Shadow on the Trail

by Zane Grey

  A powerful horse, with saddle, trappings, bags and rifle such as were used by Texas Rangers, stood bridle down before the porch. In a single leap Wade was down, to stride up on the porch, into the living room. A big sombrero and dusty gloves lay on the table. He heard voices, Pencarrow’s and then a deeper, harder one—that of a native Texan. Wade stood an instant like stone. He had to steel himself against two terrific forces—the ruthless will to kill and the more insupportable need to be the way Jacqueline believed him. That was the most cruel moment of his whole life. How strange and incomprehensible that Jacqueline broke it with a happy little laugh!

  “Baby favors my husband,” she said, proudly.

  “Wal, lass, I can shore recognize some Pencarrow heah, an’ a whole lot of yore Spanish,” drawled her father.

  “Dad, please have Captain Mahaffey stay to lunch,” Jacqueline went on. “Tex will be back then.”

  Mahaffey! His had been the step upon the trail. Ride the man down! Always Wade had known—and yet had risked his fool’s paradise! But even now Wade found comfort in the fact that it had not all been for himself. Never for his own love, his own peace of mind, his own skin! And the truth upheld him. It would be Tex Brandon and not Wade Holden that Mahaffey would meet.

  Wade stepped into the bedroom. The gold sunshine flooded through the white-curtained windows. Jacqueline sat propped up on pillows, the pearl tint of her lovely face, the soft dark splendor of her wonderful eyes, never before so beautiful. The baby lay gurgling beside her. Pencarrow stood on the far side of the bed. On the nearer side to Wade, as he entered, sat a square-shouldered man with iron-gray hair, with his back to the door. It struck Wade then how strange it was that a Texas Ranger captain, famous for riding down notorious criminals, should sit with his back toward any door!

  “Heah he is now,” cried Jacqueline, with a blush that still came for Wade on occasions. “Darling, we have a visitor from Texas. . . . Captain Mahaffey, this is my husband.”

  The big man stood up and turned around. Mahaffey indeed— the iron-jawed, hawk-eyed ranger—a little grayer and grimmer, his visage seamed and lined with the records of his stem life.

  “Howdy, Captain,” said Wade, with cool and easy graciousness. “I haven’t been away from Texas long enough to have forgotten your name.”

  “Howdy, Brandon,” replied Mahaffey. “I’ve heahed of you all the way across. Let me shake yore hand.”

  The lightning leaped to his gray hawk eyes as he extended his hand. Wade met it. What was the ranger’s game? Oh! The old Texas chivalry toward a woman! Mahaffey would make his arrest outside.

  “Wal, now,” he went on. “Seems like I’ve felt hands like this one before. Soft most as a woman’s—velvet over steel! Like my old friends Buck Duane, Wess Hardin, King Fisher, an’ all thet outfit, you don’t chop wood or otherwise mistreat this right member.”

  “I never used to,” replied Wade, with a laugh. “But my gun days are over. I’ll come yet to chopping wood—or perhaps even breaking stone. . . . Mahaffey, did you by any chance shake with Billy the Kid on the way across?”

  “No, wuss luck. For a Texas Ranger, I shore had a weakness for Billy. . . . He was killed not long ago by Pat Garritt.”

  “No!” exclaimed Wade. “Not an even break?”

  “Wal, I should smile not. Garritt hadn’t the nerve for thet. Billy would have beat him to a gun. . . . It happened at Pete Maxwell’s in Lincoln. Garritt, the sheriff an’ his deputies were on Billy’s track. They missed him. But at night when Garritt sat in the dark talkin’ to Maxwell, Billy came in the door. Maxwell had been his friend. Billy asked who the stranger was, instead of shootin’ first. Pat recognized his voice an’ bored him.”

  “Well!—Who’d ever have guessed such an end for Billy the Kid,” exclaimed Wade, profoundly moved.

  “None of us can figure what our ends will be,” replied the ranger.

  “Heah, you bloodthirsty men of the draw, never mind such talk!” retorted Jacqueline. “Babies are more important than guns. Look at this one!”

  “Wal, thank Gawd, they air,” replied Mahaffey, heartily, as he bent to let the little Jacqueline take a final squeeze at his finger. When he stood up again, he appeared a softer, stranger Mahaffey, one without that piercing gray fire of eye. “Brandon, Pencarrow heah told me about you an’ yore work on this range. I never heahed the beat of it unless thet job of Buck Duane’s—when he joined Cheseldine’s outfit in the Big Bend, an’ cleaned them out, even to the great Paggin. But Buck carries a lot of lead even to this day an’ you didn’t get even a bullet burn.”

  “That’s the miracle,” admitted Wade. “I owe it to Jacqueline.”

  “Wal, I reckon. Air you shore you appreciate her?”

  “God knows I do—as greatly as I don’t deserve her,” replied Wade, poignantly.

  “Brandon, a man can never tell what’s in him till a good woman brings it out. Stand by what you jest said all yore life.”

  Wade could not speak. His mind seemed to receive with startling vividness, but could give out no response.

  “Good-by, mother an’ baby,” went on Mahaffey. “I shore am the happier for meetin’ you.”

  The ranger strode out, with Pencarrow following.

  “Cain’t you stay for lunch, Captain?” asked the rancher.

  “Sorry, Pencarrow. But it’s early—an’ I’ll be on my way. I’m damn glad to meet you, an’ tell you I hadn’t nothin’ to do with killin’ yore brother Glenn. I’m tellin’ you all us rangers air not. . .”

  They passed out of hearing. Wade found sense in his nerves and muscles, and he sat down beside Jacqueline, to peer out at the purple Arizona range. What was it that had happened? He seemed to be shut out of the sepulcher of his mind. Inside that locked chamber—faces of the old years—his father—a dark stern ghost this strange Mahaffey—the strife and agony of his struggle—seemed to try to burst their confines to explain that quick retreating footstep. Jacqueline gazed up at him with dim wet eyes. There was something about to happen. But the unreality possessed him. A ring of ironshod hoofs on the court outside! The ranger was riding away. Mahaffey—he whose clarion voice broke through the wall of mind—Ride the Man Down!

  “Wade . . . Wade,” whispered Jacqueline. “He knew you.”

  “My God! . . . What did—you—call me?” gasped Wade. This was another and an unbearable nightmare. But Jacqueline lay there, white and convulsed of face, her dark eyes eloquent with love and pity.

  “I called you—Wade,” she went on, brokenly. “My husband. . . . You are Wade Holden. You are the boy whom I saved long ago—that night in the canyon—saved from this very Mahaffey. . . . I always knew you—yet was never sure until that night—when you came back with the new cowboys—and I met you coming around the tent into the firelight. . . . Oh, Wade, darling . . . all the time I’ve known.”

  “Jacqueline!. . . And you loved me . . . married me?” cried Wade, hoarsely, falling to his knees beside the bed.

  “Yes. I loved you—married you,” she whispered. “I would never have told you but for that ranger’s coming. He knew you, Wade. He was heah to arrest you—take you back to Texas. He never guessed that I knew you were Wade Holden . . . and as he listened to Dad and me—slowly strangely softening. Oh, it was beautiful to see. . . . He knew you, Wade. Did you not divine that?”

  “Yes. I—saw,” choked Wade.

  “But you did not betray yourself. . . . He has gone, big with his secret. . . . That gave me right and reason to tell my secret. . . . Whatever you did in the past it is atoned for. Mahaffey—that stern, hard-lipped man of law—he removed the stigma. You are free, Wade.

  “Oh, yes—free of him—and that footstep on my trail. But can I be of that haunting horror—the fortune my father gave me— robber’s money! . . . the use I put it to—to help your father?”

  “You saved that through all the years of your outlawry?” she asked, wonderingly.

  “Yes. Saved it like a miser. But it was money I could never have
returned. Where it came from God only knows. . . .”

  “Wade, I could have forgiven and forgotten that without Captain Mahaffey’s help,” said Jacqueline, with sad and persuasive eloquence. “But he represents the law. He forgave it. The good you have done far outweighs the bad. That is the answer . . . he will forget.”

  “Brandon is my middle name,” said Wade, lifting his head. “It was my mother’s.”

  “What’s in a name? But Jacqueline Pencarrow Brandon—that is pretty. Lift her up to the window, dear, and let’s look out over the range.”

  Wade gazed a long time before the dimness left his eyes. Then this bright land, this indescribably new Arizona land rolled away to infinitude, speaking, beautiful, wild, with its straggling cattle dotting the gray, and the pine-clad knolls leading out to the purple desert. Then he understood his father and he understood Mahaffey, and this loyal loving wife. Until that moment it had not been given him to see them clearly, nor his unabatable struggle nor the opportunity that had grown unceasingly with it. Now the truth permeated his being. This was what had happened to one evildoer when he made his pledge and rode away with the spirit to rise. Something beside a footstep had followed along his wandering trail. It was that which abided in mother and babe. They were his to hold, to keep, to grow by, together with the endless range out there, with its blue flats and green knolls, its yellow-walled canyons, and the dim red shadows in the desert distance.