Cabin Gulch

by Zane Grey

  “If it isn’t Jim Cleve!” cried another.

  Jim jumped off and hugged the first speaker. She seemed overjoyed to see him, and then overcome. Her face began to work. “Jim! We always hoped you’d . . . you’d fetch Joan back!”

  “Sure!” shouted Jim, who had no heart now for even an instant’s deception. “There she is!”

  “Who? What?”

  Joan slipped out of her saddle, and, tearing off the mask, she leaped forward with a little sob. “Auntie! Auntie! . . . It’s Joan . . . alive . . . well! Oh, so glad to be home! Don’t look at my clothes . . . look at me!”

  Aunt Jane evidently sustained a shock of recognition, joy, amaze, consternation, and shame, of which all were subservient to the joy. She cried over Joan and murmured over her. Then suddenly alive to the curious and growing crowd she put Joan from her.

  “You . . . you wild thing! You desperado! I always told Bill you’d run wild someday! March in the house and get out of that indecent rig!”

  That night under the spruces with the starlight piercing the lacy shadows Joan waited for Jim Cleve. It was one of the white silent mountain nights. The brook murmured over the stones and the wind rustled the branches.

  The wonder of Joan’s homecoming was in learning that Bill Hoadley was indeed Overland, the discoverer of Alder Creek. Years and years of profitless toil had at last been rewarded in this rich gold strike. Joan hated to think of gold. She had wanted to leave the gold back in Cabin Gulch, and she would have done so had Jim permitted it. And to think all that gold that was not Jim Cleve’s belonged to her uncle! She could not believe it.

  Fatal and terrible forever to Joan would be the significance of gold. Did any woman in the world or any man know the meaning of gold as well as she knew it? How strange and enlightening and terrible had been her experience! She had grown now not to blame any man, honest miner or bloody bandit. She blamed only gold. She doubted its value. She could not see it a blessing. She absolutely knew its driving power to change the souls of men. Could she ever forget that vast ant hill of toiling diggers and washes, blind and deaf and dumb to all save gold? Always limned in figures of fire against the black memory would be the forms of these wild and violent bandits—Gulden, the monster, the gorilla, the cannibal. Horrible as was the memory of him, there was no horror in the thought of his terrible death. That seemed to be the one memory that did not hurt.

  But Kells was indestructible—he lived in her mind. Safe out of the border now and at home she could look back clearly. Still all was not clear and never would be. She saw Kells the ruthless bandit, the organizer, the planner, and the blood-spiller. He might have no place in a good woman’s memory. Yet he had. She never condoned one of his deeds or even his intentions. She knew her intelligence was not broad enough to grasp the vastness of his guilt. She believed he must have been the worst and most terrible character on that wild border. That border had developed him. It had produced the time and the place and the man. And therein lay the mystery. For against this bandit’s weakness and evil she could contrast strength and nobility. She alone had known the real man in all the strange phases of his nature. And the darkness of his crimes faded out of her mind. She suffered remorse—almost regret. Yet what could she have done? There had been no help for that impossible situation as there was now no help for her in a right and just placing of Kells among men. He had stolen her—wantonly murdering for the sake of lonely fruitless hours with her; he had loved her—and he had changed; he had gambled away her soul and life—a last and terrible proof of the evil power of gold, and in the end he had saved her—he had gone with his white, radiant coolness, with his strange pale eyes and his amiable, mocking smile, and all the ruthless force of his life had expended itself in one last magnificent stand. If only he had known her at the end—when she lifted his head. But, no—there had been only the fading light—the strange weird look of a retreating soul, already alone forever.

  A rustling of leaves, a step thrilled Joan out of her meditation. Suddenly she was seized from behind, and Jim Cleve showed that, although he might be a joyous and grateful lover, he certainly would never be an actor. For if he intended to live over again that fatal meeting and quarrel that had sent them out on the border, he failed utterly in his part. There was possession in the gentle grasp of his arms. And bliss in the trembling of his lips.

  “Jim, you never did it that way.” Joan laughed. “If you had . . . do you think I could ever have been furious?”

  Jim, in turn, laughed happily. “Joan, that’s exactly the way I stole upon you and mauled you!”

  “You think so? Well, I happen to remember. Now you sit here and make believe you are Joan. And let me be Jim Cleve! I’ll show you!”

  Joan stole away in the darkness, and noiselessly as a shadow she stole back—to enact that violent scene as it lived in her memory.

  Jim was breathless, speechless, choked.

  “That’s how you treated me,” she said.

  “I . . . I don’t believe I could have . . . been such a . . . a bear!” panted Jim.

  “But you were. And consider. I’ve not half your strength!”

  “Then all I can say is . . . you did right to drive me off. Only you should never have trailed me to the border.”

  “Ah, but Jim, in my fury, I discovered my love.”

  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 psychodramas 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.