by Zane Grey
Friday ate his meat, standing, while he watched the sky. Presently he strode out to where he could have an unobstructed view. Upon his return he informed Sterl the rain would come soon. Slyter, and all at his camp, heard the good news, and liberated their taut apprehensions in various kinds and degrees of unprecedented rejoicings. One of Slyter’s manifestations was to run across the way to tell the Danns. Red whooped and hobbled after him, evidently to inform Beryl that the rains were coming.
“I’m going to ride guard tonight,” Leslie announced brightly, approaching Sterl.
Her face showed the havoc of these torrid weeks less than that of anyone, Sterl had observed, but that was enough to give him a pang.
“Yeah. You look like it,” he rejoined dubiously.
“How do I look,” she retorted hastily.
“Terrible.”
“So do you. So does Red. I saw Beryl a minute ago. Oh, if I took terrible, you should see her…. What do you mean by terrible?” She was apprehensive and startled, if not actually over her looks, then because of Sterl’s aspersion.
“Eyes hollow, blue veins at your temples, lines you didn’t used to have.”
“Oh, Sterl! I hate my mirror, because it says just that. Am I pretty no longer?”
“You couldn’t help being pretty, Leslie. You have grace, line, contour, color, spirit that you can’t lose while you’re young, if ever,” replied Sterl, yielding as always to the appeal which destroyed his relentlessness.
Grateful and happy again, she glanced around. “Too many people,” she said, significantly. “Then I’m not to ride guard with you tonight?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“But you’re my boss.”
“Long ago, Leslie, when we were full of fun and dreams and sentiment, before this trek had made me old and you a little savage…then I might have called myself your boss. But no more.”
“What if I am a little savage?” she asked wistfully. There was wisdom in her query. If nature had made her that, it was to enable her to endure. Sterl did not want her in the least different. She shamed him with the truth that was not in him.
Red and Slyter returned from the Dann camp, and Slyter said: “Saddle up, all hands. Stanley wants the mob driven into that basin out there, and surrounded.”
Sterl went on with Red. They gathered up bridles, saddles, and blankets, and, thus burdened, made for the open. Friday appeared to relieve Sterl of his saddle. The afterglow of sunset shone over the land. The vast mass of merging clouds shut out the northeast. The two seemed to be in conflict.
“I seen Beryl,” Red was saying, his voice deep with pain. “She lay on her bed where the canvas had been rolled up. When I called, she didn’t answer. I stepped up on the hub an’ then on the wheel, so I could look down on her. My Gawd, if I only knowed what made her look like that! This orful day, I reckon. I hope…. I spoke, an’ she whispered ‘Red,’ with a heartbreakin’ ghost of a smile. But it was her eyes thet got me, as she whispered more. ‘Bury me on…the lone prairie….’ You know, I used to sing thet to her…before Ormiston. Sterl, could Beryl Dann look at me like thet, smile like thet, say thet to me, if she meant to run off with this black-faced rustler?”
“Red, give me something easy,” replied Sterl grimly. “Back home, or back in Downsville, I’d swear to God she couldn’t. But out here, after what we’ve gone through, I say, hell yes, she could. Take your pick.”
“Pard, my faith dies hard. An’ thet’s because I’ve a love that cain’t die. If you was me, would you watch Beryl’s wagon tonight, instead of guardin’ herd?”
“No! Red, you might kill Ormiston, and kill him too soon. Let these Danns find out what we know. Then you can break loose, an’ I’ll be with you. Man alive, she can’t get away…Ormiston can’t get away…not with her or his stolen cattle or his life. If he took Beryl on horse back, we’d run him down and kill him in a day. Red, old man, come to your senses!”
“Thanks, pard. Reckon I…I was kinda queer. Mebbe the heat…. Heah’s the hosses.”
“What’ll you ride?” asked Sterl, as he looked the remuda over. The horses were fat, lazy, tame. King whinnied and thudded toward him.
“Leslie’s Duke. He’s a big water-dog. An’ mebbe there’ll be a flood. Them clouds all same Red River color, pard.”
Sterl threw his bridle over King’s neck. “Well, King, I’ve never forked you in thunder and lightning with a stampede on. But I’ll gamble you’ll be as good as you look.”
Mounted, the cowboys headed for the grassy basin already half covered with cattle. From the riverbanks strings of the big mob wagged in to the call of the drovers. Sterl made out Stanley Dann on his white charger. Slyter came pounding along to join the cowboys, and he expressed anxiety for his horses. Red said he was sure they would stand, unless run down by a frightened mob. The peril lay with the cattle. But the drover claimed that after these torrid weeks it would take the eruption of a volcano to start the mob. Already many of the cattle were lying down. The calves were bawling. The usual crowding was not manifest.
The afterglow still lingered when the mob had been pressed into the shallow basin half a mile back from the river. A wide swath of bare ground led into it from the river, where during former floods the water had overflowed into this depression. It had already been grazed over, but there was still plenty of grass, bleached white during the hot spell.
Stanley Dann rode around the mob, hauling up last where Sterl and Red had been joined by Larry and Roland. “Station yourselves at regular intervals. Concentrate on the river and camp sides,” said Dann. “Probably the mob won’t rush. If they do, keep out of their way. They won’t run far, and we can drove them back. From the looks of it, we are in for a rip-roarer of a storm.”
“She can’t rip and roar too hard for us, Mister Dann,” asserted Larry, as the leader wished them luck and rode away.
“Boys,” went on Larry, “Rollie and I will hold down this corner. You take your stand farther toward camp. Don’t expect to see anything after this storm bursts. Keep up the slope a little way.”
“Wal, if you cain’t see a-tall, what the hell’s the use of us guardin’?” asked Red caustically.
“Rollie and I say there isn’t any sense in it at all. But that’s orders, and we’ll do our best,” returned Larry. Then he and his partner turned away, while Red and Sterl rode back as they had been directed.
“Let’s stick pretty close together,” suggested Sterl.
“You cain’t lose me, pard. I jest wonder what’n’ll’s comin’ off. Look at them clouds! An’ the sky over heah! There ain’t no such things.”
“Still hot as blazes, Red, but somehow not the same,” rejoined Sterl. “The air’s stirring. Smells dusty.”
“Pard, them high clouds air comin’ faster. But it’s them low clouds thet holds the storm. God, but they’re black.”
The last of the afterglow of sunset brightened to flood the landscape with a dusky, ruddy gold. In the west a broad belt of sky remained clear, losing its golden effulgence. The wild ranges stood up stark and ragged, silhouetted in ebony. Down the river, a lane of shining water, between its borders of trees, shimmered to show the flight of waterfowl, winging away toward where the sun had set. Stormward, however, the scene was majestic and awe inspiring in the extreme. The columnar towers of clouds had joined only at their lower half, an inky blank space, horizon wide, which lighted up every second with fitful flashes. On the summits of the clouds the pearly white had turned to sinister red. Then the first deep, detonating rumble of thunder rolled toward the waiting drovers. The tired, heat-dulled cattle gave no sign of uneasiness.
“Bet you they won’t stampede,” called Red, some yards to Sterl’s right.
“They’re English cattle. They cain’t be scared, maybe,” Sterl returned jocularly.
Thunder boomed over the battlements of the ranges north and east. Flashes of lightning flared from behind these mountains. The first breath of moving air struck Sterl in the face, hot like th
e breath of fire, and laden with dry scents of the desert. It came in by puffs. It strengthened. Sterl coughed and strangled against its impact. A shining, darkening wave rippled across the grass, and the lacy foliage of the eucalyptus trees began to toss against a sky still clear. The front of it had rolled over the ranges. Zigzag ropes of lightning shot down at wide distances and minute intervals.
“Whoopee!” yelled Red. “She’s a-comin’ an’ a humdinger!”
The onslaught of this storm—end of the long dry spell had a thundering vastness and weird magnificence that fitted the boundlessness of the country. It had been brewing for months. It meant to make amends for the devastation of the sun. It came rolling on like an avalanche. Sterl conceived the impression that this storm had started on the Gulf or even the distant coast, and gathered volume and momentum as it fed its furnace with the fuel of torrid air over the grassy barrens.
When the hot gale struck Sterl, he turned his back and felt that he was shriveling up like leather in a flame. The gum trees bent away from its force; streaks of dusty light sped along the ground; the afterglow faded into a gloaming that was a moving curtain before the wind. Dusk mantled the scene. Leaves and grass and bits of bark whipped by Sterl, and King’s mane and tail stood straight out. Behind Sterl the thunderbolts grew sharper, and flashes of lightning illumined the dusk.
Night still held aloof, with fading light in the west. Against that western sky the tossing treetops resembled specters dancing through the air. A ghastly unreal phantasmagoria of shadows and gleams preceded the storm, racing on a gale too hot to face. Sterl listened for the cattle to rush. King did not like this thing, and had to be held with an iron hand. That freakish, flitting dance of shadows along the grass, now on fire with lightning and again blacker than the dusk, worked upon Sterl with its unreality. Strange country, forbidding and inhospitable—strange visitation of blasting sun—strange storm that threatened destruction with its salvation.
All at once Sterl’s senses awakened to a startling fact. The hot furnace blast had gone on the wind. The acrid, dusty, sulphuric smell was lessening its strangling grip. The air was cool, damp! He cried aloud to the darkening skies his gladness that the heat which had nearly driven him mad was gone.
Then Sterl faced the storm, exultant. Red sat his horse close by, a dark figure, bent forward and to one side, as if listening, and he held a hand aloft. His wild yell came splitting Sterl’s ear. And with it pierced a roar, steady, gaining, tremendous—the roar of rain.
The cattle were huddled in one vast mob, densely packed, now dark, now gleaming, according to the flashes of lightning. Dusk had given place tonight. Peering into the wind, Sterl could make out the closer half of the mob, when a broad flare illumined the sky. Beyond, the rest was black.
But above the ground and the mob, Sterl’s keen eyes made out the storm almost upon them, a colossal octopus of black arms and black body, huge as the north, alternately revealed by the dazzling, blue-white streaks of lightning, and hidden by the blank contrast, and rendered appalling by the jarring thunder of the storm gods and the deafening roar of the rain.
The pall bore down upon them, steel-gray in the blazes of white fire, a wall of rain like an engulfing sea, to swallow up earth and night and lightning and thunder. Sterl felt that he would drown, sitting astride his horse. He could not see a hand before his face. But how he reveled in that drenching—how King stood there with bowed head and minded not the deluge!
It swallowed up time, too, and he almost forgot the great mob of cattle. But to think of them was futile. Red, his comrade, an arm’s length away, was as invisible as if he had been leagues distant. Sterl shut his eyes, bent his head, and thanked heaven for every drop of that endless torrent. The rains had come; Stanley Dann’s faith and prayers were justified; the trek was saved; long leagues of grassy plains and filled creeks and water holes awaited them for months ahead. It was something to have suffered, this arid and terrible spell of heat, and to have lived through it. The stupendousness of the deluge did not frighten Sterl—almost he would have welcomed the great deluge.
That rapt enchantment made the moments or hours as naught for Sterl Hazelton. He was wrapped in thoughts and feelings that did not record time. But a rough hand on his shoulder roused him instantly. He opened his eyes. The lightning flashes were far in the west, and the thunder rolled with them. The rain was pouring down, but not in a solid sheet. He could see indistinctly.
“Pard!” yelled Red close to his ear. “Cattle Stampede! Feel the ground shakin’?”
Chapter Eighteen
King’s nervous stepping turned out to be caused by a vibration of the ground under his hoofs. Above the roar of the rain swelled the trample of cattle running.
“Stampede shore. Jest started,” shouted Red. “Let’s find the break. You ride. I’ll ride ahaid, meet heah, if we can make it.”
Turned away from the pelting rain, Sterl could see a little better, enough, at least, to locate the darker line of cattle against the white grass. Riding closer, he failed to make out any action. They were not moving on this side. He checked King to listen again. There was a decided roar of hoofs, but it was lessening in volume. He failed to detect further vibration of the ground.
These facts allayed the strain and excitation under which he labored. He walked King farther on. Perhaps a spur of cattle had broken out of the main mob. But in a lull of the heavy downpour, he caught a trampling roar again. Gunshots. They were muffled, dull, just audible. Turning to peer back, he saw dim flashes away across the herd. Dann’s drovers on that side were trying to hold the mob and prevent a rush. Presently Sterl made out the dark shape of a horseman. Riding close, he shouted and got an answer. This rider was Roland.
“Rush on over there, but they’re quiet here,” yelled the drover. “They’ll hold now. If they were going to rush, it’s strange they didn’t when the storm was fierce.”
“Strange at that,” replied Sterl. “Where’s your next guard?”
“Not far along. Drake. He rode up here, got my report, and told me Slyter was fussing about his horses.”
“Small wonder. I’ll ride back to Red.”
The wind and rain came in violent gusts, during which Sterl could not hear anything else. He saw dim flashes from guns either farther away or obscured by the rain. Sound of reports did not reach him. Wet to the skin, Sterl had not felt so cool and comfortable at any other time on this trek. The rain poured down with intermittent heavier bursts. He had sent Friday back to the camp before the break of the storm, which fact he recalled when he was unable to locate the black. And he did not feel sure just where he and Red had parted. He halted in a couple of places, and on the last stop he found the cattle jostling and pressing one another. To his dismay the roar seemed to have grown louder. In the gray gloom the mob moved and swayed as if from irresisitible pressure from its center.
Sterl trotted King a hundred yards farther around that corner of the herd. Two riders emerged from the impenetrable black.
“Heah you air,” shouted Red, as the three met.
“All jake down the line on this side, according to Rollie and Drake,” replied Sterl.
“Wal, it shore ain’t ’round on the other. Tell him, Larry.”
Larry leaned to Sterl and told him that before the storm broke there was a line of guards, Dann’s drovers, spread beyond his point all the way around the herd on that side and that on his last ride that way, before he met Red, these drovers were all gone.
“Gone?” echoed Sterl. “They must have worked around. Cattle busted out somewhere. We heard them.”
“Cattle rarin’ to slope around there,” interposed Red. “It ain’t safe, but we might stop a stampede.”
“Where’s Cedric?”
“He was number six or seven beyond me,” rejoined Larry. “The mob is unguarded from his post to mine.”
“But those guards will be back unless….”
Red interrupted: “Like hell they will! Pard, we had it figgered. Some of them dro
vers, in cahoots with Ormiston, have cut out a bunch of cattle. It wasn’t no stampede. But I reckon they hoped to start one. An’ there will be yet, if we don’t stop it. Let’s mosey.”
The three riders loped their mounts through the driving rain and lashing grass for perhaps a quarter of a mile around the curving line of cattle.
“Ride up an’ down heah,” shouted Red, pointing to the surging mob. “Blaze away with yore guns. Mebbe we can hold ’em. But if there’s a break anywhere, run for yore lives.”
They separated. Sterl rode back along the way they had come. Close to the herd he made out their unrest, and he heard the bawling. At intervals he fired his gun. Turning back, he would retrace his steps until he met either of his two comrades. Along Sterl’s line of progress the restive cattle finally settled down and stood. But soon he found that in the other direction Red and Larry were encountering extreme difficulty in preventing a break. A bulge of cattle was crowding out. Sterl joined the boys at the crucial point, and for a few moments it seemed vain to attempt blocking the cattle. But the intrepid riders, with a gun in each hand, spouting fire, stubbornly contested the charge, and at the expense of great risk, and practically all their ammunition, they finally held the animals in check. Then it was a matter of taking advantage of the good work by persistent riding to prevent a new charge. At last the excited fringe of the mob on this side quieted down.
“Jest luck an’ you…cain’t beat it,” panted Red, as the three reined in together.
“I’d call it some work, too,” averred Sterl.
“Boys,” said Larry, “I’ll tell the Danns who saved their mob. New work to me, and my heart was in my throat half the time. Where are those drovers?”
“Haw! Haw! Yes, shore, where in the hell air they. Heah! Listen…. What’s thet roar?”
