Tonto Basin, page 24
An hour later Ellen found strength to go to the fire and partake of the food and drink her body sorely needed. Colter and the men waited on her solicitously and in silence, now and then stealing furtive glances at her from under the shadow of their black sombreros. The dark night settled down like a blanket. There were no stars. The wind moaned fitfully among the pines, and all about that lonely, hidden recess was in harmony with Ellen’s thoughts.
“Girl, you’re shore game,” said Colter admiringly. “An’ I reckon you never got it from the Jorths.”
“Tad in there … he’s game,” said Queen in mild protest.
“Not to my notion,” replied Colter. “Any man can be game when he’s croakin’ with somebody around, but Lee Jorth an’ Jackson … they always was yellow clear to their gizzards. They was born in Louisiana … not Texas. Shore they’re no more Texans than I am. Ellen, heah, she must have got another strain in her blood.”
To Ellen these words had no meaning. She rose and asked: “Where can I sleep?”
“I’ll fetch a light presently an’ you can make your bed in there by Tad,” replied Colter.
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“Wal, if you reckon you can coax him to talk, you’re shore wrong,” declared Colter with that cold timbre of voice that struck like steel on Ellen’s nerves. “I cussed but good an’ told him to keep his mouth shut. Talkin’ makes him cough an’ that fetches up the blood. Besides, I reckon I’m the one to tell you how your dad an’ uncle got killed. Tad didn’t see it done, an’ he was bad hurt when it happened. Shore all the fellers left have their idee about it. But I’ve got it straight.”
“Colter … tell me now,” insisted Ellen.
“Wal, all right, come over heah,” he replied, and drew her away from the campfire, in the shadow away from the glow. “Poor kid! I shore felt bad about it.” He put a long arm around her waist and drew her against him. Ellen felt it, yet did not offer any resistance. All her faculties seemed abandoned in a morbid and sad anticipation.
“Ellen, you shore know I always loved you … now, don’t you?” he asked with suppressed breath.
“No, Colter. It’s news to me … an’ not what I want to heah.”
“Wal, you may as well heah it right now,” he said. “It’s true. An’ what’s more … your dad gave you to me before he died.”
“What? Colter, you must be a liar.”
“Ellen, I swear to God I’m not lyin’,” he returned in eager passion. “I was with your dad last an’ heard him last. He shore knew I’d loved you for years. An’ he said he’d rather you be left in my care than anybody’s.”
“My father gave me to you in marriage?” ejaculated Ellen in bewilderment.
Colter’s ready assurance did not carry him over this point. It was evident that his words somewhat impressed and disconcerted him for the moment.
“To let me marry a rustler … one of the Hash Knife Gang!” exclaimed Ellen with weary incredulity.
“Wal, your dad belonged to Daggs’s gang, same as I do,” replied Colter, recovering his cool ardor.
“No!” cried Ellen.
“Yes, he shore did, for years,” declared Colter positively. “Back in Texas. An’ it was your dad that got Daggs to come to Arizona.”
Ellen tried to fling herself away, but her strength and her spirit were ebbing, and Colter increased the pressure of his arm. All at once she sank limply. Could she escape her fate? Nothing seemed left to fight with or for.
“All right … don’t hold me so … tight,” she panted. “Now, tell me how Dad was killed … an’ who … who.…”
Colter bent over so he could peer into her face. In the darkness, Ellen just caught the gleam of his eyes. She felt the virile force of the man in the strain of his body as he pressed her close. It all seemed unreal—a hideous dream—the gloom, the moan of the wind, the weird solitude, and this rustler with hand and will like cold steel.
“We’d come back to Greaves’s store,” Colter began. “An’ as Greaves was daid, we all got free with his liquor. Shore some of us got drunk. Bruce was drunk, and Tad in there … he was drunk. Your dad put away more’n I ever seen him. But shore he wasn’t exactly drunk. He got one of them weak an’ shaky spells. He cried an’ he wanted some of us to get the Isbels to call off the fightin’. He shore was ready to call it quits. I reckon the killin’ of Daggs … an’ then the awful way Greaves was cut up by Jean Isbel … took all the fight out of your dad. He said to me … ‘Colter, we’ll take Ellen an’ leave this heah country … an’ begin life all over again … where no one knows us.’”
“Oh, did he really say that? Did he … really mean it?” murmured Ellen with a sob.
“I’ll swear it by the memory of my daid mother,” replied Colter. “Wal, when night come, the Isbels rode down on us in the dark an’ began to shoot. They smashed in the door … tried to burn us out … an’ hollered ’round for a while. Then they left an’ we reckoned there’d be no more trouble that night. All the same we kept watch. I was the soberest one an’ I bossed the gang. We had some quarrels about the drinkin’. Your dad said, if we kept it up, it’d be the end of the Jorths. An’ he planned to send word to the Isbels next mawnin’ that he was ready for a truce. An’ I was to go fix it up with Gaston Isbel. Your dad went to bed in Greaves’s room, an’ a little while later your Uncle Jackson went in there, too. Some of the men laid down in the store an’ went to sleep. I kept guard till aboot three in the mawnin’. An’ I got so sleepy I couldn’t hold my eyes open. So I waked up Wells an’ Slater an’ set them on guard, one at each end of the store. Then I laid down on the counter to take a nap.”
Colter’s low voice, the strain and breathlessness of him, the agitation with which he appeared to be laboring, and especially the simple matter-of-fact detail of his story, carried absolute conviction to Ellen Jorth. Her vague doubt of him had been created by his attitude toward her. Emotion dominated her intelligence. The images, the scenes called up by Colter’s words, were as true as the gloom of the wild gulch and the loneliness of the night solitude—as true as the strange fact that she lay passively in the arm of a rustler.
“Wal, after a while I woke up,” went on Colter, clearing his throat. “It was gray dawn. All was as still as death. An’ somethin’ shore was wrong. Bruce an’ Slater had got to drinkin’ again an’ now laid daid drunk or asleep. Anyways, when I kicked them, they never moved. Then I heard a moan. It came from the room where your dad an’ uncle was. I went in. It was just light enough to see. Your Uncle Jackson was layin’ on the floor … cut half in two … daid as a doornail. Your dad lay on the bed. He was alive, breathin’ his last. He says … ‘That half-breed Isbel … knifed us … while we slept!’ The winder shutter was open. I seen where Jean Isbel had come in an’ gone out. I seen his moccasin tracks in the dirt outside an’ I seen where he’d stepped in Jackson’s blood, an’ tracked it to the winder. You shore can see them bloody tracks yourself, if you go back to Greaves’s store. Your dad was goin’ fast. He said … ‘Colter … take care of Ellen’ … an’ I reckon he meant a lot by that. He kept sayin’ … ‘My God, if I’d only seen Gaston Isbel before it was too late’ … an’ then he raved a little, whisperin’ out of his haid … an’ after that he died. I woke up the men, an’ aboot sunup we carried your dad an’ uncle out of town an’ buried them. An’ them Isbels shot at us while we were buryin’ our daid! That’s where Tad got his hurt. Then we hit the trail for Jorth’s ranch. An’, now, Ellen, that’s all my story. Your dad was ready to bury the hatchet with his old enemy. An’ that Nez Percé Jean Isbel, like the sneakin’ savage he is, murdered your uncle an’ then your dad … cut him horrible … made him suffer tortures of hell … all for Isbel revenge!”
When Colter’s husky voice ceased, Ellen whispered through lips as cold and still as ice: “Let me go … leave me … heah … alone!”
“Why, shore. I reckon I understand,” replied Colter. “I hated to tell you. But you had to heah the truth aboot that half-breed. I’ll carry your pack in the cabin an’ unroll your blankets.”
Releasing her, Colter strode off in the gloom. Like a dead weight Ellen began to slide until she slipped down full length beside the log, and then she lay in the cool, damp shadow, inert and lifeless so far as outward physical movement was concerned. She saw nothing and felt nothing of the night, the wind, the cold, the falling dew. For the moment she was crushed by despair and seemed to see herself sinking down and down into a black, bottomless pit, into an abyss where murky tides of blood and furious gusts of passion contended between her body and her soul. Into the stormy blast of hell! In her despair she longed, she ached for death. Born of infidelity, cursed by a taint of evil blood, further cursed by higher instinct for good and happy life, dragged from one lonely and wild and sordid spot to another, never knowing love or peace or joy or home, left to the companionship of violent and vile men, driven by a strange fate to love with unquenchable and insupportable love a half-breed, a savage, an Isbel, the hereditary enemy of her people, and at last the ruthless murderer of her father—what in the name of God had she left to live for? Revenge! An eye for an eye! A life for a life! But she could not kill Jean Isbel. Woman’s love could turn to hate but not the love of Ellen Jorth. He could drag her by the hair in the dust, beat her, and make her a thing to loathe, and cut her mortally in his savage and implacable thirst for revenge—but with her last gasp she would whisper she loved him and that she had lied to him to kill his faith. It was that—his strange faith in her purity—which had won her love. Of all men, that he should be the one to recognize the truth of her, the womanhood yet unsullied—how strange, how terrible, how overpowering! False, indeed, was she to the Jorths! False as her mother had been to an Isbel! This agony and destruction of her soul was the bitter Dead Sea fruit—the sins of her parents visited upon her.
“I’ll end it all,” she whispered to the night shadows that hovered over her. No coward was she—no fear of pain or mangled flesh or death or the mysterious hereafter could ever stay her. It would be easy, it would be a last thrill, a transport of self-abasement and supreme self-proof of her love for Jean Isbel to kiss the rim rock where his feet had trod, and then fling herself down into the depths. She was the last Jorth. So the wronged Isbels would be revenged.
But he would never know … never know … I lied to him! she wailed mutely to the night wind. She was lost—lost on earth and to hope of heaven. She had neither right to live nor to die. She was nothing but a little weed along the trail of life, trampled upon, buried in the wind. She was nothing but a single rotten thread in a tangled web of love and hate and revenge, and she had broken.
Lower and lower she seemed to sink. Was there no end to the gulf of despair? If Colter had returned, he would have found her a rag and a toy—a creature degraded, fit for his vile embraces. To be thrust deeper into the mire, to be punished fittingly for her betrayal of a man’s noble love and her own womanhood—to be made an end of, body, mind, and soul.
But Colter did not return.
The wind mourned, the owls hooted, the leaves rustled, the insects whispered their melancholy night song, the campfire flickered and faded. Then the wild forest land seemed to close imponderably over Ellen. All that she wailed in her despair, all that she confessed in her abasement was true, and hard as life could be—but she belonged to nature. If nature had not failed her, had God failed her? It was there—the lonely land of tree and fern and flower and brook, full of wild birds and beasts, where the mossy rocks could speak and the solitude had ears, where she had always felt herself unutterably a part of creation. Then a wavering spark of hope quivered through the blackness of her soul, and gathered light.
The gloom of the sky, the shifting clouds of dull shade, split asunder to show a glimpse of a radiant star, piercingly white, cold, pure, a steadfast eye of the universe, beyond all understanding and illimitable with its meaning of the past, and the present, and the future. Ellen watched it until the drifting clouds once more hid it from her strained sight.
What had that star to do with hell? She might be crushed and destroyed by life, but was there not something beyond? Just to be born, just to suffer, just to die—could that be all? Despair did not loose its hold on Ellen, the strife and pang of her breast did not subside. But with the long hours and the strange closing-in of the forest around her, and the fleeting glimpse of that wonderful star, with a subtle divination of the meaning of her beating heart and throbbing mind, and, lastly, with a voice thundering at her conscience that a man’s faith in a woman must not be greater, nobler, than her faith in God and eternity—with them she checked the dark flight of her soul toward destruction.
Chapter Twelve
A chill, gray, somber dawn was breaking when Ellen dragged herself into the cabin and crept under her blankets, there to sleep the sleep of exhaustion.
When she awoke, the hour appeared to be late afternoon. Sun and sky shone through the sunken and decayed roof of the old cabin. Her uncle, Tad Jorth, lay on a blanket bed upheld by a crude couch of boughs. The light fell upon his face, pale, lined, cast in a still mold of suffering. He was not dead, for she heard his respiration.
The floor underneath Ellen’s blankets was bare clay. She and Jorth were alone in this cabin. It contained nothing besides their beds and a rank growth of weeds along the decayed lower logs. Half of the cabin had a rude ceiling of rough-hewn boards that formed a kind of loft. This attic extended through to the adjoining cabin, forming the ceiling of the porch-like space between the two structures. There was no partition. A ladder of two aspen saplings, pegged to the logs and with braces between the steps, led up to the attic.
Ellen smelled wood smoke and odor of frying meat, and she heard the voices of men. She looked out to see that Slater and Somers had joined their party—an addition that might have strengthened it for defense, but did not lend her own situation anything favorable. Somers had always appeared the one best to avoid.
Colter espied her and called her to “come an’ feed your pale face.” His comrades laughed, not loudly, but guardedly, as if noise was something to avoid. Nevertheless, they awoke Tad Jorth, who began to toss and moan in the bed.
Ellen hurried to his side and at once ascertained that he had a high fever and was in a critical condition. Every time he tossed, he opened a wound in his right breast, rather high up. For all she could see nothing had been done for him except the binding of a scarf around his neck and under his arm. This scant bandage had worked loose. Going to the door, she called out: “Fetch me some water!”
When Colter brought it, Ellen was rummaging in her pack for some clothing or towel that she could use for bandages.
“Weren’t any of you decent enough to look after my uncle?” she queried.
“Huh! Wal, what the hell,” rejoined Colter. “We shore did all we could. I reckon you think it wasn’t a tough job to pack him up the rim. He was done for then an’ I said so.”
“I’ll do all I can for him,” said Ellen.
“Shore, go ahaid. When I get plugged or knifed by that half-breed, I shore hope you’ll be around to nurse me.”
“You seem to be pretty shore of your fate, Colter.”
“Shore as hell,” he bit out darkly. “Somers saw Isbel an’ his gang trailin’ us to the Jorth Ranch.”
“Are you goin’ to stay heah … an’ wait for them?”
“Shore, I’ve been quarrelin’ with the fellars out there over that very question. I’m for leavin’ the country. But Queen, the damn’ gunfighter, is daid set to kill that cowman Blue who swore he was King Fisher, the old Texas outlaw. None but Queen is spoilin’ for another fight. All the same they won’t leave Tad Jorth heah alone.” Then Colter leaned in at the door and whispered: “Ellen, I cain’t boss this outfit. So let’s you an’ me shake them. I’ve got your dad’s gold. Let’s ride off tonight an’ shake this country.”
Ellen shook her head. “Neither would I leave my uncle heah alone.”
Colter, muttering under his breath, left the door, and returned to his comrades. Ellen had received her first intimation of his cowardice, and his mention of her father’s gold started a train of thought that persisted in spite of her efforts to put all her mind to attending her uncle. He grew conscious enough to recognize her and her working over him, and thanked her with a look that touched Ellen deeply. It changed the direction of her mind. This suffering and imminent death, which she was able to alleviate and retard somewhat, worked upon her pity and compassion so that she forgot her own plight. Half the night she was tending him, cooling his fever, holding him quiet. Well she realized that but for her ministrations he would have died. At length he went to sleep.
Ellen, sitting beside him in the lonely, silent darkness of that late hour, received again the intimations of nature, those vague and nameless stirrings of her innermost being, those whisperings out of the night and the forest and the sky. Something had a hold on her spirit. Something great would not let go of her soul. She pondered.
Attention to the wounded man occupied Ellen, and soon she redoubled her activities in this regard, finding in them something of protection against Colter. He had waylaid her as she went to a spring for water, and with a lunge like that of a bear he had tried to embrace her. But Ellen had been too quick.
“Wal, are you goin’ away with me?” he demanded.
“No. I’ll stick by my uncle,” she replied.
That motive of hers seemed to obstruct his will. Ellen was keen to see that Colter and his comrades were at a last stand and disintegrating under a severe strain. Nerve and courage of the open and the wild they possessed, but only in a limited degree. Colter seemed obsessed by his passion for her, and, although Ellen did not yet fear him, in her stubborn pride she realized she ought to. After that incident she watched closely, never leaving her uncle’s bedside except when Colter was absent. One or more of the men kept constant look-out somewhere down the cañon.
