by Zane Grey
Sue felt all these, deeply, poignantly, but beyond them, inexplicable and vague, was the spiritual thing Panguitch typified. She endowed him with soul. She had gazed at him, recognizing in him something within herself.
Panguitch came out on top of the rim, sharply silhouetted against the blue sky, and stood a moment looking down, with his long mane and tail streaming in the wind. The lilac haze lent him unreality, but the uplift of his head gave him life. Wild and grand he seemed to Sue, fitting that last stand of wild horses. He moved against the sky; he was gone.
“Oh, Panguitch, stay up there always!” called Sue.
Chane smiled upon her. “Sweetheart, I’d stake my life he’ll never feel another rope.”
“We alone know his trail to the heights. And we never will tell?”
“Never, Sue.”
“You will not show Dad how to get on top of Wild Horse Mesa?” she begged. “So he could run sheep and cattle up there?”
“I promise, Sue. Why, do you imagine I could ever become that much of a rancher? It may be long before another rider, or an Indian, happens on this secret. Maybe never. Some distant day airships might land on Wild Horse Mesa. But what if they do? An hour of curiosity, an achievement to boast of … then gone! Wild Horse Mesa rises even above this world of rock. It was meant for eagles, wild horses … and for lonely souls like mine.”
Slowly the transformation of sunset worked its miracles of evanescent change and exquisite color. Gold and silver fire faded, died away. The sun sank below the verge. Then from out of the depths where it had gone rose the afterglow, deepening the lilac haze to purple.
“Chane, you have made Wild Horse Mesa yours,” said Sue. “Millions of men can never take it from you. As for me … Panguitch seems mine. He’s like my heart or something in my blood.”
“Yes, I think I understand you,” he replied dreamily. “We must labor … we must live as people have lived before. But these thoughts are beautiful … You are Panguitch and I am Wild Horse Mesa.”
THE END
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 a hundred and nine 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 rereading 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.
