole in the roof. And when Chuck Evans and Tod Barstow, amateurs in the carpenter’s line, stood back and wiped the sweat off their brown faces and looked with fond and prideful eyes at their handiwork, Helen and her father were no whit less delighted.

  ‘If you want more room after a while,’ said Barstow, ‘it’d be easy to tack more sheds on and run canvas over them, just the same as what we done. Me and Chuck would come up most any time and lend a hand.’

  The breeze stiffened and the crazy edifice shivered.

  ‘I don’t know as I’d make it much bigger,’ said Evans. ‘If a real blow come on and the wind got inside—Say, Tod, how about a few guy ropes? Huh?’

  Barstow agreed, and they brought what ropes they had in the wagon and ‘staked her out, same as if she was a runaway horse,’ as Chuck put it. In other words, they ran one rope from the rear end of the ridge of the house to the base of a conveniently-located pine tree; then they secured the second rope to the other end of the ridge-pole and anchored it to a big boulder. Meanwhile Helen opened some cans and made coffee on the newly-adjusted stove and they sat on the grass by the spring and made their evening meal. After which Barstow and Evans went down to their wagon and returned to Desert Valley. And James Edward Longstreet and his daughter sat alone upon their camp-stools in front of their new abode and looked off across the valley and into the distances.

  The day departed slowly, lingeringly. The soft night came little by little, a misty veil floating into a hollow yonder, a star shining, the breeze strengthening and cooling. Before the twilight was gone and while one might look for miles across the billowing landscapes, they saw a horseman riding down in the valley; he appeared hardly more than a vague moving dot. And yet——

  ‘It’s Mr. Howard!’ cried Helen.

  Longstreet withdrew his straining eyes and turned them wonderingly upon his daughter.

  ‘How in the world do you know?’ he asked.

  Helen smiled, a quiet smile of transcendent wisdom.

  ‘Oh, I just knew he’d come over.’ she said.

  CHAPTER X

  A Warning and a Sign

  John Carr made a special trip back to Desert Valley ranch for a word with Howard. He rode hard and there was a look of anxiety in his eyes when he came upon his friend smoking thoughtfully in the big living-room of the ranch-house. It was late evening and a week after the departure of Howard’s guests.

  Howard dragged his boot heels down from the table top when he saw who it was and jumped to his feet his hand outstretched.

  ‘Hello, John old boy,’ he cried warmly. What’s the good wind blowing you over this way already?’

  Carr tossed his hat to the table, drew up a chair for himself and took a cigar before he answered. Then it was quietly and earnestly.

  ‘Met up with Jim Courtot the other night, I hear?’ he began.

  Howard nodded and waited, his look curious.

  ‘Well,’ went on Carr, ‘I wish you hadn’t. He’s a treacherous beast if this man’s land ever cradled one. He’s looking for you, Al.’

  ‘He knows where to find me,’ said Alan shortly. And then, ‘Just what’s worrying you, Johnnie?’

  ‘I’ve known Jim for seventeen or eighteen years,’ rejoined Carr. ‘He’s a cold, hard, calculating and absolutely crooked proposition. During that time I’ve never known him to go on a drunk more than two or three times. And every time there was trouble.’

  ‘He’s drinking now, then?’

  ‘He started in right after you got through with him the other night. And he has been talking. There’s no use being a fool!’ he cut in sternly as Alan shrugged his shoulders. ‘Courtot doesn’t talk to me, but I’ve got straight what he has said. He talks to Moraga, and Moraga talks to Barbee, and Barbee passes it on to me. He told Moraga that if it was the last thing he did, he’d get you. And he is carrying a gun every step he takes.’

  ‘The more a man talks, the less killing he does, I’ve noticed,’ said Howard. But his tone did not carry conviction. Carr frowned impatiently.

  ‘He hasn’t talked much. He was mad clean through when he made that crack to Moraga. I tell you there’s no use being a fool, Al.’

  ‘No. Guess you’re right, John. Anyway, it was pretty decent of you to ride over.’

  He got up and went into his bedroom. A moment later he came out carrying a heavy Colt revolver in one hand, a box of cartridges in the other. The gun was well oiled; the cylinder spun silently and easily; the six chambers were loaded. He put the gun down on the table.

  ‘I’ll ride heeled for a few days, anyhow,’ he decided. ‘I guess I can shoot with Jim Courtot yet.’

  ‘Did you ever find out for sure that it was Jim the other time?’

  ‘Sure enough to suit me,’ returned Howard. ‘He was in town that night. And it was his style of work to take a pot shot at a man out of the dark.’

  ‘He’s not exactly a coward,’ warned Carr.

  ‘No, not a cowa
rd. But that’s his kind of work, just the same. He would go after a man just as he plays poker—simply to win the surest, quickest, easiest way. Saw Sanchia Murray in town the same day he was there. Are they working together again?’

  ‘I haven’t seen either one of them. But I guess so. Barbee, poor kid, is trailing after her all the time, and he comes back hating Courtot worse and worse every day. Seen the Longstreets lately?’

  Howard admitted that he had. It was only a little way over, he reminded Carr, an hour and a half ride or such a matter, and the old boy was such a helplessly innocent old stranger, that it didn’t seem quite right to turn them adrift altogether.

  ‘The girl is a pretty thing.’ said Carr.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Howard. ‘Kind of pretty.’

  Carr looked at him steadily. And for absolutely no slightest, vaguest reason in the wide world that he could think of, Alan Howard felt his face going red. Carr’s look probed deeper. Then, with common consent, they turned to other subjects until bedtime. Nothing of business matters passed between them, although both remembered that a considerable payment was to fall due within ten days.

  In particular Howard had cause to remember. He had recently balanced his books and had found that he had cut into his last five thousand dollars. Therefore, meaning to pay on the nail, he had arranged a sale of beef cattle. The range was heavily stocked, he had a herd in prime condition, the market was fair, and his system called for a sale soon and the purchase of some calves. Therefore the next morning, before Carr was astir, Howard and several of his men were riding toward the more remote fields where his beef herds were. Behind them came the camp wagon and the cook.

  All day long he worked among his herds, gathering them, sorting them, cutting out and heading back towards the home corrals those under weight or in any way not in the pink of condition for the sale. His men rode away into the distances, going east and south, disappearing over the ridges seeking cattle that had strayed far. Howard changed the horse under him four times that day, and the beast he freed long after the stars were out was jaded and wet. In the end he threw himself down upon the hot earth in the shade of the wagon and turned his eyes toward the uplands of the Last Ridge. He had had no moment of his own to-day, no opportunity to ride for a call on his new friends, and now, after he rested a little and ate, he would go back to work with his men, night-herding. For the rounded-up cattle were now a great milling herd that grew greater as the night went on and other lesser bands were brought in, a stamping, churning mass whose deep-lunged bellowing surged out continuously across the valley stretches and through the passes of the hills.