Tonto Basin, page 14
That for Ellen seemed the culminating blow under which she almost sank. But one moment longer could she maintain this unnatural and terrible poise. “Jean Isbel … go along with you,” she said impatiently. “I’m waiting heah for Simm Bruce!”
At last it was as if she had struck his heart. Because of doubt of himself and a stubborn faith in her, his passion and jealousy were not proof against this last stab. Instinctive subtlety inherent in Ellen had prompted the speech that tortured Isbel. How the shock to him rebounded on her! She gasped as he lunged for her, too swift for her to move a hand. One arm crushed around her like a steel band, the other, hard across her breast and neck, forced her head back. Then she tried to wrestle away, but she was utterly powerless. His dark face bent down closer and closer. Suddenly Ellen ceased trying to struggle. She was like a stricken creature paralyzed by the piercing hypnotic eyes of a snake. Yet, in spite of her terror, if he meant death by her, she welcomed it.
“Ellen Jorth, I’m thinkin’ yet … you lie!” he said, low and tense between his teeth.
“No! No!” she screamed wildly. Her nerve broke there. She could no longer meet those terrible black eyes. Her passionate denial was not only the last of her shameful deceit; it was the woman of her, repudiating herself and him, and all this sickening, miserable situation.
Isbel took her literally. She had convinced him. The instant held blank horror for Ellen.
“By God … then I’ll have somethin’ of you anyway,” muttered Isbel thickly.
Ellen saw the blood bulge his powerful neck. She saw his dark, hard face, strange now, fearful to behold, come lower and lower, till it blurred and obstructed her gaze. She felt the swell and ripple and stretch—then the bind of his muscles, like huge coils of elastic rope. Then with savage rude force his mouth closed on hers. All Ellen’s senses reeled, as if she were swooning. She was suffocating. The spasm passed, and a bursting spurt of blood revived her to acute and terrible consciousness. For the endless period of one moment he held her so that her breast seemed crushed. His kisses burned and bruised her lips. Then, shifting violently to her neck, they pressed so hard that she choked under them. It was as if a huge bat had fastened upon her throat.
Suddenly the remorseless, binding embraces—the hot and savage kisses—fell away from her. Isbel had let go. She saw him throw up his hands and stagger back a little, all the while with his piercing gaze on her. His face had been dark purple; now it was white.
“No … Ellen Jorth,” he panted. “I don’t … want any of you … that way.” And suddenly he sank on the log and covered his face with his hands. “What I loved in you … was what I thought you were.”
Like a wildcat Ellen sprang upon him, beating him with her fists, tearing out his hair, scratching his face in a blind fury. Isbel made no move to stop her, and her violence spent itself with her strength. She swayed back from him, shaking so that she could scarcely stand.
“You … damned … Isbel!” she gasped with hoarse passion. “You insulted me!”
“Insulted you?” Isbel laughed in bitter scorn. “It couldn’t be done.”
“Oh! I’ll kill you!” she hissed.
Isbel stood up and wiped the red scratches on his face. “Go ahead. There’s my gun,” he said, pointing to his saddle sheath. “Somebody’s got to begin this Jorth-Isbel feud. It’ll be strictly business. I’m sick of it already. Kill me! First blood for Ellen Jorth!”
Suddenly the dark grim tide that had seemed to engulf Ellen’s very soul cooled and receded, leaving her without its false strength. She began to sag. She stared at Isbel’s gun. Kill him, whispered the retreating voice of her hate. But she was as powerless as if she were still held in Jean Isbel’s giant embrace.
“I … I want to … kill you,” she whispered, “but I can’t. Leave me.”
“You’re no Jorth … the same as I’m no Isbel. We oughtn’t be mixed in this deal,” he said somberly. “I’m sorrier for you than I am for myself … you’re a girl! You once had a good mother … a decent home. And this life you’ve led here … mean as it’s been … is nothin’ to what you’ll face now. Damn the men that brought you to this! I’m goin’ to kill some of them.”
With that, he mounted and turned away. Ellen called out for him to take his horse. He did not stop or look back. She called again, but her voice was fainter, and Isbel was now leaving at a trot. Slowly she sagged against the tree, lower and lower. He headed into the trail leading up the cañon. How strange a relief Ellen felt! She watched him ride into the aspens and start up the slope, at last to disappear in the pines. It seemed at the moment that he took with him something that had been hers. A pain in her hand dulled the thoughts that wavered to and fro. After he had gone, she could not see so well. Her eyes were tired. What had happened to her? There was blood on her hands. Isbel’s blood! She shuddered. Was it an omen? Lower she sank against the tree and closed her eyes.
Old John Sprague did not return. Hours dragged by—dark hours for Ellen Jorth, lying prostrate beside the tree, hiding the blue sky and golden sunlight from her eyes. At length the lethargy of despair, the black, dull misery wore away, and she gradually returned to a condition of coherent thought.
What had she learned? Sight of the black horse grazing near seemed to prompt the trenchant replies. Spades belonged to Jean Isbel. He had been stolen by her father or by one of her father’s accomplices. Isbel’s vaunted cunning as a tracker had been no idle threat. Her father was a horse thief, a rustler, a sheepman only as a blind, a consort of Daggs, leader of the Hash Knife Gang. Ellen remembered the ill repute of that gang, away back in Texas years ago. Her father had gotten in with this famous band of rustlers to serve his own ends—the extermination of the Isbels. It was all very plain now to Ellen.
“Daughter of a horse thief an’ rustler,” she muttered.
Her thoughts sped back to the days of her girlhood. Only the very early stage at that time had been happy. In the light of Isbel’s revelation the many changes of residence, the sudden moves to unsettled parts of Texas, the periods of poverty and sudden prosperity, all leading to the final journey to this god-forsaken Arizona—these were now seen in their true significance. As far back as she could remember, her father had been a crooked man. Her mother had known it. He had dragged her to her ruin. That degradation had killed her. Ellen realized that with poignant sorrow, with a sudden revolt against her father. Had Gaston Isbel truly and dishonestly started her father on his downhill road? Ellen wondered. She hated the Isbels with unutterable and growing hate, yet she had it in her to think, to ponder, to weigh judgments in their behalf. She owed it to something in herself to be fair. But what did it matter who was to blame for the Jorth-Isbel feud? Somehow Ellen was forced to confess that deep in her soul it mattered terribly. To be true to herself—the self that she alone knew—she must have right on her side. If the Jorths were guilty, and she clung to them and their creed, then she would be one of them.
“But I’m not,” she mused aloud. “My name’s Jorth, an’ I reckon I have bad blood. But it never came out in me till today. I’ve been honest. I’ve been good … yes, good, as my mother taught me to be … in spite of all. Shore, my pride made me a fool … an’ now have I any choice to make? I’m a Jorth. I must stick to my father.”
All this summing up, however, did not wholly account for the pang in her breast. What had she done that day? The answer beat in her ears like a great, throbbing hammer stroke. In an agony of shame, in the throes of hate, she had perjured herself. She had sworn away her honor. She had basely made herself vile. She had struck ruthlessly at the great heart of a man who loved her. Ah! What thrust had rebounded to leave this dreadful pang in her breast. Loved her? Yes, the strange truth, the insupportable truth! She had to contend now, not with her father and her disgrace, not with the baffling presence of Jean Isbel, but with the mysteries of her own soul. Wonder of all wonders it was that such love had been born for her. Shame worse than all other shame it was that she should kill it by a poisoned lie. By what monstrous motive had she done that? To sting Isbel as he had stung her! But that had been base. Never could she have stooped so low except in a moment of tremendous tumult. If she had done sore injury to Isbel, what had she done to herself? How strange, how tenacious had been his faith in her honor! Could she ever forget? She must forget it. But she could never forget the way he had scorned those vile men in Greaves’s store—the way he had beaten Bruce for defiling her name—the way he had stubbornly denied her own insinuations. She was a woman now. She had learned something of the complexity of a woman’s heart. She could not change nature. All her passionate being thrilled to the manhood of her defender. But even while she thrilled, she acknowledged her hate. It was the contention between the two that caused the pang in her breast.
“An’ now what’s left for me?” murmured Ellen. She did not analyze the significance of what had prompted that query. The most incalculable of the days’ disclosures was the wrong she had done herself. “Shore, I’m done for, one way or another. I must stick to Dad … or kill myself.”
Ellen rode Spades back to the ranch. She rode like the wind. When she swung out of the trail into the open meadow in plain sight of the ranch, her appearance created a commotion among the loungers before the cabin. She rode Spades at a full run.
“Who’s after you?” yelled her father, as she pulled the black to a halt. Jorth held a rifle. Daggs, Colter, the other Jorths were there, likewise armed, and watchful, strung with expectancy.
“Shore nobody’s after me,” replied Ellen. “Cain’t I run a horse ’round heah without being chased?”
Jorth appeared both incensed and relieved.
“Hah! What you mean, girl, runnin’ like a streak right down on us? You’re actin’ queer these days, an’ you look queer. I’m not likin’ it.”
“Reckon these are queer times … for the Jorths,” replied Ellen sarcastically.
“Daggs found strange hoss tracks crossin’ the meadow,” said her father. “An’ that worried us. Someone’s been snoopin’ ’round the ranch. An’ when we seen you runnin’ so wild, we shore thought you was bein’ chased.”
“No. I was only trying out Spades to see how fast he could run,” returned Ellen. “Reckon when we do get chased, it’ll take some runnin’ to catch me.”
“Haw! Haw!” roared Daggs. “It shore will, Ellen.”
“Girl, it’s not only your runnin’ an your looks that’s queer,” declared Jorth in dark perplexity. “You talk queer.”
“Shore, Dad, you’re not used to hearing Spades called Spades,” said Ellen as she dismounted.
“Humph!” ejaculated her father, as if convinced of the uselessness of trying to understand a woman. “Say, did you see any strange horse tracks?”
“I reckon I did. And I know who made them.”
Jorth stiffened. All the men behind him showed a sudden intensity of suspense.
“Who?” demanded Jorth.
“Shore it was Jean Isbel,” replied Ellen coolly. “He came up heah, tracking his black horse.”
“Jean … Isbel … trackin’ … his … black … horse,” repeated her father.
“Yes. He’s not overrated as a tracker, that’s shore.”
Black silence reigned. Ellen cast a slow glance over her father, and the others, then she began to loosen the cinches of her saddle. Presently Jorth burst the silence with a curse, and Daggs followed with one of his sardonic laughs.
“Wal, boss, what did I tell you?” he drawled.
Jorth strode to Ellen, and, whirling her around with a strong hand, he held her facing him. “Did you see Isbel?”
“Yes,” replied Ellen just as sharply as her father had asked.
“Did you talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he want up heah?”
“I told you. He was tracking the black horse you stole.”
Jorth’s hand and arm dropped limply. His sallow face turned a livid hue. Amazement merged into discomfiture and that gave place to rage. He raised a hand as if to strike Ellen. Suddenly Daggs’s long arm shot up to clutch Jorth’s wrist. Wrestling to free himself, Jorth cursed under his breath. “Let go, Daggs!” he shouted stridently. “Am I drunk that you grab me?”
“Wal, you ain’t drunk, I reckon,” replied the other with sarcasm. “But there’re shore some things I’ll reserve for your private ear.”
Jorth gained a semblance of composure, but it was evident that he labored under a shock.
“Ellen, did Jean Isbel see this black horse?”
“Yes. He asked me how I got Spades, an’ I told him.”
“Did he say Spades belonged to him?”
“Shore, I reckon he proved it. You can always tell a horse that loves its master.”
“Did you offer to give Spades back?”
“Yes. But Isbel wouldn’t take him.”
“Hah! An’ why not?”
“He said he’d rather I kept Spades. He was about to engage in a dirty, blood-spilling deal, an’ he reckoned he’d not be able to care for a fine horse. I didn’t want Spades. I tried to make Isbel take him. But he rode off … and that’s all there is to that.”
“Maybe it’s not,” replied Jorth, chewing his mustache and eyeing Ellen with a dark, intent gaze. “You’ve met this Isbel twice.”
“It wasn’t any fault of mine,” retorted Ellen.
“I heah he’s sweet on you. How aboot that?”
Ellen smarted under the blaze of blood that swept to neck and cheek and temple, but it was only memory that fired this shame. What her father and his crowd might think were matters of supreme indifference. Yet she met his suspicious gaze with truthful, blazing eyes.
“I heah talk from Bruce an’ Lorenzo,” went on her father. “An’ Daggs heah.…”
“Daggs nothin’!” interrupted that worthy. “Don’t fetch me in. I said nothin’ an’ I think nothin’.”
“Yes, Jean Isbel was sweet on me, Dad … but he will never be again,” returned Ellen in low tones. With that she pulled the saddle off Spades, and, throwing it over her shoulder, she walked off to her cabin.
Hardly had she gotten indoors when her father entered.
“Ellen, I didn’t know that horse belonged to Isbel,” he began in the swift, hoarse, persuasive voice so familiar to Ellen. “I swear I didn’t. I bought him … traded with Slater for him. Honest to God I never had any idea he was stolen. Why, when you said ‘that horse you stole’, I felt as if you’d knifed me.…”
Ellen sat at the table and listened while her father paced to and fro, and by his restless action and passionate speech worked himself into a frenzy. He talked incessantly, as if her silence was condemnatory and as if eloquence alone could convince her of his honesty. It seemed that Ellen saw and heard with keener faculties than ever before. He had a terrible thirst for her respect. Not so much for her love, she divined, but rather that she would not see how he had fallen! She pitied him with all her heart. She was all he had, as he was all the world to her. And so, as she gave ear to his long, illogical rigmarole of argument and defense, she slowly found that her pity and her love were making vital decisions for her. As of old, in poignant moments, her father lapsed at last into a denunciation of the Isbels, and what they had brought him to. His sufferings were real, at least, in Ellen’s presence. She was the only link that bound him to long-past happier times. She was her mother over again—the woman who had betrayed another man for him and gone with him to her ruin and death.
“Dad, don’t go on so,” said Ellen, breaking in upon her father’s rant. “I will be true to you … as my mother was. I am a Jorth. Your place is my place … your fight is my fight … never speak of the past to me again. If God spares us through this feud, we will go away and begin all over again, far off where no one ever heard of a Jorth. If we’re not spared, we’ll at least have had our whack at these damned Isbels.”
Chapter Seven
During June Jean Isbel did not ride far away from Grass Valley. Another attempt had been made upon Gaston Isbel’s life. Another cowardly shot had been fired from ambush, this time from a pine thicket bordering the trail that led to Blaisdell’s ranch. Blaisdell heard this shot, so near his home was it fired. No trace of the hidden foe could be found. The ground all around that vicinity bore a carpet of pine needles that showed no trace of footprints. The supposition was that this cowardly attempt had been perpetrated, or certainly instigated, by the Jorths. But there was no proof. Gaston Isbel had other enemies in the Tonto Basin besides the sheep clan. The old man raged like a lion about this sneaking attack on him. His friend Blaisdell urged an immediate gathering of their kin and friends. “Let’s quit ranchin’ till this trouble settles,” he declared. “Let’s arm an’ ride the trails an’ meet these men halfway. It won’t help our side any to wait till you’re shot in the back.” More than one of Isbel’s supporters offered the same advice.
“No, we’ll wait till we know for shore,” was the stubborn cattleman’s reply to all these promptings.
“Know! Wal, hell … didn’t Jean find the black hoss up at Jorth’s ranch?” demanded Blaisdell. “What more do we want?”
“Jean couldn’t swear Jorth stole the black.”
“Wal, by thunder, I can swear to it,” growled Blaisdell. “An’ we’re losin’ cattle all the time. Who’s stealin’ them?”
“We’ve always lost cattle ever since we started ranchin’ heah.”
“Gass, I reckon you want Jorth to start this fight in the open. But maybe he’ll never do it.”
“It’ll start soon enough,” was Isbel’s gloomy reply.
Jean had not failed altogether in his tracking of lost or stolen cattle. It was just that circumstances had been against him, and there was something baffling about this rustling. The summer storms had set in early, and it had been his luck to have heavy rains wash out fresh tracks that he might have followed. The range was large and cattle were everywhere. Sometimes a loss was not discovered for weeks afterward. Gaston Isbel’s sons were now the only men left to ride the range. Two of his riders had quit because of the threatened war, and Isbel had let another go, so that Jean did not often learn that cattle had been stolen until their tracks were old. Added to this was the fact that the Grass Valley country was covered with horse tracks and cattle tracks. The rustlers, whoever they were, had long been at the game, and, now that there was reason for them to show their cunning, they did it.
