by Zane Grey
“Yes, it does,” she replied solemnly, and ashamed. “But, Sue … he has kissed me!”
“Ora!” cried Sue, aghast.
“I … I couldn’t help it,” hastily added Ora, greatly troubled. “We were out under the cottonwoods, last night. He just grabbed me … He’s like a bear. I boxed his ears, but he just laughed. Then I ran off.”
“Ora, I’m surprised,” Sue returned, much concerned. “Chess is a boy … nice, you know, and maybe harmless. But Manerube is a man, and likely a Mormon who has power over women. I’ve heard of that. He is queer … sort of dominating. But I never felt he had any reverence for women. Ora, I think you had better keep away from him. At least don’t be alone with him.”
“Leave him all for you, I suppose?” Ora queried sarcastically. “I’ll play hob doing that.”
Sue steadily regarded the girl for a long moment. “Ora, I believe Chess was right … you are catty. Now stop coming to me with your confidences … about Manerube or anybody.” With that Sue turned her back and went to her tent, tingling with anger. She resolved to pay no more attention to Ora and to avoid Manerube.
This latter decision was not easy to uphold. Melberne’s outfit ate and talked and worked as one big family. The geniality of the leader was reflected in all his party. Moreover, Manerube had evidently struck Melberne with unusual favor. During the early hours, and especially at supper time and afterward, Sue could not keep out of Manerube’s way. He watched her across the spread tarpaulin around which they ate, and across the campfire, and when Sue slipped away to watch the sunset, Manerube followed her and stood by the log where she sat. He did not ask for privileges, as was Chess’ way.
“Ora says you told her to keep away from me,” he began quite pleasantly.
“Did she?” replied Sue.
“Yes. What made you say that?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I will. Say, is Ora Chess’ girl?”
“She was.”
“Humph! Well, Miss Melberne, I’m sorry you think I ought to be avoided. I can’t see that Ora ran away from me.” He laughed, not exactly with conceit, but certainly with a pleasing assurance. “Girls are different. I’ve been weeks alone riding the desert … lonely, hungry for the look and voice of a woman. Would you expect me to avoid one? Ora is full of fun. She’s like a kitten. She’ll purr and scratch. And if I’m fond of being with her, teasing her, how do you think I feel about being with you?”
“I never thought about it,” replied Sue shortly.
“All right. Think of it now. I’m settled in this horse deal with your father and am likely to go in the ranch business with him later. We’re talking of it. So you’re going to see a good deal of me. And I tell you it’s a different thing from seeing Ora. You’re a woman, a beautiful young woman. If you’d rather I stopped tormenting you, trying to make you like me … I’ll do it. But then I’ll get serious and when I’m serious I’m dangerous.”
“Mister Manerube, you seem to take a good deal for granted … about yourself,” retorted Sue.
Manerube was not to be offended, rebuffed, or alienated. Sue let him talk and she listened. He grew rather more forceful in his arguments and statements, and as he waxed more eloquent and personal, he drew closer to Sue until he sat beside her. His proximity seemed more compelling than his speech. Sue felt that. She knew she was level-headed and had contempt for this man’s estimate of himself. The more he talked the less she liked him, yet she was conscious of some singular attraction about him. When at last the sun sank and the purple shadows of twilight fell like a mantle over the valley, Sue decided it was time to return to camp. So she slipped down off the big log.
“It’s chilly. I’m going back to camp,” she said.
Manerube grasped her hand and tried to draw her closer. It took no small effort on Sue’s part to get away from him.
“Keep your hands off me,” she said with a heat she could not restrain. “Didn’t I tell you before?”
“Sue, I reckon I’m in love with you,” he replied.
Without replying, Sue fled and went to her tent. She was furious. Her cheeks were hot. She felt them with her cool hands. Not until she was snug and cozy under her blankets did she find composure. Then she thought out her estimate of Manerube. He might have had some education, some advantages beyond those of a range rider, but he was not a gentleman. Sue intuitively grasped that Manerube was not influenced in the least by her objection to being courted. He was not a man to care what a woman thought or said or did. He had no sense of shame, or perhaps of honor. He would work his will with a woman one way or another.
But as for his effect upon her—that was a matter very much more difficult of analysis. Sue was honest, most of all with herself. She had an honesty of soul and she was not afraid to tell herself what she found out. In this case she seemed baffled. If Manerube did not cease his importunities she was going to hate him, that much was certain, but it did not imply she did not feel some strange power in him. And she pondered over that. It could not be because he was a big bold-looking rider and handsome. She acknowledged that he was that, though she preferred dark men. There must be something that came to her in his presence that thrilled her, yet did not belong to him. Being masculine, virile, strong, he must represent something to her. Then she happened to think of Chess and the singular emotion his simple avowal of love had stirred in her heart. Strange to recall, Manerube’s had likewise quickened her pulse, though she scorned it. This vague power, then, had to do with love. Before that word love she trembled like a guilty creature surprised. It was an open sesame. Any man, did he choose to employ it, could make a woman’s heart quiver, if she happened to be in Sue’s peculiar state of unrest, of longing, of fancy freedom.
Next morning Sue was awakened by her father’s cheery call.
“Up with you, lass, if you’re goin’ to be a wild horse wrangler.”
Sue sat up in bed with a start. It was dark and the air felt cold. “But, Dad … it’s still night,” complained Sue reluctantly.
“Fine mawnin’, Sue,” he replied. “Heah’s breakfast ready. Crawl out. We’re shore goin’ to chase wild mules.”
“Mules? Oh, I forgot,” Sue said with a reviving thrill. “All right, Dad. I’m a-rarin’ to go.”
Sue got up, not without feminine qualms and shivers, despite her enthusiasm, and nimbly put on her riding clothes and boots in the dark. Then she rushed out to get to the fire. Her hands were tingling with the cold. Hot water was a boon that morning. She brushed her hair by the light of the blaze, and quickly braided the long mass. Manerube, at her elbow, disconcerted her with a remark that she should be more careful of such beautiful hair.
“If I have to ride any more through the brush, I’ll cut it short,” retorted Sue.
“Shore you will not,” replied her father. “Not until you get some boss besides your dad.”
Sue ate her breakfast in a wonderful dark morning twilight. In the east, low over the black waving range, hung the morning star, radiant, blue-white, blinking, a beacon that heralded the dawn. A grayness was imperceptibly stealing over the sky. The other stars looked pale, spectral. Down in the valley the shadows seemed lifting, changing, drifting.
The horses were in, and stamping the ground or champing their bits. When the riders, spurred and chapped, came trooping to the campfire, Melberne called out, “Wal, we’re off! Jim, shore somebody has to stay in camp with the women.”
“I reckon so. But we’re short of riders now, Manerube says,” replied his partner.
“Bonny, you an’ Captain Bunk toss up for who goes an’ who stays heah.”
“I’ll stay, boss,” spoke up Tway Miller with astounding fluency.
“Say, Miller, is this heah stutterin’ of your’n all put on?” demanded Utah. “Playin’ to the porch, huh?”
“’T-t-t-t-t-ta-ta-tain’t so!” retorted Miller hotly, al
l of a sudden victim to his weakness.
“Aw, now yore naturool ag’in,” Utah replied dryly.
Bonny won the choice of the toss and graciously waived it in Captain Bunk’s favor, who manifestly was eager to ride out on the mule chase.
“Shure you can go, Cap,” he said. “I was kicked by a mule once.”
“Thanks, mate. I’ll take my chances navigatin’ mules,” replied Bunk animatedly.
Sue rode beside her father out into the crisp frosty morning. Once beyond the fire she realized how really cold it was. Yet how exhilarating! They rode at a brisk trot, with backs to the lightening east, toward the long wandering dim line of the western wall of the valley. Utah and Alonzo were in the lead; Manerube rode on the other side of her father; Loughbridge with Ora and the two remaining riders brought up the rear.
The exercise soon sent the warm blood dancing all over Sue. How wonderful it was to ride out on an autumn morning like this. The wild quest would not wholly be resisted. She did not want to see a mule hurt any more than another creature, but the adventure appealed to her. Utah and Alonzo rode there ahead, lithe, erect, yet easy, somehow as wild and picturesque as their calling. Then as the morning grayness brightened to full daylight, Sue looked to the horizon line with a swelling heart. It was something original, big, splendid to ride along and gaze at the purple changing to rose, to feel the loneliness and solitude of that vast land. She realized how subtly and surely the charm of this wilderness had enfolded her. Yet she struggled against that which implied surrender.
Jack rabbits and coyotes trotted before the band of riders. A gray wolf, wonderful to see, watched them from a ridge top. Wild horses kept moving away continually, not allowing near approach. They would stand like statues, erect, sharply defined, resembling the wolf in their wildness, and then they would race down the valley, swift as the wind, presently to halt and look again.
Sue heard Manerube propounding with great vehemence his plan for capturing a thousand wild horses, all at one drive. She felt her father’s intense interest, and somehow it filled her with sorrow.
Wild Horse Mesa caught Sue’s eye and held it. Far away, yet how clear-cut and lofty, an endless black-fringed rosy-walled tableland, rising out of purple chaos! It did not seem real. It reached the soft, creamy, fleecy canopy of cloud that was turning pink. Then the sun burst over the obstructing range. All that rolling valley and waving rock line changed so suddenly and wondrously as to bewilder the vision. Wild Horse Mesa became a horizon of fire.
Presently Alonzo and Utah led off the valley slope into the mouth of a cañon, wide, low, gray saged, and ribbed with outcroppings of ledges. No water showed in the sandy stream bed. As they rode up the level meadow-like cañon floor the walls gradually grew more rugged, and the breaks fewer. Thickets of oak with gold and russet leaves livened the gray. Deer bounded up the slopes; birds flew in flocks from the acorn copses.
After several miles of travel mostly over even and a scarcely perceptible rising ground the cañon walls came together, forming a narrow gate. These rugged walls did not rise far without a breaking and falling back to ragged and crumbling steps.
This rock-walled lane opened into a long oval valley, sloping gently on each side up to rugged rims, colorful with the dark green of cedars and a few straggling pines. The notches at the heads of the ravines were choked with oak thickets, lending an autumn touch of gold to the scene.
Straight ahead, however, the valley changed, showing lines of cottonwoods along a rock-strewn brook, and a number of remarkable ridges that ran up toward the head of the cañon like the ribs of a fan. It was a big country, this oval boxed end of the cañon, and beautiful enough to bring loud acclaim from Melberne.
“Shore this heah’s a place for a ranch!” he ejaculated, slapping his leg. “What do you say, Jim?”
“If we don’t find better, we’ll homestead here,” declared Loughbridge with enthusiasm.
“Pretty enough. Good water and grass,” agreed Manerube. “But it’s nothing to some of the box heads of cañons west.”
Sue was asked for her opinion, which she did not give in words. She just gazed as if spellbound. Manerube saw her rapt attention and asked her if she could be happy living there in a log cabin. The half-curious, half-ironic query gave Sue a remarkable thrill. It was one of deep emotion and it seemed to fling at her mind the truth that she could live happily in such a place—with the man of her dreams.
“Wal, boss,” said Utah, “you all wait an’ I’ll ride up a ways an’ see if the mules are here yet.”
While Sue sat her horse, looking to all points of this shut-in park, her father and the other men discussed animatedly the wonderful natural trap this cañon afforded. Manerube rather dominated the council. Presently Utah rode back to the group.
“They’re shore here,” he said. “Seen mebbe a hundred. An’ ’pears to me the boss of the bunch is a gray old cuss thet’s been branded. I didn’t see him the other day. Shore he wasn’t born wild. An old mule who has run away makes the wildest kind of a beast. He’ll take a lot of ketchin’.”
Manerube, with the common consent of Melberne and Loughbridge, began enlarging upon plans for the drive. Utah, who had found the band of mules and manifestly had plans of his own, did not take kindly to being disregarded by a stranger. But Manerube was indifferent to Utah’s suggestions. He ordered cedars cut and dragged to block the far end of the narrow defile through which the party had entered the park.
“We’ll trap the whole bunch,” he concluded with great gusto.
“A-huh! Mebbe we will,” declared Utah sourly, and the look he gave Manerube was expressive. Tway Miller rode off with Utah and his stuttering speech floated back.
“W-w-w-w-why in t-t-t-the h-h-h-hell didn’t you kick? These are y-y-y-yore mules.”
Manerube at last turned to the girls. “You can help without hard riding,” he said. “When we get ready to drive the cañon, you ride up on top of that first ridge. Watch the mules, and when they run into the trap here, wave your scarfs, so we can all see.”
“I thought I was to chase mules,” Ora pouted with a reproachful look at Manerube.
“Chase them all you like when they run down this way,” replied Manerube.
The men then set to work cutting and dragging cedars. Sue dismounted and let her horse graze, while she sat under a cottonwood. Ora very manifestly avoided her. As always when resting or waiting, Sue passed the time in dreams. And those several hours were short.
It occurred to Sue that it was not necessary for Manerube to escort her and Ora to the station he had assigned them on the ridge, but he did so, giving his attention solely to Ora. This brought Ora out of her sulky mood, and, if the truth had been known, pleased Sue as well. She scorned an incipient idea that she had begun to be afraid of this man.
From the ridge top Sue saw the band of mules perhaps a quarter of a mile up the cañon and now below her position. They were out in the open. Some of them were grazing, but most were facing down the cañon, as stiff and erect as any wild horses. Several white ones showed conspicuously. There were also some tans. Most of them were brown. They looked shaggier than any mules Sue had seen before. Finally her glance fell upon the one gray mule in the band. He was large and there was something distinctive about him. Presently the riders appeared below, rounding the corners of the ridge. The big gray mule was the first to move. He headed up the cañon and his band fell in behind him. They were soon out of sight.
At the head of the grassy park the horsemen separated into pairs and rode on, spreading out, until they too disappeared around slopes and into the brushy thickets. That end of the cañon formed a kind of amphitheater with the ridges wide apart at the base and sloping up toward the wall, growing closer as they ascended. The ravines between these ridges were green and gold with oak thickets; the ridges were treeless, some gray with sage, some touched with patches of green grass, some yellow with exposed
earth.
Sue was thrilled to see the mules, led by the gray chief, appear in a compact band on the center ridge and move quite swiftly up toward the wall. Puffs of dust rose and, forming clouds like yellow smoke, blew away on the wind. This ridge was long, still Sue could see the mules plainly. By the time they had reached the base of the wall four of Melberne’s riders were climbing. The old gray mule watched them, with his band huddled behind him. There seemed something incongruous about this watching-and-waiting process. These mules did not appear wild.
Presently the gray leader wheeled away, to trot along the base of the wall. His band followed. They passed the heads of several of the ridges, until they came to the last rib of the fan-shaped slope. Here they halted.
Meanwhile, two other riders appeared climbing another ridge. Sue recognized Manerube and Loughbridge. One of them yelled. At this signal Melberne and his men broke into a gallop along the base of the wall in the direction of the mules. Sue began to get excited.
“Ora! Look!” she cried to her companion, some paces distant. “These horse hunters of ours won’t have such a picnic as Mister Manerube thought.”
The girl responded with the glare of one whose idol had been insulted.
Then the gray mule tore down the far slope, with his band at his heels. They were lost in clouds of dust. Both groups of riders rode down their particular ridges. Evidently the descent was rather steep. Utah was the only one who maintained a gallop. Both riders and mules disappeared, but the trampling of their hoofs proved they were still moving.
In a few moments Sue saw the band of mules appear from behind the far slope on her side of the cañon. They were running. Sue thought they would come down the valley. But the wary old leader never even headed down that way; he ran across the wide part of the park and took to another slope.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” Sue declared in delight.
“Don’t you want them to catch the mules?” snapped Ora.
“I sure don’t. Do you?”
Ora did not deign to reply to that.
