The Great Trek

by Zane Grey

  The Great Trek

  ZANE GREY®

  TURNING THE HERD

  Then Red rode up to the herd, gun high over his head, to yell and shout. Larry took his cue from that and did likewise. Sterl, riding back a hundred feet, followed suit. Cedric and Drake, with the drovers farther back, let loose with guns and lungs.

  The front of the great mob, like the sharp edge of a wedge, roused to lunge and thud away from the din. It headed away from a direct line toward the river. That relieved Sterl. The turn was not enough, but it had started. Cattle, like sheep, blindly followed the leaders. Every few seconds Sterl would fire his gun and whoop. Dust clouds began to lift. The trampling of many hoofs, the knocking of horns, the increase in hoarse bawling, indicated the start of the milling Sterl was so keen to accomplish. Something like a current ran all the way back to the rear. That frightened Sterl. He yelled and fired and waved his sombrero. They had the apex of the mob quartering away from a direct line to the river bed. But the river took a bend to the east there, and looked less than two miles away!

  Suddenly from the far side of the herd waved a trampling roar that drowned yells and gunshots. Sterl’s piercing yell was a whisper in his ears. He had heard that kind of roar. His blood ran cold….

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1999 Zane Grey, Inc.

  An earlier version of this story appeared under the title The Wilderness Trek by Zane Grey. Copyright © 1944 by Zane Grey, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1972 by Zane Grey, Inc.

  The name Zane Grey is a registered trademark with the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office and cannot be used for any purpose without express written permission.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477833254

  ISBN-10: 1477833250

  Contents

  Title Page

  Turning The Herd

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  About the Author

  This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.

  Foreword

  by Loren Grey

  When my father made his first visit to Australia in the fall of 1935, it was on a pioneering expedition for big game fish, particularly the giant man-eating sharks known to frequent Australian waters. At the time, deep sea fishing, though not unknown there, was in a relatively primitive state compared to angling in New Zealand—which he had made famous during his travels there in 1921, 1927, and 1929—and at Catalina Island, Florida, and other Atlantic waters. Just a short time after he arrived, he was rewarded by the capture of a world record one-thousand-thirty-six pound tiger shark, landed right in the middle of the shipping lanes just three miles off the entrance to Sydney harbor. Of course, the attendant publicity was huge and did not appear unduly diminished by the fact that about three weeks later Lyle Bagnard, one of Dad’s employees, landed a one-thousand-three-hundred-sixty-five pound tiger shark, which, of course, broke Dad’s world record. Although Dad graciously consented to pose with Lyle for the publicity shots, perhaps not surprisingly no mention of Lyle’s catch appeared in his book about this first visit, AN AMERICAN ANGLER IN AUSTRALIA.

  In all respects—except for the one just mentioned—his trip was a huge success. In addition to his fishing records, he also starred in a full-length movie called WHITE DEATH, a name he had given to the great white shark. It was never a commercial success, but added to the lore about the world’s greatest living man-eater.

  Dad also quickly became aware of another great frontier in Australia, the nature of which was virtually unknown to most Americans—the vast central desert of this great continent to which the Australians referred in their laconic manner simply as “the Outback.”

  Although Zane Grey never crossed this great wilderness completely, he traveled far enough inland to see that it very much resembled his own American desert in many respects except, of course, for the bewildering array of strange and exotic species of animals and plants to be found there, as well as the enigmatic presence of virtually the last Stone Age man left in the world—the Australian aborigine. Everything about this strange land enthralled him. It was not long before his imagination led him to the dream of writing a great Australian frontier epic revolving around the attempts by Australian cattlemen-drovers, as they were called, with the help of American cowboys to drive a huge herd of cattle across the northern desert to the verdant Kimberley Mountains on the northwest coast, where gold had been discovered and beef was in short supply.

  The result is this huge sweeping saga which in many ways is one of his finest. But as so often had happened in his frequent publishing woes with the moguls of Harper, when this book was completed in 1937, it was not on their agenda. It was too foreign, too strange, too “unlike” the Zane Grey which, literally, had kept them solvent during the Depression years. Instead, came WEST OF THE PECOS, RAIDERS OF THE SPANISH PEAKS, and KNIGHTS OF THE RANGE, all well written, tried and true oat-burners which gave them no risks and helped to improve their bottom line which, as most of us know—or should know—is the religious deity of all business. This new novel not only had the handicaps mentioned above, but to the editors at Harper, it was also much too long.

  It was 1944 before they finally got around to considering publishing it, five years after my father’s death. But even then, though the Depression was only a memory, small was still big. With inflation and the higher costs of paper, to make money and keep the same prices, books had to be much shorter. So the editors chopped and chopped, and, when they were done, they chopped some more. The book ended up practically a novelette, being less than one-third of the length of the original story. Most of his great descriptions of the Australian wilderness were cut out and even some of the fine plot was thinned. Surprisingly, the resulting “foreign” book sold very well to American readers, which made everybody happy but me. Mother and my brother, Romer, who ran the family affairs didn’t seem to mind, but for a while I was mad. In the ensuing years, as a result of many such experiences as heir, with my sister, to the Zane Grey estate with the mighty house of Harper, I have never become much happier with what I have seen as the cavalier manner with which most Harper editors have treated Zane Grey and all of us who followed him since the beginning, all the way back to 1910. I have
many files with letters from them where they, figuratively, patted Zane on the head like a small, wayward child, telling him this book is too much of this and that book is too little of that. Of course, having dealt with editors about my own writings—which editors always seemed to know more about than I did—I got used to it. Today they still act the same way, but they want Zane Grey—or at least say they do—on their catalog list without changes now, even though on reprints we have seen to it that they only get ten percent of the royalties earned by the books instead of the usual fifty percent split. At least in this sense we have had some revenge. And now, for the first time in many years, we have other options.

  This story is now is being published by Five Star Westerns in its entirety for the first time, as THE GREAT TREK. And as new material surfaces (which is still happening even after all these years—if you don’t believe this, come and look at my garage!) and the stature of Zane Grey as a major voice in the legends of the West grows, there will be other unrevised novels appearing for his readers to enjoy. I think it is about time.

  Loren Grey

  Woodland Hills, California

  Chapter One

  Across the blue Tasman Sea, smooth and heaving on that last day, the American adventurers eagerly watched the Australian horizon grow bold and rugged, changing from dark to pale green, its ranges spreading far-flung and wide, significant of a vast wild country beyond.

  “Red, it’s land…land,” Sterl Hazelton said, his gray eyes dim from watching and remembrance of other land like that, from which he must forever be an exile.

  “Shore, pard, I seen it long ago,” replied Red. “This heah sea gettin’ level an’ that sight jest about saved my life. Sterl, I’ve gone places with you years on end, but no more ridin’ ships for Red Krehl. Not even for you.”

  “But Red, old friend, let me remind you how I begged you not to come,” replied Hazelton earnestly.

  “What kind of talk is thet? Do you think I’d ever let you go to hell alone? Only I’m sorry it wasn’t that Argentine country we’ve lit out for. Them pampas plains…the gauchos an’ grand hosses…an’ dark-eyed Spanish señoritas.”

  “As if dark eyes and blue eyes hadn’t ruined us enough?” Sterl muttered bitterly.

  “Pard, this heah Australia begins to loom up kinda big, at thet. But it’s English…. An’ whoever heerd of an English gurl lookin’ at a cowboy?”

  “Red, someday you’ll get enough girl to do you for good and all, as I got.”

  “Shore I can stand a lot, Sterl. Air my eyes pore or is thet shoreline standin’ kinda cliff-like an’ gold?”

  “Yes, pard. Walls of gold, like an Arizona cañon, with a great break there in the middle. The mate told me that was Sydney Heads, entrance to the finest harbor in the world.”

  “Yeah? Wal, I’m from Mizzourie. He’s gotta show me. Sterl, anythin’ thet reminds us of Arizonie an’ Texas is gonna be bad.”

  “It sure is. Like home! We’ve been on this blasted sailing ship for a thousand days, it seems, and now we are reminded of home. I wanted this country to be new and strange.”

  “Wal, it shore looks big an’ wild. Kinda eases away thet orful pain I’ve had. Pard, this heah sea-sickness is wuss than gunshots.”

  “Funny I didn’t get sick,” mused Sterl. “But you’ve worn out your stomach with nine cups of coffee every meal, and gallons of hard liquor between times.”

  “Say, if I had a bottle on this ship, I wouldn’t be near dead now. Sterl, let’s have one orful drink before we hunt for jobs.”

  “Sounds good, but it’s not sense.”

  “But we never had no sense no how,” Red protested. “You takin’ the blame for thet gun play? An’ me fool enough to let you!”

  This time Hazelton did not reprove his friend and shut him up about the fatal step which had bound them for a far country. But outside of Red’s incredible loyalty he had no part in the killing that had made Sterl an outlaw. Red might be driven, if not persuaded, to go back to America. This idea had developed and waited in Sterl’s mind, and now with the ship making time across that rippling blue and white sea, due before midday in Sydney, it was time to try the plan out on Red.

  How high the gold-rimmed cliffs loomed! Sterl thought of the Verde, of Oak Creek Cañon, of Cañon Diablo, of many lesser Arizona cañons he had known so well. If Australia was full of craggy, colored walls like these, how would he ever forget? The pang was there in his breast and the endless leagues across the Pacific had not seemed to ease it. But Sterl had never suffered a regret for his sacrifice. A rolling stone gathered no moss. He knew in the depths of his heart that Nan Halbert could have steadied him, changed his wandering trail life, ended his drinking and gun-throwing, if it had only worked out that way. She had loved him, too, as well as his cousin, Ross Haight. Ross, the gay handsome blade, lovable and sweet-tempered, except in his cups, the only child, pride and hope of an ailing father with lands and herd to bequeath. Ross, who had in a moment of passion shot a man who certainly had deserved it, but which deed had put the range hounds of justice upon the track of the killer! Sterl had taken upon himself that guilt, which to him was not guilt. His family had been gone so long that he hardly remembered them, except his schoolteacher mother who had loved and taught him. There had been only Nan. And what could he have done for her, compared to what Ross could do? It was the big thing that singularly appealed to him. And it all rolled back in poignant memory to the last scene where Ross had confronted him and Red that last night, passionate and desperate in remorse and shame.

  “But Sterl!” he had rung out, “Nan believes you killed this man! Dad believes…and everybody else. How can I stand that?”

  “For her sake! She loves you best. Go straight, Ross…. Good bye!”

  And Sterl had raced away into the blackness of the Arizona night, soon followed by the loyal Red, who could neither be eluded nor driven.

  “Red, you remember what Ross forced upon you to give me?”

  “Shore I remember,” replied Red, looking up with interest. “I had a hunch it was money. An’ as I knowed you was about broke….”

  “Yes…money. I never opened that packet till we got to Frisco. Ten thousand dollars!”

  “Holy mavericks!” Red ejaculated, astounded. “So much money! Where’d Ross get it?”

  “Must have told his father. Well, you know we outfitted in Frisco and bought tickets on this ship. Red, I’m asking you to take half this money and go back home.”

  “Yeah! The hell you air?” Red retorted scornfully.

  “Yes, pard, I’m begging you.”

  “An’ why for?” queried Red. “ ’Cause you don’t want me with you?”

  “No…no. It’d be grand to have you…to be pards, riders together…gamblers with adventure. But for your sake!”

  “Wal, if it’s for my sake, don’t insult me no more. Would you leave me, if you was me an’ I you? Honest Injun, Sterl?”

  It seemed quite impossible to look into those blazing blue eyes, that lean face red as flame, and tell such a lie. Krehl was always good to look at, but, when eloquence or passion possessed him, then he shook Sterl’s nerve. Reluctantly he had to reply in the negative.

  “Wal, what’s eatin’ you then? Anyone would think I hadn’t any romantic feelin’s or love of adventure. Why, I always had you skinned to a frazzle.”

  “All right, I apologize. Stay with me, Red. God knows I need you.”

  “I should snicker to snort you will. No matter where we haid up, some girl will go for you an’ there’ll be trouble. Hasn’t thet always been so? Twice on the Chisholm Trail, Waco an’ thet Red River Ranch, if you remember, again in Abilene, an’ time an’ again in Arizona, toppin’ off with thet turrible case on Nan Halbert. What’d become of you but for me, pard?”

  “¿Quién sabe? Boy, we’re getting somewhere. Look. There’s a big ship steaming along under the left wall, from the west. And another way off there to the north.”

  “Gosh, they shore look grand. I neve
r seen ships a-tall till we got to Frisco. What’s thet smoke out heah?”

  “Another steamer, hull down they call it. And that long, black rolling cloud of smoke comes from her funnels.”

  “Hull down? For cripe’s sake, is she sinkin’?”

  “Red, didn’t you ever hear that the earth is round?”

  “Not thet I remember. The school I went to for six weeks in Mizzourie didn’t know it, I reckon. All thees ships a-comin’! This Sydney must be a real man-sized burg, huh?”

  “Big city, Red, so the sailors tell me, and I’m going to take you out of it muy pronto.”

  “Suits me, pard. But what air we gonna do? We don’t know nuthin’ but hosses, guns, an’ cattle.”

  “I read that Australia is going to be a big cattle country.”

  “If thet’s a fact, we’re ridin’ pretty,” Red returned with satisfaction. “But mebbe I won’t be glad to get my feet on good old solid ground.”

  They lapsed into one of their frequent silences while the ship sailed on, her canvas bellying, her yards and bones creaking. Under the bow below where the friends reclined, the water gurgled and splashed, at long intervals lifting the ship to a heaving swell.

  Sterl saw the two steamers turn and head into the wide portal between the great rocky heads. And the third, that had been hull down, rose as if by magic out of the sea, to bear down upon the sailing vessel. She was a huge liner, flying the Union Jack, a roaring, hissing hulk, massive as a mountain, and somehow pregnant and magnificent with the potency of foreign lands. She made Sterl think wonderingly of what little he knew of the world. And she passed the sailing ship, slowing down to meet the pi lot boat that stood out from the heads.

  Soon the mile-wide gateway to Australia offered the sailing ship a lonely entrance. Sterl got up to gaze with intense and inexplicable interest. The moment was far-reaching, and it baffled him. Red made some loquacious remark about the lighthouse high upon the western head. The cliff sheered up hundreds of feet, a seamed and scarred face of yellow rock, like any age-old cañon wall, and at its base the white surge broke with hollow roar.