The Zane Grey Megapack

by Zane Grey

  She was dead, and she was the last of Nas Ta Bega’s family. In the old grandfather’s agony, in the wild chant of the stricken grandmother, in the brother’s stern and terrible calmness Shefford felt more than the death of a loved one. The shadow of ruin, of doom, of death hovered over the girl and her family and her tribe and her race. There was no consolation to offer these relatives of Glen Naspa. Shefford took one more fascinated gaze at her dark, eloquent, prophetic face, at the tragic tiny shape by her side, and then with bowed head he left the hogan.

  * * * *

  Outside he paced to and fro, with an aching heart for Nas Ta Bega, with something of the white man’s burden of crime toward the Indian weighing upon his soul.

  Old Hosteen Doetin came to him with shaking hands and words memorable of the time Glen Naspa left his hogan.

  “Me no savvy Jesus Christ. Me hungry. Me no eat Jesus Christ!”

  That seemed to be all of his trouble that he could express to Shefford. He could not understand the religion of the missionary, this Jesus Christ who had called his granddaughter away. And the great fear of an old Indian was not death, but hunger. Shefford remembered a custom of the Navajos, a thing barbarous looked at with a white man’s mind. If an old Indian failed on a long march he was inclosed by a wall of stones, given plenty to eat and drink, and left there to die in the desert. Not death did he fear, but hunger! Old Hosteen Doetin expected to starve, now that the young and strong squaw of his family was gone.

  Shefford spoke in his halting Navajo and assured the old Indian that Nas Ta Bega would never let him starve.

  At sunset Shefford stood with Nas Ta Bega facing the west. The Indian was magnificent in repose. He watched the sun go down upon the day that had seen the burial of the last of his family. He resembled an impassive destiny, upon which no shocks fell. He had the light of that flaring golden sky in his face, the majesty of the mountain in his mien, the silence of the great gulf below on his lips. This educated Navajo, who had reverted to the life of his ancestors, found in the wildness and loneliness of his environment a strength no white teaching could ever have given him. Shefford sensed in him a measureless grief, an impenetrable gloom, a tragic acceptance of the meaning of Glen Naspa’s ruin and death—the vanishing of his race from the earth. Death had written the law of such bitter truth round Glen Naspa’s lips, and the same truth was here in the grandeur and gloom of the Navajo.

  “Bi Nai,” he said, with the beautiful sonorous roll in his voice, “Glen Naspa is in her grave and there are no paths to the place of her sleep. Glen Naspa is gone.”

  “Gone! Where? Nas Ta Bega, remember I lost my own faith, and I have not yet learned yours.”

  “The Navajo has one mother—the earth. Her body has gone to the earth and it will become dust. But her spirit is in the air. It shall whisper to me from the wind. I shall hear it on running waters. It will hide in the morning music of a mocking-bird and in the lonely night cry of the canyon hawk. Her blood will go to make the red of the Indian flowers and her soul will rest at midnight in the lily that opens only to the moon. She will wait in the shadow for me, and live in the great mountain that is my home, and for ever step behind me on the trail.”

  “You will kill Willetts?” demanded Shefford.

  “The Navajo will not seek the missionary.”

  “But if you meet him you’ll kill him?”

  “Bi Nai, would Nas Ta Bega kill after it is too late? What good could come? The Navajo is above revenge.”

  “If he crosses my trail I think I couldn’t help but kill him,” muttered Shefford in a passion that wrung the threat from him.

  The Indian put his arm round the white man’s shoulders.

  “Bi Nai, long ago I made you my brother. And now you make me your brother. Is it not so? Glen Naspa’s spirit calls for wisdom, not revenge. Willetts must be a bad man. But we’ll let him live. Life will punish him. Who knows if he was all to blame? Glen Naspa was only one pretty Indian girl. There are many white men in the desert. She loved a white man when she was a baby. The thing was a curse.… Listen, Bi Nai, and the Navajo will talk.

  “Many years ago the Spanish padres, the first white men, came into the land of the Indian. Their search was for gold. But they were not wicked men. They did not steal and kill. They taught the Indian many useful things. They brought him horses. But when they went away they left him unsatisfied with his life and his god.

  “Then came the pioneers. They crossed the great river and took the pasture-lands and the hunting-grounds of the Indian. They drove him backward, and the Indian grew sullen. He began to fight. The white man’s government made treaties with the Indian, and these were broken. Then war came—fierce and bloody war. The Indian was driven to the waste places. The stream of pioneers, like a march of ants, spread on into the desert. Every valley where grass grew, every river, became a place for farms and towns. Cattle choked the water-holes where the buffalo and deer had once gone to drink. The forests in the hills were cut and the springs dried up. And the pioneers followed to the edge of the desert.

  “Then came the prospectors, mad, like the padres for the gleam of gold. The day was not long enough for them to dig in the creeks and the canyon; they worked in the night. And they brought weapons and rum to the Indian, to buy from him the secret of the places where the shining gold lay hidden.

  “Then came the traders. And they traded with the Indian. They gave him little for much, and that little changed his life. He learned a taste for the sweet foods of the white man. Because he could trade for a sack of flour he worked less in the field. And the very fiber of his bones softened.

  “Then came the missionaries. They were proselytizers for converts to their religion. The missionaries are good men. There may be a bad missionary, like Willetts, the same as there are bad men in other callings, or bad Indians. They say Shadd is a half-breed. But the Piutes can tell you he is a full-blood, and he, like me, was sent to a white man’s school. In the beginning the missionaries did well for the Indian. They taught him cleaner ways of living, better farming, useful work with tools—many good things. But the wrong to the Indian was the undermining of his faith. It was not humanity that sent the missionary to the Indian. Humanity would have helped the Indian in his ignorance of sickness and work, and left him his god. For to trouble the Indian about his god worked at the roots of his nature.

  “The beauty of the Indian’s life is in his love of the open, of all that is nature, of silence, freedom, wildness. It is a beauty of mind and soul. The Indian would have been content to watch and feel. To a white man he might be dirty and lazy—content to dream life away without trouble or what the white man calls evolution. The Indian might seem cruel because he leaves his old father out in the desert to die. But the old man wants to die that way, alone with his spirits and the sunset. And the white man’s medicine keeps his old father alive days and days after he ought to be dead. Which is more cruel? The Navajos used to fight with other tribes, and then they were stronger men than they are today.

  “But leaving religion, greed, and war out of the question, contact with the white man would alone have ruined the Indian. The Indian and the white man cannot mix. The Indian brave learns the habits of the white man, acquires his diseases, and has not the mind or body to withstand them. The Indian girl learns to love the white man—and that is death of her Indian soul, if not of life.

  “So the red man is passing. Tribes once powerful have died in the life of Nas Ta Bega. The curse of the white man is already heavy upon my race in the south. Here in the north, in the wildest corner of the desert, chased here by the great soldier, Carson, the Navajo has made his last stand.

  “Bi Nai, you have seen the shadow in the hogan of Hosteen Doetin. Glen Naspa has gone to her grave, and no sisters, no children, will make paths to the place of her sleep. Nas Ta Bega will never have a wife—a child. He sees the end. It is the sunset of the Navajo.… Bi Nai, the Navajo is dying—dying—dying!”

  CHAPTER XV

  WILD JUS
TICE

  A crescent moon hung above the lofty peak over the valley and a train of white stars ran along the bold rim of the western wall. A few young frogs peeped plaintively. The night was cool, yet had a touch of balmy spring, and a sweeter fragrance, as if the cedars and pinyons had freshened in the warm sun of that day.

  Shefford and Fay were walking in the aisles of moonlight and the patches of shade, and Nas Ta Bega, more than ever a shadow of his white brother, followed them silently.

  “Fay, it’s growing late. Feel the dew?” said Shefford. “Come, I must take you back.”

  “But the time’s so short. I have said nothing that I wanted to say,” she replied.

  “Say it quickly, then, as we go.”

  “After all, it’s only—will you take me away soon?”

  “Yes, very soon. The Indian and I have talked. But we’ve made no plan yet. There are only three ways to get out of this country. By Stonebridge, by Kayenta and Durango, and by Red Lake. We must choose one. All are dangerous. We must lose time finding Surprise Valley. I hoped the Indian could find it. Then we’d bring Lassiter and Jane here and hide them near till dark, then take you and go. That would give us a night’s start. But you must help us to Surprise Valley.”

  “I can go right to it, blindfolded, or in the dark.… Oh, John, hurry! I dread the wait. He might come again.”

  “Joe says—they won’t come very soon.”

  “Is it far—where we’re going—out of the country?”

  “Ten days’ hard riding.”

  “Oh! That night ride to and from Stonebridge nearly killed me. But I could walk very far, and climb for ever.”

  “Fay, we’ll get out of the country if I have to carry you.”

  When they arrived at the cabin Fay turned on the porch step and, with her face nearer a level with his, white and sweet in the moonlight, with her eyes shining and unfathomable, she was more than beautiful.

  “You’ve never been inside my house,” she said. “Come in. I’ve something for you.”

  “But it’s late,” he remonstrated. “I suppose you’ve got me a cake or pie—something to eat. You women all think Joe and I have to be fed.”

  “No. You’d never guess. Come in,” she said, and the rare smile on her face was something Shefford would have gone far to see.

  “Well, then, for a minute.”

  He crossed the porch, the threshold, and entered her home. Her dim, white shape moved in the darkness. And he followed into a room where the moon shone through the open window, giving soft, mellow, shadowy light. He discerned objects, but not clearly, for his senses seemed absorbed in the strange warmth and intimacy of being for the first time with her in her home.

  “No, it’s not good to eat,” she said, and her laugh was happy. “Here—”

  Suddenly she abruptly ceased speaking. Shefford saw her plainly, and the slender form had stiffened, alert and strained. She was listening.

  “What was that?” she whispered.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he whispered back.

  He stepped softly nearer the open window and listened.

  Clip-clop! clip-clop! clip-clop! Hard hoofs on the hard path outside!

  A strong and rippling thrill went over Shefford. In the soft light her eyes seemed unnaturally large and black and fearful.

  Clip-clop! clip-clop!

  The horse stopped outside. Then followed a metallic clink of spur against stirrup—thud of boots on hard ground—heavy footsteps upon the porch.

  A swift, cold contraction of throat, of breast, convulsed Shefford. His only thought was that he could not think.

  “Ho—Mary!”

  A voice liberated both Shefford’s muscle and mind—a voice of strange, vibrant power. Authority of religion and cruelty of will—these Mormon attributes constituted that power. And Shefford suffered a transformation which must have been ordered by demons. That sudden flame seemed to curl and twine and shoot along his veins with blasting force. A rancorous and terrible cry leaped to his lips.

  “Ho—Mary!” Then came a heavy tread across the threshold of the outer room.

  Shefford dared not look at Fay. Yet, dimly, from the corner of his eye, he saw her, a pale shadow, turned to stone, with her arms out. If he looked, if he made sure of that, he was lost. When had he drawn his gun? It was there, a dark and glinting thing in his hand. He must fly—not through cowardice and fear, but because in one more moment he would kill a man. Swift as the thought he dove through the open window. And, leaping up, he ran under the dark pinyons toward camp.

  Joe Lake had been out late himself. He sat by the fire, smoking his pipe. He must have seen or heard Shefford coming, for he rose with unwonted alacrity, and he kicked the smoldering logs into a flickering blaze.

  Shefford, realizing his deliverance, came panting, staggering into the light. The Mormon uttered an exclamation. Then he spoke, anxiously, but what he said was not clear in Shefford’s thick and throbbing ears. He dropped his pipe, a sign of perturbation, and he stared.

  But Shefford, without a word, lunged swiftly away into the shadow of the cedars. He found relief in action. He began a steep ascent of the east wall, a dangerous slant he had never dared even in daylight, and he climbed it without a slip. Danger, steep walls, perilous heights, night, and black canyon the same—these he never thought of. But something drove him to desperate effort, that the hours might seem short.

  * * * *

  The red sun was tipping the eastern wall when he returned to camp, and he was neither calm nor sure of himself nor ready for sleep or food. Only he had put the night behind him.

  The Indian showed no surprise. But Joe Lake’s jaw dropped and his eyes rolled. Moreover, Joe bore a singular aspect, the exact nature of which did not at once dawn upon Shefford.

  “By God! you’ve got nerve—or you’re crazy!” he ejaculated, hoarsely.

  Then it was Shefford’s turn to stare. The Mormon was haggard, grieved, frightened, and utterly amazed. He appeared to be trying to make certain of Shefford’s being there in the flesh and then to find reason for it.

  “I’ve no nerve and I am crazy,” replied Shefford. “But, Joe—what do you mean? Why do you look at me like that?”

  “I reckon if I get your horse that’ll square us. Did you come back for him? You’d better hit the trail quick.”

  “It’s you now who’re crazy,” burst out Shefford.

  “Wish to God I was,” replied Joe.

  It was then Shefford realized catastrophe, and cold fear gnawed at his vitals, so that he was sick.

  “Joe, what has happened?” he asked, with the blood thick in his heart.

  “Hadn’t you better tell me?” demanded the Mormon, and a red wave blotted out the haggard shade of his face.

  “You talk like a fool,” said Shefford, sharply, and he strode right up to Joe.

  “See here, Shefford, we’ve been pards. You’re making it hard for me. Reckon you ain’t square.”

  Shefford shot out a long arm and his hand clutched the Mormon’s burly shoulder.

  “Why am I not square? What do you mean?”

  Joe swallowed hard and gave himself a shake. Then he eyed his comrade steadily.

  “I was afraid you’d kill him. I reckon I can’t blame you. I’ll help you get away. And I’m a Mormon! Do you take the hunch?… But don’t deny you killed him!”

  “Killed whom?” gasped Shefford.

  “Her husband!”

  Shefford seemed stricken by a slow, paralyzing horror. The Mormon’s changing face grew huge and indistinct and awful in his sight. He was clutched and shaken in Joe’s rude hands, yet scarcely felt them. Joe seemed to be bellowing at him, but the voice was far off. Then Shefford began to see, to hear through some cold and terrible deadness that had come between him and everything.

  “Say you killed him!” hoarsely supplicated the Mormon.

  Shefford had not yet control of speech. Something in his gaze appeared to drive Joe frantic.

  “Damn you! T
ell me quick. Say you killed him!… If you want to know my stand, why, I’m glad!… Shefford, don’t look so stony!… For her sake, say you killed him!”

  Shefford stood with a face as gray and still as stone. With a groan the Mormon drew away from him and sank upon a log. He bowed his head; his broad shoulders heaved; husky sounds came from him. Then with a violent wrench he plunged to his feet and shook himself like a huge, savage dog.

  “Reckon it’s no time to weaken,” he said, huskily, and with the words a dark, hard, somber bitterness came to his face.

  “Where—is—she?” whispered Shefford.

  “Shut up in the school-house,” he replied.

  “Did she—did she—”

  “She neither denied nor confessed.”

  “Have you—seen her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did—she look?”

  “Cool and quiet as the Indian there.… Game as hell! She always had stuff in her.”

  “Oh, Joe!… It’s unbelievable!” cried Shefford. “That lovely, innocent girl! She couldn’t—she couldn’t.”

  “She’s fixed him. Don’t think of that. It’s too late. We ought to have saved her.”

  “God!… She begged me to hurry—to take her away.”

  “Think what we can do now to save her,” cut in the Mormon.

  Shefford sustained a vivifying shock. “To save her?” he echoed.

  “Think, man!”

  “Joe, I can hit the trail and let you tell them I killed him,” burst out Shefford in panting excitement.

  “Reckon I can.”

  “So help me God I’ll do it!”

  The Mormon turned a dark and austere glance upon Shefford.

  “You mustn’t leave her. She killed him for your sake.… You must fight for her now—save her—take her away.”

  “But the law!”

  “Law!” scoffed Joe. “In these wilds men get killed and there’s no law. But if she’s taken back to Stonebridge those iron-jawed old Mormons will make law enough to—to… Shefford, the thing is—get her away. Once out of the country, she’s safe. Mormons keep their secrets.”