by Zane Grey
Hathaway’s death, coming one night when he was unattended, shocked everyone, even the cowboys, out of the abnormal unfeeling stages. For days he had been delirious and burning up with fever. He had been a sorry, dread burden, and it seemed that he should pass on. They buried him beside Emily Dann, and erected another cross. Stanley Dann, in his faltering prayer, committed his soul to rest, and freedom from the plague of unsatisfied life.
Sterl wondered if the great leader was breaking. Then he reproached himself for such disloyalty. That very night, when Ormiston, who had not attended the funeral, presented himself at Dann’s camp, professing grief for the loss of his friend, the leader delivered himself of a significant and far-reaching speech.
“Ormiston,” he boomed in his sonorous voice, “you need not demean yourself to tell me that you won Hathaway’s cattle at cards, or that he otherwise owed you money.”
That staggered the bush-ranger for a moment, perhaps because both the cowboys and Beryl were present. It penetrated the hide of his monstrous conceit. It struck deep into him and disrupted thoughts and doubts that had become allayed. His dark gaze, questioning, scarcely veiling malignancy, would have warned a man less noble than Stanley Dann. The drover dropped his head and went his way.
“Dad!” exclaimed Beryl petulantly, “anyone would think you doubted Hathaway owed Ash money. I knew it ages ago.”
“Yes, Daughter, anyone who hasn’t a mind would think that,” returned her father, and left her to find consolation with Leslie. The cowboys sat staring into the fire, enduring its smoke to insure a relief from the pest of mosquitoes that had been recently added to the tribulations of the forks.
Sterl revolved Dann’s caustic speech in his mind. Their leader was not such a fool, after all. He was merely greater than most men. But what did it signify beyond a hint that Ormiston was greedy? It was not inconceivable for Dann to believe Hathaway had owed Ormiston money. Hathaway liked games of chance, and the hellish hold-up of the trek could account for any weary seeking of distraction. Still, Dann might have divined more than that. When would this game stamp upon the viper?—Sterl wondered and kept thinking, although his brain felt confined under a redhot skull.
Sometime during that night Sterl opened his eyes, wide awake instantly. It was pitch dark, stifling hot, still as the grave. His long training in the open had magnified his sensorial perceptions. In a flash his consciousness told him that he had been awakened by something unusual. He listened. Friday, the faithful black man, lay just outside the tent. There could be no danger.
He thought while his keen ear, his instincts were strained to the uttermost. A cowboy learned to awaken at the slightest jar, sound, touch. A drop of rain on his face, a rattlesnake slipping under the edge of his blanket, a tarantula crawling across him, any unusual sound—these had hundreds of times brought Sterl out of slumber, on the qui vive.
He was wringing wet with sweat. The heat of the day always lingered until after midnight, often till dawn. But despite the heat and the burning sweat, a queer little chill ran over him. What had awakened him? It struck him presently that he could not hear Red’s regular deep breathing when he slept. Still he felt that Red was there.
Suddenly that painful silence broke to a long, low, rolling rumble. Thunder! Had he gone mad with the heat? Was he dreaming? It sounded again, like the distant roar of stampeding buffalo. Yes, it was thunder!
Sterl sat up, transfixed and thrilling. His heart thumped audibly. His breast swelled. He had a dry mouth and a constriction in his throat.
“Red…Red,” he panted huskily.
“Hell, pard. I heahed it. Thunder.”
There came a soft tapping on the tent outside, then Friday’s voice.
“Boss, bimeby rain!”
“Yes, Friday. Yes, we heard,” replied Sterl, and he groped with trembling hand for his boots. “My God! Red, it’s coming.”
“Funny, pard, I was layin’ heah, after I heahed it, thinkin’ I hadn’t never appreciated rain before. A feller always learns. Life cain’t be too long fer thet.”
They pulled on their boots, crawled from under their nets, and out of the tent. There was starlight enough to see Friday’s tall, black image, the pale wagons, the spectral trees. The air was sultry, oppressive, heavy, strangely different. Then on the moment a flare of lightning ran along the eastern horizon. How exceedingly beautiful, beneficent, overwhelming! With bated breath Sterl waited for the thunder, to assure himself, to enable him to judge how far distant. Would it never come? That storm was far away. Then—low rumble, continuous, swelling rumble—the gods of the elements were rolling clouds on high!
“Aw!” Red’s expulsion of breath told his acceptance, his relief. “The real old thing, pard. Thunder! Deep an’ heavy! I reckon I’m orful glad.”
“Friday, it’s a storm…lightning…thunder…rain!” burst out Sterl. “How far…when?”
“Alonga ober dere,” replied the black, with his slow gesture. “Rain bimeby. Mebbe soon…mebbe no.”
Slyter came stamping from the direction of his wagon. Leslie’s rich glad voice rang out. Stanley Dann boomed to his brother. The drovers were calling one to another. Across the river lights flashed at Ormiston’s camp, and answering yells resounded. They had all heard. They were all astir. Their shouts had a ringing note. Everybody seemed excited, exultant.
Slyter’s thought was for his horses. Dann boomed to his drovers that thunder and lightning, after so long a dry spell, might stampede the mob. In short order all the drovers and partners, even Leslie, were mounted and on guard.
But the storm passed by to the southward. Soon, however, the disappointed trekkers thrilled to more thunder, low and long, rolling far away, but coming. In due course that storm, too, passed by the forks, but closer, heavier, longer. Even the most pessimistic knew that these two storms were the forerunners of the belated rainy season. They rejoiced. Red Krehl’s piercing Comanche war whoop rang out to make the welkin ring. Larry tried to imitate it. From the aborigine encampment there came proof that even the blacks felt the saving promise of rain.
The day broke just the same. The sun rose just the same, fiery red, burning to molten steel. The birds and wildfowl, in flocks and flocks, came in to water. The slopes and flats were black with kangaroos and wallabies. Again the heat blazed down; again the infernal hordes of whirling, humming, biting, blood-sucking flies settled down around man and beast.
After breakfast Stanley Dann assembled all his trekkers, to the last one, to hear what Sterl anticipated was to be a startling address. The leader towered before them, his gold hair rumpled like the mane of a lion, his amber eyes shining with a wondrous light.
“Friends, countrymen, my brother, my daughter,” he boomed, “my prayers have been answered. The wet season is at hand. We are saved, and we lift up our voices in thanksgiving to Him, in whom we have never lost faith. When the rains cease, or when it has rained long enough to fill the rivers and creeks and lakes and water holes, we shall proceed on our trek. But with this change, we will go by the Gulf route, and on to Darwin, and from there to the Kimberleys. A year longer in my calculation! But that is better than to split up our party, our cattle, our strength, our harmony. Eric has traveled this Gulf route. We are off it now, but surely it is close to the Forks, and we can find it. Ormiston, you who have been even more stubborn than my brother in refusal to cross the Never Never, you can rejoice now that I have changed my mind, have waived my wishes, even my judgments, to keep the peace and join up all together, to trek on and ever on to victory.”
Sterl had fastened searching eyes upon Ormiston during this address, and he saw, perhaps, what was not visible to others, that not only was the truculent drover amazed, but secretly chagrined and perplexed. But that passion did not last. Ormiston quickly grasped, that vital as this decision was to the Danns, it meant nothing at all to Ormiston, so far as his plan was concerned. In any event he was not going on with them.
A loud hurrah from a half dozen lusty-throated drovers broke up t
he silence following Dann’s address. The leader waited, naturally, anticipating a response from Ormiston. But none came. The drover turned away his dark face and mingled with the others. Then Sterl averted his gaze in time to see Beryl drop her head as if stupefied, and make for her wagon. Eric Dann, however, received the news with a blank visage, then a gradual breaking expression which Sterl interpreted as extreme consternation. He, too, shouldered his way out of the circle, a man haunted by something.
Leslie, in the stress of the hour, forgetting the estrangement she had caused between herself and Sterl, met him with eyes darkly excited, to grasp his arm with the old familiar intimacy.
“Oh, Sterl! I’m glad…glad in a way. But I did want to cross the Never Never. Didn’t you?”
The answer that sprang to Sterl’s lips was both cruel and insulting, but somehow he could not hold back the words. “Yes,” he said caustically, “I sure hate the idea of having to spend a year longer in the society of two shallow, mindless girls like you and Beryl.”
Her face turned red, her eyes blazed with passion, and there was little doubt that but for Red’s intervention she would have struck him. As it was, she gave him a start and a shock not wholly unpleasant. She might have been a little fool—she certainly had responded unthinkingly to the vile camp gossip—but she had nerve and spirit, she was a fighter, and she was honest. These qualities Sterl respected. He went on his way, deeply disturbed by the encounter. Red caught up with him.
“Say, pard, the kid would have smacked the daylights out of you but for me,” he said.
“That didn’t escape me, Red.”
“Mad as hell. An’ I left her cryin’. That was a mean kind of speech you gave her, Sterl.”
“Agree with you,” Sterl snapped. Then after a pause: “Did you look at Beryl while her father was blowing up?”
“Shore. I knowed you’d have yore lamps on Ormiston. Beryl was surprised at their dads’ change of heart. We know thet she knows Ormiston ain’t goin’ no farther. But what struck me deepest was mebbe she’s not so true to them noble idees of bein’ true to her dad. Mebbe she’s been talked into elopin’ with Ormiston.”
“Ah, I had that thought, too. Red, I hoped I was wrong…doing Beryl an injustice. But how can a man think right in this hellish hole? It’s hard enough to live…to fight the things you don’t think about.”
“Wal, we not only have to think but figger pretty darn pronto.”
“It’s welcome. Anything for action. Red, Eric Dann was sunk at his brother’s decision. Sunk! That’s all I can call it.
“Hell you say?” ejaculated Red. “Now isn’t thet another sticker? He oughta be overjoyed. If he ain’t…why ain’t he?”
“Give me an easy one.”
“Paid, this feller Eric always struck me kinda phony. Aw, I don’t mean crooked. But he’s weak or somethin’, not even a shadow of his brother.”
“Red, what will Ormiston’s next move be?”
“I cain’t say. I ain’t givin’ a damn. He shore thinks he’s ridin’ high, wide, an’ handsome. But he’s ridin’ for a fall. Gosh, ain’t it hot again? Thet false alarm last night made us expect this…sun wouldn’t shine no more.”
“But the air feels different.”
Indeed, there was an infinitesimal humidity in the atmosphere that morning. But the sun and the dry, hot earth soon dispelled it. That day white clouds, like ships at sea, sailed over the ranges to the northeast. They were good to see. They seemed to soothe seared eyeballs. Before they crossed the zenith the heat had dissipated them. The sky took on a brassy hue. Trekkers suffered that day to exhaustion, because their hopes kept them out from under shelter.
Nevertheless, although night seemed never to come, that day ended. The sunset was ruddy, dusky, smoky. A sultry mantle covered the parched earth. The cattle lowed. There was an uneasy activity among the birds and kangaroos. Nature had a way of telling them what it was going to do. Friday talked to the old men among the aborigines, and he returned so uncommunicative, that Sterl dared not ask him questions. It could not be that there would be no rain. Madness surely would follow such failure.
Sterl wrote in Leslie’s journal by firelight. Red nudged him. In the gloaming Ormiston led, almost dragged, Beryl away from Dann’s campfire.
“Watch a while, pard. It won’t be long now,” said Red, getting up to glide off like an Indian on Ormiston’s trail.
Friday sat with his legs under him, smoking, wrapped in his prehistoric thought, his long spear standing high, resting on his shoulder. A murmur of Slyter’s conversation with his wife came to Sterl’s ears. Leslie hovered about the tiny fire, resentful at Beryl’s desertion. Out of the corner of his eye Sterl watched Leslie, and knew she would approach him. At last she did.
“Beryl has gone off with Ormiston,” she announced.
“So I observed,” rejoined Sterl.
“Red has followed them. What’s he going to do? Kill that blighter? I wish to God he would.”
Sterl did not deign to answer this outburst. But it reached a response deep within him. Leslie would break down sooner or later. She had to talk, to rid herself of suffocating thoughts, fears, hopes, griefs. Sterl felt sorry for her, but he did not soften outwardly.
“Eric Dann has got the willys, what ever Red means by them,” went on Leslie restlessly, edging closer.
“Yes? That’s interesting,” Sterl returned just a bit encouragingly.
“He acted queer. And he was drinking whiskey. In this heat!”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him. I smelled it. Sterl, the rains will come?” she asked imploringly.
“Friday says bimeby. Mebbe soon. Mebbe no.”
“I thought I’d die last night, hoping, waiting. But the storm went by. It’ll never rain. We’ll all dry up and blow away.”
Sterl allowed silence to intervene after this passionate speech. Leslie came closer, and suddenly, desperate, she sat down beside Sterl.
“You hateful, callous, unforgiving cowboy,” she whispered huskily.
“Leslie, how very unflattering,” he rejoined mildly.
She appeared tense, quivering, bursting with emotion. “I hate you!” she went on.
“That is only natural, Leslie. You are a headstrong child, wholly influenced by….”
“Headstrong, yes, but I’m no child. I’m not even a girl any more. I’m a woman. I’m old. I’ll be like these gins presently.”
“Very well, then, you’re old. What of it?”
“Oh, I don’t care. Nobody cares. You don’t. I…I wish I’d thrown myself away on Ormiston.”
“Yeah? Is it too late?”
“Don’t be a damned fool,” she flashed. “It’s bad enough for you to be a monster of indifference. A man of rock! I’m sick. I’m wild. I’m scared. I’m full of…of….”
“You must be full of tea, darling,” interposed Sterl lightly.
“Sterl Hazelton, don’t you dare call me that…that…when you’re making fun of me. I’m so miserable. And it’s not all about myself.”
“Who, then?”
“Beryl. She’s strange. She was lovely to me for a while. Now she’s changed. She’s sort of numb, thick. It’s that cad Ormiston’s fault. Sterl, you must do something, or she’ll go away with him.”
“What could I do?” Sterl asked wearily.
“You can kill the blighter! Dad should do that, but he won’t. Red ought to, but something holds him back.”
“Why should Dann or my friend Red kill Ormiston on Beryl’s account?” asked Sterl constrainedly.
“Because he’s got the best of her,” wailed the girl.
Sterl did not want to hear that ambiguous assertion made clear; he did not want to know any more; he did not want to think any further than the stand Beryl had taken that night by the river.
“Les, hadn’t you better go to bed?” he queried gently.
“Yes. I’m weak as a cat and wet as water. But, before I go, I want to tell you something I overheard Mum say to
Dad. It made me sick. They were talking. They didn’t know I was around. Mum said…‘I see Hazelton doesn’t go to the lubras any more.’ And Dad replied…‘I hadn’t noticed. But it’s none of your business, woman.’ Then Mum snapped out…‘Bingham Slyter, I didn’t hold it against Sterl. I’d do it myself, if I were a man! In this horrible hole, where God only knows what keeps us from going mad! The Danns rely on the bottle. You drink, too. But these cowboys don’t.’”
“Well, well!” ejaculated Sterl, taken aback and flustered. “Then what did your dad say?”
“He swore terribly at Mum.”
Sterl relaxed into the flimsy protection of silence. All these good people, and the hard-driven drovers, even Ormiston and his bush-rangers, might be forgiven for anything. It was a diabolical maëlstrom—this trek.
“That…distressed me…Sterl,” Leslie went on falteringly. “I’m as crazy as Mum, or any of them. I…I lied when I said I hated you. I worship you, Sterl Hazelton. It hurts me…that about you…and the lubras. But I forgive you. I…I don’t care. I’ll never think of it again. There! I’ve told you. Maybe I now can sleep.”
She ran off sobbing, leaving Sterl prey to somberer thoughts than ever. It was well, he reflected, that Leslie had fled. A kind word, a tender touch from him at that crucial moment would have fetched the distracted girl into his arms. Fortunately she had missed what surely he would have said and done. In the future he would not risk any contact like that again. There could never be anything between them. He could keep the secret that made him a man without a country.
Friday sat there, immobile and passive, his head bent, the dim red glow from the embers shining upon him. He had heard, undoubtedly. How much of Leslie’s poignant disclosure had he understood?
Sterl sat there a long time. The fire died down, and Friday crossed a couple of sticks over the ashes. Mosquitoes began to snarl around. Red returned, dragged his feet, his gait like that of a whipped cur. A furious flame of passion waved over Sterl. That this cowboy, as keen as flint, a man who had laughed and drawled in the very face of death—that he should crawl back to the firelight, ashamed and abased, crushed at the weakness or perfidy of a girl, was too revolting to withstand. Sterl leaped up, muttering: “I won’t endure it!” Then a deep low roll of thunder stilled his passion.
