by Zane Grey
His face was bruised and cut, his dress dirty and bloody, but he did not appear the worse for that fight. Jane found her legs scarcely able to support her, and she had apparently lost her voice.
“Let us put you on my saddle till we find your horse,” he said, and lifted her lightly as a feather to a seat crosswise. Then he walked with a hand on the bridle.
Jane saw him examining the ground, evidently searching for horse tracks. “Ha! Here we are.” And he led off in another direction through the cedars. Soon Jane espied her horse, calmly nibbling at the bleached grass. In a few moments she was back in her own saddle, beginning to recover somewhat from her distress. But she divined that as fast as she recovered from one set of emotions she was going to be tormented by another.
“There’s a good cold spring down here in the rocks,” remarked Springer. “I think you need a drink, an’ so do I.”
They rode down the sunny cedar slopes, into a shady ravine skirted by pines, and up to some mossy cliffs from which a spring gushed forth.
Jane was now in the throes of thrilling, bewildering conjectures and fears. Why had Springer followed her? Why had he not sent one of the cowboys? Why did she feel so afraid and foolish? He had always been courteous and kind and thoughtful, at least until she had offended so egregiously. And here he was now. He had fought for her. Would she ever forget? Her heart began to pound. And when he dismounted to take her off her horse, she knew it was to see a scarlet and telltale face.
“Mister Springer, I…I thought you were Tex…or somebody,” she said.
He laughed as he took off his sombrero. His face was warm, and the cuts were still bleeding a little.
“You sure can ride,” he replied. “And that’s a good little pony.”
He loosened the cinches on the horses. Jane managed to hide some of her confusion.
“Won’t you walk around a little?” he asked. “It’ll rest you. We are fifteen miles from home.”
“So far?”
Then presently he lifted her up and stood beside her with a hand on her horse. He looked up frankly into her face. The keen eyes were softer than usual. He seemed so fine and strong and splendid. She was afraid of her eyes and looked away.
“When the boys found you were gone, they all saddled up to find you,” he said. “But I asked them if they didn’t think the boss ought to have one chance. So they let me come.”
Something happened to Jane’s heart just then. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a strange happiness that she must hide, but could not. It seemed there was a long silence. She felt Springer there, but she could not look at him.
“Do you like it out here in the West?” he asked presently.
“Oh, I love it! I’ll never want to leave it,” she replied impulsively.
“I reckon I’m glad to hear that.”
Then there fell another silence. He pressed closer to her and seemed now to be leaning on the horse. She wondered if he heard the weird knocking of her heart against her side.
“Will you be my wife an’ stay here always?” he asked simply. “I’m in love with you. I’ve been lonely since my mother died…. You’ll sure have to marry some one of us. Because, as Tex says, if you don’t, ranchin’ can’t go on much longer. These boys don’t seem to get anywhere with you. Have I any chance…Jane…?”
He possessed himself of her gloved hand and gave her a gentle pull. Jane knew it was gentle because she scarcely felt it. Yet it had irresistible power. She was swayed by that gentle pull. She was slipping sidewise in her saddle. She was sliding into his arms.
* * * * *
A little later he smiled up at her and said: “Jane, they call me Bill for short. Same as they call me boss. But my two front names are Frank Owens.”
“Oh!” cried Jane, startled. “Then you…you…?”
“Yes, I’m the guilty one,” he replied happily. “It happened this way. My bedroom, you know, is next to my office. I often heard the boys poundin’ the typewriter. I had a hunch they were up to some trick. So I spied upon them…heard about Frank Owens an’ the letters to the little schoolmarm. At Beacon I got the postmistress to give me your address. An’, of course, I intercepted some of your letters. It sure has turned out great.”
“I…I don’t know about you or those terrible cowboys,” replied Jane dubiously. “How did they happen on the name Frank Owens?”
“Sure, that’s a stumper. I reckon they put a job up on me.”
“Frank…tell me…did you write the…the love letters?” she asked appealingly. “There were two kinds of letters. That’s what I could never understand.”
“Jane, I reckon I did,” he confessed. “Somethin’ about your little notes just won me. Does that make it all right?”
“Yes, Frank, I reckon it does,” she returned, leaning down to kiss him.
“Let’s ride back home an’ tell the boys,” said Springer gaily. “The joke’s sure on them. I’ve corralled the little schoolmarm from Missouri.”
THE END
About the Author
Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Gray at Zanesville, Ohio in 1872. He was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 with a degree in dentistry. He practiced in New York City while striving to make a living by writing. He married Lina Elise Roth in 1905 and with her financial assistance he published his first novel himself, Betty Zane (1903). Closing his dental office, the Greys moved into a cottage on the Delaware River, near Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. Grey took his first trip to Arizona in 1907 and, following his return, wrote The Heritage of the Desert (1910). The profound effect that the desert had had on him was so vibrantly captured that it still comes alive for a reader. Grey couldn’t have been more fortunate in his choice of a mate. Trained in English at Hunter College, Lina Grey proofread every manuscript Grey wrote, polished his prose, and later she managed their financial affairs. Grey’s early novels were serialized in pulp magazines, but by 1918 he had graduated to the slick magazine market. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune and, with 109 films based on his work, Grey set a record yet to be equaled by any other author. Zane Grey was not a realistic writer, but rather one who charted the interiors of the soul through encounters with the wilderness. He provided characters no less memorable than one finds in Balzac, Dickens, or Thomas Mann, and they have a vital story to tell. “There was so much unexpressed feeling that could not be entirely portrayed,” Loren Grey, Grey’s younger son and a noted psychologist, once recalled, “that, in later years, he would weep when re-reading one of his own books.” Perhaps, too, closer to the mark, Zane Grey may have wept at how his attempts at being truthful to his muse had so often been essentially altered by his editors, so that no one might ever be able to read his stories as he had intended them. It may be said of Zane Grey that, more than mere adventure tales, he fashioned psycho-dramas about the odyssey of the human soul. If his stories seem not always to be of the stuff of the mundane world, without what his stories do touch, the human world has little meaning — which may go a long way to explain the hold he has had on an enraptured reading public ever since his first Western novel in 1910. His next will be The Water Hole.
