Tonto Basin, page 11
Ellen could only say good bye and the word was so low as to be almost inaudible. She ran to her burro. She could not see very clearly through tear-blurred eyes and her shaking fingers were all thumbs. It seemed she had to rush away … somehow … anywhere, not to get away from kind old John Sprague but from herself … this palpitating, bursting self whose feet stumbled down the trail. All … all seemed ended for her. That interminable story! It had taken hours. And every minute of it she had been helplessly torn asunder by feelings she had never known she possessed. This Ellen Jorth was an unknown creature. She sobbed now as she dragged the burro down the cañon trail. She sat down only to rise. She hurried only to stop. Driven, pursued, barred, she had no way to escape the flaying thoughts, no time or will to repudiate them. The death of her girl-hood, the rending aside of a veil of maiden mystery only vaguely, instinctively guessed, the barren sordid truth of her life as seen by her enlightened eyes, the bitter realization of the vileness of the men of her clan in contrast to the manliness and chivalry of an enemy, the hard facts of unalterable repute as created by slander and fostered by low minds—all these were forces in a cataclysm that had suddenly caught her heart and whirled her through changes, immense and agonizing, to bring her face to face with reality, to force upon her suspicion and doubt of all she had trusted, to warn her of the dark, impending horror of a tragic, bloody feud, and lastly to teach her the supreme truth at once so glorious and so terrible—that she could not escape the doom of womanhood.
About noon that day Ellen Jorth arrived at The Knoll, which was the location of her father’s ranch. Three cañons met there to form a larger one. The Knoll was a symmetrical hill situated at the mouth of the three cañons. It was covered with brush and cedars, with here and there lichened rocks showing above the bleached grass. Below The Knoll was a wide grassy flat, or meadow, through which a willow-bordered stream cut its rugged, boulder-strewn bed. Water flowed abundantly at this season, and the deep washes leading down from the slopes attested to the fact of cloudbursts and heavy storms. This meadow valley was dotted with horses and cattle, and meandered away between the timbered slopes to lose itself in a green curve. A singular feature of this cañon was that a heavy growth of spruce trees covered the slope facing northwest, and the opposite slope, exposed to the sun and therefore less snow-bound in winter, held a sparse growth of yellow pines. The ranch house of Colonel Jorth stood around the rough corner of the largest of the three cañons. Rather well hidden, it did not obtrude its rude and broken-down log cabins, its squalid surroundings, its black mud holes of corrals upon the beautiful and serene meadow valley.
Ellen Jorth approached her home slowly with dragging, reluctant steps, and never before in the three unhappy years of her existence there had the ranch seemed so bare, so uncared for, so repugnant to her. As she had seen herself with clarified eyes, so now she saw her home. The cabin that Ellen lived in with her father was a single-room structure with one door and no windows. It was about twenty feet square. The huge, rugged, stone chimney had been built on the outside with the wide-open fireplace set inside the logs. Smoke was rising from the chimney. As Ellen halted at the door and began unpacking her burro, she heard the loud, lazy laughter of men. An adjoining log cabin had been built in the section with a wide-roofed hall or space between them. The door in each cabin faced the other, and there was a tall man standing in one. Ellen recognized Daggs, a neighbor sheepman, who evidently spent more time with her father than at his own home, wherever that was. Ellen had never seen it. She heard this man drawl: “Jorth, heah’s your kid come home.”
Ellen carried her bed inside the cabin, and unrolled it upon a couch built of boughs in the far corner. She had forgotten Jean Isbel’s package, and now it fell out under her sight. Quickly she covered it. A Mexican woman, a relative of Antonio’s and the only servant about the place, was squatting Indian-fashion before the fireplace, stirring a pot of beans. She and Ellen did not get along well together, and few words ever passed between them. Ellen had a canvas curtain stretched upon a wire across the small triangular corner, and that afforded her a little privacy. Her possessions were limited in number. The crude square table she had constructed herself. Upon it was a little, old-fashioned, walnut-framed mirror, a brush and comb, and a dilapidated ebony cabinet that contained odds and ends the sight of which always brought a smile of derisive self-pity to her lips. Under the table stood an old leather trunk. It had come with her from Texas and contained clothing and belongings of her mother’s. Above the couch on pegs hung her scant wardrobe. A tiny shelf held several worn-out books.
When her father slept indoors, which was seldom except in winter, he occupied a couch in the opposite corner. A rude cupboard had been built against the logs next to the fireplace. It contained supplies and utensils. In the last corner, somewhat closer to the door, stood a crude table and two benches. The cabin was dark and smelled of smoke, of the stale odor of past cooked meals, of the mustiness of dry-rotting timber. Streaks of light showed through the roof where the rough-hewn shingles had split or weathered. A strip of bacon hung upon one side of the cupboard and upon the other a haunch of venison. Ellen detested the Mexican woman because she was dirty. The inside of the cabin presented the same unkempt appearance usual to it after Ellen had been away for a few days. Whatever Ellen had lost during the retrogression of the Jorths, she had kept her habits of cleanliness, and, straightening upon her return, she set to work.
The Mexican woman sullenly slouched away to her own quarters outside and Ellen was left to the satisfaction of labor. Her mind was as busy as her hands. As she cleaned and swept and dusted, she heard from time to time the voices of men, the clip-clop of shod horses, the bellow of cattle. A considerable time elapsed before she was disturbed.
A tall shadow darkened the doorway.
“Howdy, little one,” said a lazy, drawling voice. “So you-all got home?”
Ellen looked up. A superbly built man leaned against the doorpost. Like most Texans he was light-haired and light-eyed. His face was lined and hard. His long sandy mustache hid his mouth and drooped with a curl. Spurred, booted, belted, packing a heavy gun low down on his hip, he gave Ellen an entirely new impression. Indeed, she was seeing everything strangely.
“Hello, Daggs,” replied Ellen. “Where’s my dad?”
“He’s playin’ cairds with Jackson an’ Colter. Shore’s playin’ bad, too, an’ it’s gone to his haid.”
“Gamblin’?” queried Ellen.
“Mah child, when’d Kurnel Jorth ever play for fun?” said Daggs with a lazy laugh. “There’s a stack of gold on the table. Reckon your Uncle Jackson will win it. Colter’s shore out of luck.”
Daggs stepped inside. He was graceful and slow. His long spurs clinked. He laid a rather compelling hand on Ellen’s shoulder.
“Heah, mah gal, give us a kiss,” he said.
“Daggs, I’m not your girl,” replied Ellen as she slipped out from under his hand.
Then Daggs put his arm around her, not with violence or rudeness, but with an indolent, affectionate assurance, at once bold and self-contained. Ellen, however, had to exert herself to get free of him, and, when she had placed the table between them, she looked him squarely in the eyes.
“Daggs, you keep your paws off me,” she said.
“Aw, now, Ellen, I ain’t no bear,” he remonstrated. “What’s the matter, kid?”
“I’m not a kid. And there’s nothin’ the matter. You’re to keep your hands to yourself, that’s all.”
He tried to reach her across the table, and his movements were lazy and slow, like his smile. His tone was coaxing. “Mah dear, shore you set on my knee just the other day, now, didn’t you?”
Ellen felt the blood sting her cheeks. “I was a child,” she returned.
“Wal, listen to this heah grown-up young woman. All in a few days! Don’t be in a temper, Ellen. Come, give us a kiss.”
She deliberately gazed into his eyes. Like the eyes of an eagle, they were clear and hard, just now warmed by the dalliance of the moment, but there was no light, no intelligence in them to prove he understood her. The instant separated Ellen immeasurably from him and from all of his ilk.
“Daggs, I was a child,” she said. “I was lonely … hungry for affection. I was innocent. Then I was careless, too, and thoughtless when I should have known better. But I hardly understood you men. I put such thoughts out of my mind. I know now … know what you mean … what you have made people believe I am.”
“A-huh! Shore I get your hunch,” he returned with a change of tone. “But I asked you to marry me.”
“Yes, you did. The first day you got back to my dad’s house. You asked me to marry you after you found you couldn’t have your way with me. To you the one didn’t mean any more than the other.”
“Shore I did more than Simm Bruce an’ Colter,” he retorted. “They never asked you to marry.”
“No, they didn’t. And if I could respect them at all, I’d do it because they didn’t ask me.”
“Wal, I’ll be dog-goned!” ejaculated Daggs thoughtfully as he stroked his long mustache.
“I’ll say to them what I’ve said to you,” went on Ellen. “I’ll tell Dad to make you let me alone. I wouldn’t marry one of you … you loafers to save my life. I’m very suspicious about you. You’re a bad lot.”
Daggs changed subtly. The whole indolent nonchalance of the man vanished in an instant. “Wal, Miss Jorth, I reckon you mean we’re a bad lot of sheepmen?” he queried in the cool easy speech of a Texan.
“No,” flashed Ellen. “Shore I don’t say sheepmen. I say you’re a bad lot.”
“Oh, the hell you say!” Daggs spoke as he might have spoken to a man, then, tuning swiftly on his heel, he left her. Outside, he encountered Ellen’s father. She heard Daggs speak: “Lee, your little wildcat is shore heah. An’ take mah hunch. Somebody has been talkin’ to her.”
“Who has?” asked her father in his husky voice. Ellen knew at once that he had been drinking.
“Lord only knows,” replied Daggs. “But shore it wasn’t any friends of ours.”
“We cain’t stop people’s tongues,” said Jorth resignedly.
“Wal, I ain’t so shore,” continued Daggs with his slow, cool laugh. “Reckon I never yet heered any daid men’s tongues wag.”
Then the musical tinkle of his spurs sounded more faintly. A moment later Ellen’s father entered the cabin. His dark, moody face brightened at sight of her. Ellen knew she was the only person in the world left for him to love, and she was sure of his love. Her very presence always made him different. Through the years, the darker their misfortunes, the further he slipped away from better days, the more she loved him.
“Hello, my Ellen,” he said, and he embraced her. When he had been drinking, he never kissed her. “Shore I’m glad you’re home. This heah hole is bad enough any time, but when you’re gone, it’s black. I’m hungry.”
Ellen laid food and drink on the table, and for a little while she did not look directly at him. She was concerned about this new, searching power of her eyes. In relation to him she vaguely dreaded it.
Lee Jorth had once been a singularly handsome man. He was tall, but did not have the figure of a horseman. His dark hair was streaked with gray and was white over his ears. His face was sallow and thin, with deep lines. Under his round, prominent, brown eyes, like deadened furnaces, were blue swollen welts. He had a bitter mouth and weak chin, not wholly concealed by dark gray mustache and pointed beard. He wore a long frock coat and a wide-brimmed sombrero, both black in color, and so old and stained and frayed that along with the fashion of them they betrayed that they had come from Texas with him. Jorth always persisted in wearing a white linen shirt, likewise a relic of his Southern prosperity, and today it was as ragged and soiled as usual.
Ellen watched her father eat and waited for him to speak. It occurred to her strangely that he never asked about the sheep or the newborn lambs. She divined with a subtle new woman’s intuition that he cared nothing for his sheep.
“Ellen, what riled Daggs?” inquired her father presently. “He shore had fire in his eye.”
Long ago, Ellen had betrayed an indignity she had suffered at the hands of a man. Her father had nearly killed him. Since then she had taken care to keep her troubles to herself. If her father had not been blind and absorbed in his own brooding, he would have seen a thousand things sufficient to inflame his Southern pride and temper.
“Daggs asked me to marry him again and I said he belonged to a bad lot,” she replied.
Jorth laughed in scorn. “Fool! My God, Ellen, I must have dragged you low … that every damned rus … er … sheepman who comes along thinks he can marry you.”
At the break in his words, the incompleted meaning, Ellen dropped her eyes. Little things once not noted by her had come now to have a fascinating significance.
“Never mind, Dad,” she replied. “They cain’t marry me.”
“Daggs said somebody had been talkin’ to you. How aboot that?”
“Old John Sprague had just gotten back from Grass Valley,” said Ellen. “I stopped in to see him. Shore, he told me all the village gossip.”
“Anythin’ to interest me?” he queried darkly.
“Yes, Dad, I’m afraid a good deal,” she said hesitatingly. Then in accordance with a decision Ellen had made, she told him of the rumored war between sheepmen and cattlemen; that old Isbel had Blaisdell, Gordon, Fredericks, Blue, and other well-known ranchers on his side; that Isbel’s son Jean had come from Oregon with a wonderful reputation as fighter and scout and tracker; that it was no secret how Colonel Lee Jorth was at the head of the sheepmen; that a bloody war was sure to come.
“Hah!” exclaimed Jorth with a stain of red in his sallow cheek. “Reckon none of that is news to me. I knew all that.”
Ellen wondered if he had heard of her meeting with Jean Isbel. If not, he would hear as soon as Simm Bruce and Lorenzo came back. She decided to forestall them.
“Dad, I met Jean Isbel. He came into my camp. Asked the way to the rim. I showed him. We … we talked a little and shore were gettin’ acquainted when … when he told me who he was. Then I left him … hurried back to camp.”
“Colter met Isbel down in the woods,” replied Jorth ponderingly. “Said he looked like an Indian … a hard an’ slippery customer to reckon with.”
“Shore I guess I can endorse what Colter said,” returned Ellen dryly. She could have laughed aloud at her deceit. Still she had not lied.
“How’d this heah young Isbel strike you?” queried her father, suddenly glancing up at her.
Ellen felt the slow, sickening, guilty steal of blood rise in her face. She was helpless to stop it. But her father evidently never saw it. He was looking at her without seeing her.
“He … he struck me as different from men heah,” she stammered.
“Did Sprague tell you aboot this half-Indian Isbel … aboot his reputation?”
“Yes.”
“Did he look to you like a real woodsman?”
“Indeed, he did. He wore buckskin. He stepped quiet and soft. He acted at home in the woods. He had eyes black as night and sharp as lightnin’. They shore saw aboot all there was to see.”
Jorth chewed at his mustache and lost himself in brooding thought.
“Dad, tell me, is there goin’ to be a war?” asked Ellen.
What a strange rolling flash blazed in his eyes! His body jerked. “Shore. You might as well know.”
“Between sheepmen and cattlemen?”
“Yes.”
“With you, Dad, at the haid of one faction, and Gaston Isbel the other?”
“Daughter, you have it correct, so far as you go.”
“Oh! Dad, cain’t this fight be avoided?”
“You forget you’re from Texas,” he replied.
“Cain’t it be helped?” she repeated stubbornly.
“No!” he declared with deep, hoarse passion.
“Why not?”
“Wal, we sheepmen are goin’ to run sheep anywhere we like on the range. An’ cattlemen won’t stand for that.”
“But Dad, it’s so foolish,” declared Ellen earnestly. “You sheepmen do not have to run sheep over the cattle range.”
“I reckon we do!”
“Dad, that argument doesn’t go with me. I know the country. For years to come there will be room for both sheep and cattle without over-runnin’. If some of the range is better in water and grass, then whoever got there first should have it. That shore is only fair. It’s common sense, too.”
“Ellen, I reckon some cattle people have been prejudicin’ you,” said Jorth bitterly.
“Dad!” she cried hotly.
This had grown to be an ordeal for Jorth. He seemed a victim of contending tides of feeling. Some will or struggle broke within him and the change was manifest. Haggard, shifty-eyed, with wobbling chin, he burst into speech.
“See heah, girl. You listen. There’s a clique of ranchers down in the basin, all those you named, with Isbel at their haid. They have resented sheepmen comin’ down into the valley. They want it all to themselves. That’s one reason. Shore there’s another. All the Isbels are crooked. They’re cattle and horse thieves … have been for years. Gaston Isbel always was a maverick rustler. He’s gettin’ old now an’ rich, so he wants to cover his tracks. He aims to blame this cattle rustlin’ an’ horse stealin’ on to us sheepmen an’ run us out of the country.”
Gravely Ellen Jorth studied her father’s face, and the newly found truth-seeing power of her eyes did not fail her. In part, perhaps in all, he was telling lies. She shuddered a little, loyally battling against the insidious convictions being brought to fruition. Perhaps in his brooding over his failures and troubles he had leaned toward false judgments. Ellen could not attach dishonor to her father’s motives or speeches. For long, however, something about him had troubled her, perplexed her, baffled her. Fearfully she believed she was coming to some revelation, and despite her keen determination to know she found herself shrinking.
“Dad, Mother told me before she died that the Isbels had ruined you,” said Ellen, very low. It hurt her so to see her father cover his face that she could hardly go on. “If they ruined you, they ruined all of us. I know what we had once … what we lost again and again … and I see what we are come to now. Mother hated the Isbels. She taught me to hate the very name. But I never knew how they ruined you … or why … or when. And I want to know now.”
