Tonto Basin, page 26
“Hello, doggie,” panted Ellen. “What’s wrong … up heah?”
He yelped, his ears lost their stiffness, his body sank a little, and his bushy tail wagged to and fro. What a gray, clear intelligent look he gave her! Then he trotted back.
Ellen followed him around a corner of bluff to see the body of a man lying on his back. Fresh earth and gravel lay about him, attesting to his fall from above. He had neither coat nor hat, and the position of his body and limbs suggested broken bones. As Ellen hurried to his side, she saw that the front of his shirt, low down, was a bloody blotch. But she could lift his head; his eyes were open; he was perfectly conscious. Ellen did not recognize the dusty-skinned face, yet the mold of features, the look of the eyes, seemed strangely familiar.
“You’re … Jorth’s … girl,” he said, a faint voice of surprise.
“Yes, I’m Ellen Jorth,” she replied. “An’ are you Bill Isbel?”
“All thet’s left of me. But I’m thankin’ God that somebody come … even a Jorth.”
Ellen knelt beside him and examined the wound in his abdomen. A heavy bullet had, indeed, as Colter had avowed, torn clear through his middle. Even if he had not sustained other serious injury from the fall over the cliff, that terrible bullet wound meant death very shortly. Ellen shuddered. How inexplicable her men! How cruel, bloody, mindless!
“Isbel, I’m sorry … there’s no hope,” she said, low-voiced. “You’ve not long to live. I cain’t help you. God knows I’d do so if I could.”
“All over,” he sighed, with his eyes looking beyond her. “I reckon … I’m damn’ glad. But you can … do somethin’ for me … will you?”
“Indeed, yes. Tell me,” she replied, lifting his dusty head on her knee. Her hands trembled as she brushed his wet hair back from his clammy brow.
“I’ve somethin’ … on my conscience,” he whispered.
The woman, the sensitive in Ellen, understood and pitied him then.
“Yes,” she encouraged him.
“I stole cattle … my dad’s an’ Blaisdell’s … an’ made deals … with Daggs. All the crookedness … wasn’t on … Jorth’s side. I want … my brother Jean … to know.”
“I’ll try … to tell him,” whispered Ellen, out of her great amazement.
“We were all … a bad lot … except Jean,” went on Isbel. “Dad wasn’t fair. God, how he hated Jorth! Jorth, yes, who was … your father. Wal, they’re even now.”
“How so?” faltered Ellen.
“Your father killed Dad. At the last … Dad wanted to … save us. He sent word … he’d meet him … face to face … an’ let that end the feud. They met out in the road. But someone shot Dad down … with a rifle … an’ then your father finished him.”
“An’ then, Isbel,” added Ellen with unconscious, mocking bitterness, “your brother murdered my dad!”
“What?” whispered Bill Isbel. “Shore you’ve got … it wrong. I reckon Jean … could have killed … your father. But he didn’t. Queer, we all thought.”
“Ah! Who did … kill my father?” burst out Ellen, and her voice rang like great hammers at her ears.
“It was Blue. He went in the store … alone … faced the whole gang. Bluffed them … taunted them … told them he was King Fisher. Then he killed … your dad … an’ Jackson Jorth. Jean was out … back of the store. We were out … front. There was shootin’. Colmor was hit. Then Blue run out … bad hurt. Both of them … died in Meeker’s yard. My sister’s a widow before she married.”
“An’ so Jean Isbel has not killed a Jorth!” said Ellen in strange, deep voice.
“No,” replied Isbel earnestly. “I reckon this feud … was hardest on Jean. He never lived heah. An’ my sister Ann said … he got sweet on you. Now did he?”
Slow, stinging tears filled Ellen’s eyes, and her head sank low and lower. “Yes … he did,” she murmured tremulously.
“A-huh! Wal, that accounts,” replied Isbel wonderingly. “Too bad! It might have been. A man always sees … different when … he’s dyin’. If I had … my life … to live over again! My poor kids … deserted in their babyhood … ruined for life! All for nothin’. May God forgive.…”
Then he choked and whispered for water.
Ellen laid his head back, and, rising, she took his sombrero and started hurriedly down the slope, making dust fly and rocks roll. Her mind was a seething ferment. Leaping, bounding, sliding down the weathered slope, she gained the bench, to run across that, and so on down into the open cañon to the willow-bordered brook. Here she filled the sombrero with water and started back, forced now to walk slowly and carefully. It was then, with the violence and fury of intense muscular activity denied her, that the tremendous import of Bill Isbel’s revelation burst upon her, transporting her, transforming her very flesh and blood, and transfiguring the very world of golden light and azure sky and speaking forest land that encompassed her.
Not a drop of the precious water did she spill. Not a misstep did she make. Yet so great was the spell upon her that she was not aware she had climbed the steep slope until the dog yelped his welcome. Then, with all the flood of her emotion surging and resurging, she knelt to allay the parching thirst of this dying enemy whose words had changed finality to strength, hate to love, and the gloomy hell of despair to something unutterable. But she had returned too late. Bill Isbel was dead.
Chapter Thirteen
Jean Isbel, holding the wolf-dog Shepp in leash, was on the trail of the most dangerous of Jorth’s gang, the gunman Queen. Dark drops of blood on the stones and plain tracks of a rider’s sharp-heeled boots behind coverts indicated the trail of a wounded, slow-traveling fugitive. Therefore, Jean Isbel held in the dog and proceeded with the wary eye and watchful caution of an Indian.
Queen, true to his colors and emulating Blue with the same magnificent effrontery and with the same paralyzing suddenness of surprise, had appeared as if by magic last night at the camp of the Isbel faction. Jean had seen him first, in time to leap like a panther into the shadow. But he carried in his shoulder Queen’s first bullet of that terrible encounter. Upon Gordon and Fredericks fell the brunt of Queen’s fusillade, and they, shot to pieces, staggering and falling, held passionate grip on life long enough to draw and still Queen’s guns and send him reeling off into the darkness of the forest.
Unarmed, and hindered by a painful wound, Jean had kept a vigil near camp all that silent and menacing night. Morning disclosed Gordon and Fredericks stark and ghastly beside the burned-out campfire, their guns clutched immovably in stiffened hands. Jean buried them as best he could, and, when they were under ground with flat stones on their graves, he knew himself to be, indeed, the last of the Isbel clan. All that was wild and savage in his blood and desperate in his spirit rose to make him more than man and less than human. Then, for the third time during these tragic last days, the wolf-dog Shepp came to him.
Jean washed the wound Queen had given him, and bound it tightly. The keen pang and burn of the lead was a constant and all-powerful reminder of the grim work left for him to do. The whole world was no longer large enough for him and whoever was left of the Jorths. The heritage of blood his father had bequeathed him, the unshakable love for a worthless girl who had so dwarfed and obstructed his will and so bitterly defeated and reviled his poor romantic boyish faith, the killing of hostile men, so strange in its after-effects, the pursuits and fights, and loss one by one of his confederates—these had finally engendered in Jean Isbel a wild, unshakable thirst, these had been the cause of his retrogression, these had unalterably and ruthlessly fixed in his darkened mind one fierce passion—to live and die the last man of the Jorth-Isbel feud.
At sunrise, Jean left this camp, taking with him only a small knapsack of meat and bread, and with the eager, wild Shepp in leash he set out on Queen’s bloody trail. Black drops of blood on the stones and an irregular trail of footprints proved to Jean that the gunman was hard hit. Here he had fallen, or kneeled, or sat down evidently to bind his wounds. Jean found strips of scarf, red and discarded, and the blood drops failed to show on more rocks. In a deep forest of spruce, under silver-tipped spreading branches, Queen had rested, perhaps slept. Then, laboring with dragging steps, not improbably with a lame leg, he had gone on, up out of the dark green ravine to the open, dry, pinetipped ridge. Here he had rested, perhaps waited to see if he was pursued. From that point his trail spoke an easy language for Jean’s keen eye. The gunman knew he was pursued. He had seen his enemy. Therefore, Jean proceeded with a slow caution, never getting within revolver range of ambush, using all his woodcraft to trail this man and yet save himself. Queen traveled slowly, either because he was wounded or else because he tried to ambush his pursuer, and Jean accommodated his pace to that of Queen. From noon of that day they were never far apart, never out of hearing of a rifle shot.
The contrast of the beauty and peace and loneliness of the surroundings to the nature of Queen’s flight often obtruded its strange truth into the somber turbulence of Jean’s mind, into that fixed columnar idea around which fleeting thoughts hovered and gathered like shadows. Early autumn had touched the heights with its magic wand, and the forest seemed a temple in which man might worship nature and life rather than steal through the dells and under the arched aisles like a beast of prey. Aspens quivered on the green and gold leaves of the glades; maples in the ravine fluttered their red and purple leaves. The needle-matted carpet under the pines vied with the long lanes of silvery grass, alike enticing to the eye of man and beast. Sunny rays of light, flecked with dust and flying insects, slanted down from the overhanging, brown-limbed, green-massed foliage. Roar of wind in the distant forest alternated with soft breeze close at hand. Small, dove-gray squirrels ran all over the woodland, very curious about Jean and his dog, rustling the twigs, scratching the bark of trees, chattering and barking, frisky, saucy, and bright-eyed. A plaintive twitter of wild canaries came from the region above the tree tops—first voices of birds in their pilgrimage toward the south. Pine cones dropped with soft thuds. The blue jays followed these intruders in the forest, screeching their displeasure. The dropping seeds from the spruces pattered like rain. A woody, earthy, leafy fragrance, damp with the current of life, mingled with a cool, dry, sweet smell of withered grass and rotting pines.
Solitude and lonesomeness, peace and rest, wild life and nature reigned here. It was a golden-green region enchanting to the gaze of man. An Indian would have walked there with his spirits, and, even as Jean felt all this elevating beauty and inscrutable spirit, his keen eye once more fastened upon the blood-red drops Queen had again left on the gray moss and rock. His wound had reopened. Jean felt the thrill of the scenting panther.
The sun set, twilight gathered, night fell. Jean crawled under a dense, low, spreading spruce, ate some bread and meat, fed the dog, and lay down to rest and sleep. His thoughts burdened him, heavy and black as the mantle of night. A wolf mourned a hungry cry for a mate. Shepp quivered under Jean’s hand. That was the call that had lured him from the ranch. The wolf blood in him yearned for the wild. Jean tied the cowhide leash to his waist. When this dark business was at an end, Shepp could be free to join the lonely mate mourning out there in the forest. Then Jean slept.
Dawn broke cold, clear, frosty, with silvered grass sparkling with a soft, faint rustling of falling aspen leaves. When the sun rose red, Jean was again on the trail of Queen. By a frosty-ferned brook, where water tinkled and ran clear as air and cold as ice, Jean quenched his thirst, leaning on a stone that showed drops of blood. Queen, too, had to quench his thirst. What good, what help, Jean wondered, could the cold, sweet, granite water, so clear to woodsmen and wild creatures, do this wounded, hunted rustler? Why did he not wait in the open to fight and face the death he had meted? Where was that splendid and terrible daring of the gunman? Queen’s love of life dragged him on and on, hour by hour, through the pine groves and spruce woods, through the oak swales and aspen glades, up and down the rocky gorges, around the windfalls and over the rotting logs.
The time came when Queen made no attempt at ambush. He gave up trying to trap his pursuer by lying in wait. He gave up trying to conceal his tracks. He grew stronger, or in desperation increased his energy, so that he redoubled his progress through the wilderness. That, at best, would count only a few miles a day, and he began to circle to the northwest, back toward the deep cañon where Blaisdell and Bill Isbel had reached the end of their trails. Queen had evidently left his comrades, had lone-handed it in his last fight, but was now trying to get back to them. Somewhere in these wild, deep forest brakes the rest of the Jorth faction had found a hiding place. Jean let Queen lead him there.
Ellen Jorth would be with them. Jean had seen her. It had been his shot that killed Colter’s horse, and he had withheld further fire because Colter had dragged the girl behind him, protecting his body with hers. Sooner or later Jean would come upon their camp. She would be there. The thought of her dark beauty wasted in wantonness upon these rustlers added a deadly rage to the blood-lust and righteous wrath of his vengeance. Let her again flaunt her degradation in his face—and by the God she had forsaken, he would kill her and so end the race of Jorths!
Another night fell, dark and cold, without starlight. The wind moaned in the forest. Shepp was restless. He sniffed the air. There was a step on the trail. Again a mournful, eager, wild, and hungry wolf cry broke the silence. It was deep and low, like that of a baying hound, but infinitely wilder. Shepp strained to get away. During the night, while Jean slept, he managed to chew the cowhide leash apart and run off.
Next day no dog was needed to trail Queen. Fog and low-drifting clouds in the forest and a misty rain had put the rustler off his bearings. He was lost and showed that he realized it. Strange how a matured man, fighter of a hundred battles, steeped in bloodshed, and on his last stand, should grow panic-stricken upon being lost! So Jean Isbel read the signs of the trail.
Queen rushed to and fro, and circled and wandered through the foggy, dripping forest, until he headed down into a cañon. It was one that notched the Tonto Rim and led down and down, mile after mile into the Tonto Basin. Not soon had Queen discovered his mistake. When he did do so, night overtook him.
The weather cleared before morning. Red and bright the sun burst out of the east to flood that low basin land with light. Jean found that Queen had traveled on and on, hoping no doubt to regain what he had lost, but in the darkness he had climbed to the manzanita slopes instead of back up the cañon. Here he had fought the hold of that strange brush of Spanish name until he fell exhausted.
Surely Queen would make his stand and wait somewhere in this devilish thicket for Jean to catch up with him. Many and many a place Jean would have chosen had he been in Queen’s stead. Many a rock and dense thicket Jean circled or approached with extreme care. Manzanita grew in patches that were impenetrable except for a small animal. The brush was a few feet high, seldom so high that Jean could not look over it, and of a beautiful appearance, having glossy, small leaves, a golden berry, and branches of dark red color. These branches were tough and unbendable, every bush, hard as steel, sharp as thorns, as clutching as cactus. Progress was possible through there only by endless detours to find the half-closed aisles between patches, or else by crashing through with main strength, or walking right over the tops. Jean preferred this last method, not because it was the easiest, but for the reason that he could see ahead so much farther. So he literally walked across the tips of the manzanita brush. Often he fell through, and had to step up again; many a branch broke with him, letting him down, but for the most part he stepped from fork to fork, or branch after branch, with the balance of an Indian and the patience of a man whose purpose was sustaining and immutable.
On that south slope under the rim the hot sun beat down. There was no breeze to temper the dry air. Before midday Jean was laboring, wet with sweat, parching with thirst, dusty and hot and tiring. It amazed him, the doggedness and tenacity of life shown by this wounded rustler. The time came when under the burning raze of the sun he was compelled to abandon the walk across the tips of the manzanita bushes and take to the winding, open thresh that ran between. It would have been poor sight, indeed, that could not have followed Queen’s labyrinthine and broken passage through the brush. Then the time came when Jean espied Queen, far ahead and above, crashing like a black bug along the bright green slope. Sight then acted upon Jean as upon a hound in the chase. But he governed his actions, if he could not govern his instincts. Slowly but surely he followed the dusty, hot trail, and never a patch of blood failed to send a thrill along his veins.
Queen headed up toward the rim, finally vanished from sight. Had he fallen? Was he hiding? But the hour disclosed that he was crawling. Jean’s keen eye caught the slow moving of the brush, and enabled him to keep just so close to the rustler, out of the range of the six-shooters he carried. All the interminable hours of the hot afternoon that snail-pace flight and pursuit kept on.
Halfway up to the rim the growth of manzanita gave place to open, yellow, rocky slope dotted with cedars. Queen took to a slow-ascending ridge and left his bloody tracks all the way to the top, where in the gathering darkness the weary pursuer lost them.
Another night passed. Daylight was relentless to the rustler. He could not hide his trail. But somehow in a desperate last rally of strength he reached a point on the heavily timbered ridge that Jean recognized as being near the scene of the fight in the cañon. Queen was nearing the rendezvous of the rustlers. Jean crossed tracks of horses and then more tracks that he was certain had been made days past by his own party. To the left of this ridge must be the deep cañon that had frustrated his effort to catch up with the rustlers on the day Blaisdell lost his life and Bill Isbel disappeared. Something warned Jean that he was nearing the end of the trail, and an unaccountable sense of imminent catastrophe seemed foreshadowed by vague dreads and doubts in his gloomy mind. Jean felt the need of rest, of food, of ease from the strain of the last weeks, but his spirit drove him implacably.
