Shadow on the Trail

by Zane Grey

  “Ha! Ha! . . . That’s a joke, Elwood. . . . I spent the last of my money buying Aulsbrook out.”

  “I’ll bet you won’t be able to pay back a quarter of thet money you got off the rustlers. If Mason paid Harrobin five dollars a head for thet eight thousand odd rustled with Aulsbrook’s, why there’s forty thousand in one lump. An’ you got the cattle an’ the money too, barrin’ what you paid Aulsbrook. Haw! Haw! Thet shore beats hell!”

  “You think the balance—after I pay those little ranchers down there—is rightfully mine?”

  “Wal, I should smile I do. Pencarrow agrees. Harrobin an’ Drake had other resources. Don’t forget thet Drake, or Blue, sold out to Pencarrow for twenty thousand. He was a tightfisted geezer with some purpose up his sleeve. He never was a real hard-drinkin’, hard-gamblin’ rustler.

  “I haven’t counted it yet,” rejoined Wade, with a little laugh. “Guess I won’t. . . . How many riders will I keep to run Pencarrow’s ranch?”

  “Tex, you kinda forget you’re his pardner, don’t you? Of all the queer cusses I ever seen, you’re the queerest. . . . Wal, I’d keep your old bunch an’ add, say four more to it, an’ let Hogue be foreman.”

  “I like that. Is Hogue back? No, he couldn’t be. . . . I’d like to see his face when he hears.”

  Wade slept that night under the open shelter beside the brook and awoke at sunrise with the dark and somber mood fading like a nightmare. Lightfoot went up early to the ranch leaving Wade to his own devices.

  He spent the day along the shady rim where the brook took its amber-white leap into the canyon. In renouncing all that he might selfishly have gained, he discovered an amazing abundance left by which to live. His memory, his dream—and the companionship of nature that this Arizona land had made clear for him. He could never be lonely again. His wants would be few. There could never be too much time on his hands. These eventful years at Cedar Ranch had seen him insensibly drawn to the purple desert, the gray cedar range, the Redwall canyons, the mellow gold-lit glades where the streams glided, the fragrant dry forests. His life had been bitter. But there would be part of it sweet to remember.

  Next day Hogue and Hal invaded Wade’s retreat and hailed him with the worship of youths. They respected his reticence and seemed conscious of a change in him. But they talked and speculated and looked ahead with a vision that was spirited in Hal and touching in Hogue. That cowboy had been with Rona since his return from Holbrook. He was soft, dreamy at times, wild at others, and then again strangely studious of Wade.

  “Hogue, I mustn’t forget to tell you I’m sending you down country to make good the cattle losses of these ranchers,” said Wade.

  “Not me you ain’t sendin’,” declared Hogue. “Pencarrow has called for all his neighbors, even to the Tonto, to come with their proof. He’s shore not goin’ to let anyone impose on you.”

  “Well! I hadn’t thought of proof. . . . How’s a cattleman to prove he lost so much stock?”

  “I reckon he cain’t. But Lightfoot will get the right of it. Smart old geezer, thet homesteader! ”

  Wade walked to the foot of the trail with his friends.

  “Pard, won’t you come on up?” asked Hogue.

  “No. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Rona sent her love,” added Hal, anxiously. “An’ she said to tell you thet if you didn’t come soon she’d mosey down after you. . . . An’ Jacque—well, she’s never asked about you or sent any message. But Tex, she’s pale. She doesn’t smile an’ her eyes are too big for her face. . . . I reckon my sister .. . well, never mind what. Only, please come up, Tex.”

  “You’re a couple of locoed kids,” retorted Wade harshly, furious that the red blood burned his cheek.

  “See here, boss,” drawled Hogue, keenly, his eyes narrowed. “Now you got me straightened out an’ my boys, an’ Pencarrow on his feet, an’ Rona an’ Hal happy—an’ Jacque a ghost of her old self—you wouldn’t double-cross us all, would you, an’ leave us stumped?”

  Wade fled before the warm light in the cowboy’s eyes and the suspicious and damning content of his query. For that was what Wade had made up his mind to do. He was not sure of his strength if he once saw Jacqueline again. These loving fools would have her ill on his account, worn pale through fear for him. They would take her gratitude, her strong sense of what the Pencarrows owed him, as something deeper, and they would throw the bighearted girl into his arms. For one instant, when Wade admitted thought of the possibility of Jacqueline’s loving him, he was wrapped in a blinding flame and whirled away, passion-swept, overcome with rapture that was pain.

  He must take heed of this warning. There were forces at work beyond his ken. He drove himself to the realization that he dared not tarry longer at Cedar Ranch. The old conflict began all over again. After dark he went back up to the ranch, only to return, harassed, tom by conflicting emotions.

  “What’s on yore mind, son?” asked the homesteader.

  “I wish to God I could tell you,” answered Wade, poignantly.

  “I reckon I can guess. But up there they all think you’re sick from the killin’, ashamed of the hard man thet you had to be. . . . Do you want my advice?”

  “No, friend, I’m beyond advice. I know what to do. But I’ve been a coward.”

  “Wal! wall . . . Ain’t you thinkin’ too much about yourself? After all, these people believe in you.”

  “That makes the hell.”

  “But what people believe is true,” protested the homesteader.

  Wade rushed out into the moonlit night. To stay longer with this kindly man would be to confess the guilt that harrowed his soul. He could have told Lightfoot, but he feared counsel and wisdom that might deflect him from his prescribed course. How easy and sweet and rapturous to surrender to circumstances and stay on at Cedar Ranch, friend and brother to these good Pencarrows, perhaps more in time to Jacqueline? From Lightfoot’s hint he conceived the probability that Jacqueline would marry him to pay their debt. And that thought possessed Wade with a frenzy for hours. Was there any man who would not have won this girl by any means? But he was bound. If she had not saved his life, made it possible for him to keep his pledge to his father—truly, except for this last weakness with the money—he would have succumbed to the temptation. To take advantage of her gratitude, of her faith, to win her with a lie—that was not possible for him. No! he would ride away without a word to Jacqueline. She would never know that he had paid his debt to her. It would come to her fully as time passed how greatly he had loved her. She could not suffer through that. She would regret, she would wonder—and then life would impose its future and some fortunate man might. . . . As always Wade flinched and fell before the flame of jealousy. But even so he rallied and raised his head. Who was he to hold a thought inimical to the future happiness of this girl?

  Next day he went back to the ranch, his old cool self, as inexorable in the purpose he had set himself as the doom he had meted out to Pencarrow’s enemies. The day proved to be a full one. Wade had to meet the cattlemen who had called at Pencarrow’s invitation. They paid him the meed of the range, simple, elemental. Wade found himself deeply touched, almost exalted despite himself. Their losses did not aggregate a third of the sum Wade had found upon the rustlers. Again he felt defeated. He could not escape a fortune. But he eluded the burden, the dread of the past in a few words to Pencarrow: “Here, partner, take this for safekeeping.”

  Then visitors consumed most of the day, and the cowboys the rest. None of them wanted to leave Cedar Ranch. Wade surrendered the problem to Kinsey and Strothers. He was no longer foreman. He laughed at their perplexities. Once Rona waved to him from the porch and when he waved back, she boldly threw him kisses.

  At sunset, when he came out of his cabin to mount Pen, he felt impelled to glance up at Jacqueline’s window. Sight of her when he had not expected it gave him a considerable wrench. She waved something white—a handkerchief—no, it was an envelope. A letter! He doffed his sombrero gaily and rode toward
the cowboys’ camp with death in his soul.

  With the visiting cattlemen and cowboys, Pencarrow’s outfit had a busy merry time of it at supper. That gave Wade opportunity to listen and watch, and take his farewell of Hal and Hogue, of the volatile Kid and the somber half-breed, of all these riders who meant more to him than they had ever dreamed.

  In the early dusk he rode back to his cabin. He meant to take Pen with him—the one and only thing he exacted from the Pencarrows. The full moon had just peeped over the black mountain. He must hurry. What was it that he wanted from his cabin? He sat down to think. The moment had come for his departure and his heart seemed about to burst.

  All at once he felt something smooth and cool under his hand upon the blanket of his bed. It was an envelope. The feel of it, the meaning of it transfixed him for an instant. This was the note Jacqueline had waved at him from her window. She had put it there.

  All that remained of the cool calculating man advised that it be left there unread. But that self multiplied by a thousand could never have denied the love that surged in anguished renunciation.

  Wade’s hands, in moments of peril steady as rocks, shook like aspen leaves as he lighted the lamp. What had she written? He felt carried along in a swift current. Fumbling at the envelope to tear it open, he found it unsealed. He read with eyes that blurred.

  Dear Tex:

  You will find me waiting for you at the bench in the pines where Rona used to meet Hogue. They have graduated to the living room, with Dad’s consent.

  I would not attempt to tell you in a letter how I feel about what you have done for us. If you have imagination enough you may realize something of what awaits you by magnifying all we saw there one night in the moonlight.

  But I must hasten to let you know that you take too tragically what you suppose is my attitude—and that of all of us for that matter—toward you after the terrible things you have done. At first it did sicken me, frighten me to see you kill, and to think of it afterward. But that wore away.

  I know you would have come to me at once if you had not feared this. But you should have come, for I would have helped you, comforted you. Only such a man as you are could have saved Dad, and all of us, not to say the other families on this wild range. I would not have you the least different.

  But you have stayed away from me too long. I am dying for love of you.

  Jacqueline

  Wade tried to read the note a second time. But he could not see. He found himself erect, tense like a man mortally stricken, but glorying in the blade that had pierced his vitals. He was lost He had tarried too long. All his struggle and fall and rise must go for naught. An incredulous rapture, like a flood, waved over his whirling thoughts. If Jacqueline was dying for love of him no outlawed past, no blundering shame of the present could keep him from her.

  He went forth from the cabin like a man pursued by furies. But as he strode on, faster and faster toward the pine-clad slope, these voices of conscience left off pursuit. He seemed to be driven to hear the truth of written words and to take his course from that. Yet he knew he was lost. This had ever been about to happen.

  He reached the pines. The moon was not high enough to light up the aisles between the trees. To the last instant he did not expect to find Jacqueline. But a white form arose from the bench, and advanced into the little open glade to meet him. Jacqueline!

  Wade rushed to envelop her. “Jacqueline!” he cried, hoarsely. “You are here! . . . That message of yours! .. . What madness is this?” He crushed her to his breast so that if she had any reply for his passionate entreaty she could not have given it. Then he held her away from him, with strong and shaking hands pressing down her black hair, holding her face to the moonlight. It was indeed pale and thin, but lovely with its smile and the great dark eyes, shining with love.

  “Why did you—not come to me?” she whispered, her bare arms sliding to clasp his neck.

  “No—matter now,” he said, thickly. “It’s too late—if you love me.”

  “I have been dying of love for you.”

  “Jacqueline, you are so bighearted—so—so—” he faltered.

  “My heart might have been big, but it’s almost consumed with unrequited love,” she said, reproachfully.

  “Don’t jest. This is death—or life for me. I have worshiped you from the first. . . . I have tried to die for you. I bore a charmed life. They couldn’t kill me. . . . Jacqueline, be sure. . . .”

  “I am sure now, thank heaven, that you do love me,” she cried, awakening. “And I can be myself. Oh, I always doubted that terrible cowboy.”

  “He told the truth, child,” said Wade, mournfully.

  “But you never told me.”

  “I did not dare.”

  “Do you think I care for what your past has been?” she queried, passionately, her arms tightening. “You need say only one more word to make me the happiest girl in all this West.”

  “You’ll be—my wife?” he whispered, brokenly, carried away, terrified at the inevitable, even in that moment realizing he could never tell her his secret.

  “I will, my dearest,” she whispered, her heavy eyelids falling, her white face tilting to his. She was quivering in his arms. And when Wade yielded to those upturned lips the intense and vital life of her seemed to pass into him, like magic satisfying all the hunger of his lonely years, and fortifying him with shuddering, ecstatic strength against the future.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A YEAR and more rolled by. Summer came again to Cedar Range—a summer marked by abundant rain and grass that greened the knolls and flats from the mountains to the desert.

  Cattlemen had their first year of prosperity in that isolated section of Arizona. Pencarrow’s cowboys burned the C.R.B. brand on five thousand new calves! And other ranchers on the range multiplied their herds in like proportion.

  The remnants of the several rustler bands that had fared like robber barons vanished as if by magic. Pine Mound dwindled to a deserted village and the road that led from it to Holbrook became a trail overgrown with weeds. From Sycamore Canyon to Harrobin’s old hiding place in the brakes this fading road was said to be haunted. Cowboys made use of other trails. Around the campfires of the range, and far into other grazing country, stories were told about the hanging of the rustlers, and that Band Drake, or Rand Blue, had never been cut down from the wide-spreading cottonwood on the trail near Pine Mound. They told uncanny tales. There were no rustlers left to cut down this ghastly thing and the honest cowmen who passed that way let it remain there like a scarcecrow in the fields. They told how the buzzards and the crows picked the carcass clean of flesh and left a belted and booted skeleton to sway in the wind and rattle its bones and jingle its spurs.

  The day of the rustler on that range was done. Homesteaders and cattlemen, most of them Texans, moved into the vast unsettled country to the south.

  As notoriety and greatness had been thrust upon Tex Brandon so were prosperity and respect, and the regard of an increasing population. Wade had surrendered with outward grace to the inevitable. But on lonely rides and in the dark hours he contended with a sleepless remorse, and an abiding dread. When June came he had been married to Jacqueline for a year, and a baby Jacqueline had just arrived at Cedar Ranch. Pencarrow was a proud grandfather. In the happiness of that time he consented to the engagement of Rona to Hogue Kinsey. Hogue’s crippled sister had been sent to Kansas City where a specialist had cured the unfortunate ailment that had sent Hogue off the straight and narrow trail. She was a pretty blue-eyed girl of eighteen and her advent at Cedar Ranch had sadly upset the equilibrium of the cowboys. Hal appeared to be leading in the race for the young lady’s favor, with Kid Marshall running a close second.

  It would have been impossible for Wade not to have reveled in all this happiness. He had lived to bless the one gift that had developed out of his hard years in Texas. He shared this happiness and no one could have divined his secret haunting fears.

  But there was a step on h
is trail. He had heard it when he was alone, riding in the dusk, and sometimes when he sat beside the open fire on winter nights. It would catch up with him some day. Until that fateful time he accepted the homage of the Pencarrows and their neighbors, and he clung to Jacqueline’s love with a reverent awe and a hidden pitiful hope.

  Often he thought of the gunmen and outlaws who had abandoned a locality or a gang of comrades to disappear and never be heard of again. That had come to be a favorite thought of Wade’s. He had personally known several men like that. What had happened to them? Perhaps they had gone to other places, joined other bands under other names. But it was conceivable that one here and there might have abandoned the old evil life and made a new one that had elements of good. Wade had done this. He wondered if it would be just and right of fate to track him down now, and in punishing him for an erring past wreck the happiness of a wife and mother.

  One morning when little Jacqueline was two weeks old Wade returned from a visit to Lightfoot’s ranch. He was thinking of the probable hundred tons of alfalfa that would be cut from the homesteader’s rich acres this summer. As he turned Pen toward the corrals he happened to see a group of saddled and packed horses resting by the pine knoll. His heart leaped to his throat. The horsemen lounging there, talking to the cowboys, could be no other than Texas Rangers. He had seen rangers too often ever to be deceived. And a blind terrific fury and fear possessed him. These passed over him like a wave. No more flight for Wade Holden! He had never shed a ranger’s blood and he never would. If this were the end he would meet it with the courage that had come to him.

  In another moment he turned Pen toward the house, his one thought for Jacqueline. What a passion of regret stormed his soul! He might have told her long ago—might have spared her shock, if not heartbreak and shame. But he had never been able to face the thought of telling her the truth—of losing the incredible esteem in which she held him. Too late! It all rushed over him now and but for her he would have welcomed death.