Wildfire and the Heritage of the Desert

by Zane Grey

  Then came hours of climbing such slopes and benches and ledges as Lucy had not yet encountered. The grasping spikes of dead cedar tore her dress to shreds, and many a scratch burned her flesh. About the middle of the afternoon Creech led up over the last declivity, a yellow slope of cedar, to a flat, upland covered with pine and high bleached grass. They rested.

  “We’ve fooled Cordts, you can be sure of thet,” said Creech. “You’re a game kid, an’, by Gawd! if I had this job to do over I’d never tackle it again!”

  “Oh, you’re sure we’ve lost him!” implored Lucy.

  “Sure as I am of death. An’ we’ll make surer in crossin’ this bench. It’s miles to the other side where I’m to keep watch fer Joel. An’ we won’t leave a track all the way.”

  “But this grass?” questioned Lucy. “It’ll show our tracks.”

  “Look at the lanes an’ trails between. All pine mats thick an’ soft an’ springy. Only an Indian could follow us hyar on Wild Hoss Bench.”

  Lucy gazed before her under the pines. It was a beautiful forest, with trees standing far apart, yet not so far but that their foliage intermingled. A dry fragrance, thick as a heavy perfume, blew into her face. She could not help but think of fire—how it would race through here, and that recalled Joel Creech’s horrible threat. Lucy shuddered and put away the memory.

  “I can’t go—any farther—to-day,” she said.

  Creech looked at her compassionately. Then Lucy became conscious that of late he had softened.

  “You’ll have to come,” he said. “There’s no water on this side, short of thet cañon-bed. An’ acrost there’s water close under the wall.”

  So they set out into the forest. And Lucy found that after all she could go on. The horses walked and on the soft, springy ground did not jar her. Deer and wild turkey abounded there and showed little alarm at sight of the travelers. And before long Lucy felt that she would become intoxicated by the dry odor. It was so strong, so thick, so penetrating. Yet, though she felt she would reel under its influence, it revived her.

  The afternoon passed; the sun set off through the pines, a black-streaked, golden flare; twilight shortly changed to night. The trees looked spectral in the gloom, and the forest appeared to grow thicker. Wolves murmured, and there were wild cries of cat and owl. Lucy fell asleep on her horse. At last, sometime late in the night, when Creech lifted her from the saddle and laid her down, she stretched out on the soft mat of pine needles and knew no more.

  * * *

  She did not awaken until the afternoon of the next day.

  The site where Creech had made his final camp overlooked the wildest of all that wild upland country. The pines had scattered and trooped around a beautiful park of grass that ended abruptly upon bare rock. Yellow crags towered above the rim, and under them a yawning narrow gorge, overshadowed from above, blue in its depths, split the end of the great plateau and opened out sheer into the head of the cañon, which, according to Creech, stretched away through that wilderness of red stone and green clefts. When Lucy’s fascinated gaze looked afar she was stunned at the vast, billowy, bare surfaces. Every green cleft was a short cañon running parallel with this central and longer one. The dips and breaks showed how all these cañons were connected. They led the gaze away, descending gradually to the dim purple of distance—the bare, rolling desert upland.

  Lucy did nothing but gaze. She was unable to walk or eat that day. Creech hung around her with a remorse he apparently felt, yet could not put into words.

  “Do you expect Joel to come up this big cañon?”

  “I reckon I do—some day,” replied Creech. “An’ I wish he’d hurry.”

  “Does he know the way?”

  “Nope. But he’s good at findin’ places. An’ I told him to stick to the main cañon. Would you believe you could ride off er this rim, straight down thar fer fifty miles, an’ never git off your hoss?”

  “No, I wouldn’t believe it possible.”

  “Wal, it’s so. I’ve done it. An’ I didn’t want to come up thet way because I’d had to leave tracks.”

  “Do you think we’re safe—from Cordts now?” she asked.

  “I reckon so. He’s no tracker.”

  “But suppose he does trail us?”

  “Wal, I reckon I’ve a shade the best of Cordts at gunplay, any day.”

  Lucy regarded the man in surprise. “Oh, it’s so—strange!” she said. “You’d fight for me. Yet you dragged me for days over these awful rocks!… Look at me, Creech. Do I look much like Lucy Bostil?”

  Creech hung his head. “Wal, I reckoned I wasn’t a blackguard, but I am.”

  “You used to care for me when I was little. I remember how I used to take rides on your knee.”

  “Lucy, I never thought of thet when I ketched you. You was only a means to an end. Bostil hated me. He ruined me. I give up to revenge. An’ I could only git thet through you.”

  “Creech, I’m not defending Dad. He’s—he’s no good where horses are concerned. I know he wronged you. Then why didn’t you wait and meet him like a man instead of dragging me to this misery?”

  “Wall, I never thought of thet, either. I wished I had.” He grew gloomier then and relapsed into silent watching.

  * * *

  Lucy felt better next day, and offered to help Creech at the few camp duties. He would not let her. There was nothing to do but rest and wait, and the idleness appeared to be harder on Creech than on Lucy. He had always been exceedingly active. Lucy divined that every hour his remorse grew keener, and she did all she could think of to make it so. Creech made her a rude brush by gathering small roots and binding them tightly and cutting the ends square. And Lucy, after the manner of an Indian, got the tangles out of her hair. That day Creech seemed to want to hear Lucy’s voice, and so they often fell into conversation. Once he said, thoughtfully:

  “I’m tryin’ to remember somethin’ I heerd at the Ford. I meant to ask you—” Suddenly he turned to her with animation. He who had been so gloomy and lusterless and dead showed a bright eagerness. “I heerd you beat the King on a red hoss—a wild hoss!… Thet must have been a joke—like one of Joel’s.”

  “No. It’s true. An’ Dad nearly had a fit!”

  “Wal!” Creech simply blazed with excitement. “I ain’t wonderin’ if he did. His own girl! Lucy, come to remember, you always said you’d beat thet gray racer.… Fer the Lord’s sake tell me all about it.”

  Lucy warmed to him because, broken as he was, he could be genuinely glad some horse but his own had won a race. Bostil could never have been like that. So Lucy told him about the race—and then she had to tell about Wildfire, and then about Slone. But at first all of Creech’s interest centered round Wildfire and the race that had not really been run. He asked a hundred questions. He was as pleased as a boy listening to a good story. He praised Lucy again and again. He crowed over Bostil’s discomfiture. And when Lucy told him that Slone had dared her father to race, had offered to bet Wildfire and his own life against her hand, then Creech was beside himself.

  “This hyar Slone—he called Bostil’s hand!”

  “He’s a wild-horse hunter. And he can trail us!”

  “Trail us! Slone?… Say, Lucy, are you in love with him?”

  Lucy uttered a strange little broken sound, half laugh, half sob. “Love him! Ah!”

  “An’ your Dad’s ag’in him! Sure Bostil’ll hate any rider with a fast hoss. Why didn’t the darn fool sell his stallion to your father?”

  “He gave Wildfire to me.”

  “I’d have done the same. Wal, now, when you git back home what’s comin’ of it all?”

  Lucy shook her head sorrowfully. “God only knows. Dad will never own Wildfire, and he’ll never let me marry Slone. And when you take the King away from him to ransom me—then my life will be hell, for if Dad sacrifices Sage King, afterward he’ll hate me as the cause of his loss.”

  “I can sure see the sense of all that,” replied Creech, soberly. And he po
ndered.

  Lucy saw through this man as if he had been an inch of crystal water. He was no villain, and just now in his simplicity, in his plodding thought of sympathy for her he was lovable.

  “It’s one hell of a muss, if you’ll excuse my talk,” said Creech. “An’ I don’t like the looks of what I ’pear to be throwin’ in your way.… But see hyar, Lucy, if Bostil didn’t give up—or, say, he gits the King back, thet wouldn’t make your chance with Slone any brighter.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Thet race will have to be run!”

  “What good will that do?” cried Lucy, with tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to lose Dad. I—I—love him—mean as he is. And it’ll kill me to lose Lin. Because Wildfire can beat Sage King, and that means Dad will be forever against him.”

  “Couldn’t this wild-horse feller let the King win thet race?”

  “Oh, he could, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Can’t you be sweet round him—fetch him over to thet?”

  “Oh, I could, but I won’t.”

  Creech might have been plotting the happiness of his own daughter, he was so deeply in earnest.

  “Wal, mebbe you don’t love each other so much, after all.… Fast hosses mean much to a man in this hyar country. I know, fer I lost mine!… But they ain’t all.… I reckon you young folks don’t love so much, after all.”

  “But—we—do!” cried Lucy, with a passionate sob. All this talk had unnerved her.

  “Then the only way is fer Slone to lie to Bostil.”

  “Lie!” exclaimed Lucy.

  “Thet’s it. Fetch about a race, somehow—one Bostil can’t see—an’ then lie an’ say the King run Wildfire off his legs.”

  Suddenly it occurred to Lucy that one significance of this idea of Creech’s had not dawned upon him. “You forget that soon my father will no longer own Sage King or Sarchedon or Dusty Ben—or any racer. He loses them or me, I thought. That’s what I am here for.”

  Creech’s aspect changed. The eagerness and sympathy fled from his face, leaving it once more hard and stern. He got up and stood a tall, dark, and gloomy man, brooding over his loss, as he watched the cañon. Still, there was in him then a struggle that Lucy felt. Presently he bent over and put his big hand on her head. It seemed gentle and tender compared with former contacts, and it made Lucy thrill. She could not see his face. What did he mean? She divined something startling, and sat there trembling in suspense.

  “Bostil won’t lose his only girl—or his favorite hoss!… Lucy, I never had no girl. But it seems I’m rememberin’ them rides you used to have on my knee when you was little!”

  Then he strode away toward the forest. Lucy watched him with a full heart, and as she thought of his overcoming the evil in him when her father had yielded to it, she suffered poignant shame. This Creech was not a bad man. He was going to let her go, and he was going to return Bostil’s horses when they came. Lucy resolved with a passionate determination that her father must make ample restitution for the loss Creech had endured. She meant to tell Creech so.

  Upon his return, however, he seemed so strange and forbidding again that her heart failed her. Had he reconsidered his generous thought? Lucy almost believed so. These old horse-traders were incomprehensible in any relation concerning horses. Recalling Creech’s intense interest in Wildfire and in the inevitable race to be run between him and Sage King, Lucy almost believed that Creech would sacrifice his vengeance just to see the red stallion beat the gray. If Creech kept the King in ransom for Lucy he would have to stay deeply hidden in the wild breaks of the cañon country or leave the uplands. For Bostil would never let that deed go unreckoned with. Like Bostil, old Creech was half horse and half human. The human side had warmed to remorse. He had regretted Lucy’s plight; he wanted her to be safe at home again and to find happiness; he remembered what she had been to him when she was a little girl. Creech’s other side was more complex.

  Before the evening meal ended Lucy divined that Creech was dark and troubled because he had resigned himself to a sacrifice harder than it had seemed in the first flush of noble feeling. But she doubted him no more. She was safe. The King would be returned. She would compel her father to pay Creech horse for horse. And perhaps the lesson to Bostil would be worth all the pain of effort and distress of mind that it had cost her.

  That night as she lay awake listening to the roar of the wind in the pines a strange premonition—like a mysterious voice—came to her with the assurance that Slone was on her trail.

  On the following day Creech appeared to have cast off the brooding mood. Still, he was not talkative. He applied himself to constant watching from the rim.

  Lucy began to feel rested. That long trip with Creech had made her thin and hard and strong. She spent the hours under the shade of a cedar on the rim that protected her from sun and wind. The wind, particularly, was hard to stand. It blew a gale out of the west, a dry, odorous, steady rush that roared through the pine-tops and flattened the long, white grass. This day Creech had to build up a barrier of rock round his camp-fire, to keep it from blowing away. And there was a constant danger of firing the grass.

  Once Lucy asked Creech what would happen in that case.

  “Wal, I reckon the grass would burn back even ag’in thet wind,” replied Creech. “I’d hate to see fire in the woods now before the rains come. It’s been the longest, dryest spell I ever lived through. But fer thet my hosses—This hyar’s a west wind, an’ it’s blowin’ harder every day. It’ll fetch the rains.”

  Next day about noon, when both wind and heat were high, Lucy was awakened from a doze. Creech was standing near her. When he turned his long gaze away from the cañon he was smiling. It was a smile at once triumphant and sad.

  “Joel’s comin’ with the hosses!”

  Lucy jumped up, trembling and agitated. “Oh!… Where? Where?”

  Creech pointed carefully with bent hand, and Lucy either could not get the direction or see far enough.

  “Right down along the base of thet red wall. A line of hosses. Jest like a few crawlin’ ants!… An’ now they’re creepin out of sight.”

  “Oh, I can’t see them!” cried Lucy. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive an’ sartin,” he replied. “Joel’s comin’. He’ll be up hyar before long. I reckon we’d jest as well let him come. Fer there’s water an’ grass hyar. An’ down below grass is scarce.”

  It seemed an age to Lucy, waiting there, until she did see horses zigzagging the ridges below. They disappeared, and then it was another age before they reappeared close under the bulge of wall. She thrilled at sight of Sage King and Sarchedon. She got only a glimpse of them. They must pass round under her to climb a split in the wall, and up a long draw that reached level ground back in the forest. But they were near, and Lucy tried to wait. Creech showed eagerness at first, and then went on with his camp-fire duties. While in camp he always cooked a midday meal.

  Lucy saw the horses first. She screamed out. Creech jumped up in alarm.

  Joel Creech, mounted on Sage King, and leading Sarchedon, was coming at a gallop. The other horses were following.

  “What’s his hurry?” demanded Lucy. “After climbing out of that cañon Joel ought not to push the horses.”

  “He’ll git it from me if there’s no reason,” growled Creech. “Them hosses is wet.”

  “Look at Sarch! He’s wild. He always hated Joel.”

  “Wal, Lucy, I reckon I ain’t likin’ this hyar. Look at Joel!” muttered Creech, and he strode out to meet his son.

  Lucy ran out, too, and beyond him. She saw only Sage King. He saw her, recognized her, and whistled even while Joel was pulling him in. For once the King showed he was glad to see Lucy. He had been having rough treatment. But he was not winded—only hot and wet. She assured herself of that, then ran to quiet the plunging Sarch. He came down at once, and pushed his big nose almost into her face. She hugged his great, hot neck. He was quivering all over. Lucy heard the other horses pounding
up; she recognized Two Face’s high whinny, like a squeal; and in her delight she was about to run to them when Creech’s harsh voice arrested her. And sight of Joel’s face suddenly made her weak.

  “What’d you say?” demanded Creech.

  “I’d a good reason to run the hosses uphill—thet’s what!” snapped Joel. He was frothing at the mouth.

  “Out with it!”

  “Cordts an’ Hutch!”

  “What?” roared Creech, grasping the pale Joel and shaking him.

  “Cordts an’ Hutch rode in behind me down at thet cross cañon. They seen me. An’ they’re after me hard!”

  Creech gave close and keen scrutiny to the strange face of his son. Then he wheeled away.

  “Help me pack. An’ you, too, Lucy. We’ve got to rustle out of hyar.”

  Lucy fought a sick faintness that threatened to make her useless. But she tried to help, and presently action made her stronger.

  The Creeches made short work of that breaking of camp. But when it came to getting the horses there appeared danger of delay. Sarchedon had led Dusty Ben and Two Face off the grass. When Joel went for them they galloped away toward the woods. Joel ran back.

  “Son, you’re a smart hossman!” exclaimed Creech, in disgust.

  “Shall I git on the King an’ ketch them?”

  “No. Hold the King.” Creech went out after Plume, but the excited and wary horse eluded him. Then Creech gave up, caught his own mustangs, and hurried into camp.

  “Lucy, if Cordts gits after Sarch an’ the others it’ll be as well fer us,” he said.

  Soon they were riding into the forest, Creech leading, Lucy in the center, and Joel coming behind on the King. Two unsaddled mustangs carrying the packs were driven in front. Creech limited the gait to the best that the pack-horses could do. They made fast time. The level forest floor, hard and springy, afforded the best kind of going.

  A cold dread had once more clutched Lucy’s heart. What would be the end of this flight? The way Creech looked back increased her dread. How horrible it would be if Cordts accomplished what he had always threatened—to run off with both her and the King! Lucy lost her confidence in Creech. She did not glance again at Joel. Once had been enough. She rode on with heavy heart. Anxiety and dread and conjecture and a gradual sinking of spirit weighed her down. Yet she never had a clearer perception of outside things. The forest loomed thicker and darker. The sky was seen only through a green crisscross of foliage waving in the roaring gale. This strong wind was like a blast in Lucy’s face, and its keen dryness cracked her lips.