Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 293
“Oh, you mustn’t talk like that!”
“Do you love me?” she asked, with a low and deathless sweetness.
“Love you? With all my heart! Nothing can change that!”
“Do you want me — as you used to want the Fay Larkin lost in Surprise Valley? Do you love me that way? I understand things better than before, but still — not all. I AM Fay Larkin. I think I must have dreamed of you all my life. I was glad when you came here. I’ve been happy lately. I forgot — till last night. Maybe it needed that to make me see I’ve loved you all the time.... And I fought him like a wildcat!... Tell me the truth. I feel I’m yours. Is that true? If I’m not — I’ll not live another hour. Something holds me up. I am the same.... Do you want me?”
“Yes, Fay Larkin, I want you,” replied Shefford, steadily, with his grip on her arms.
“Then take me away. I don’t want to live here another hour.”
“Fay, I’ll take you. But it can’t be done at once. We must plan. I need help. There are Lassiter and Jane to get out of Surprise Valley. Give me time, dear — give me time. It’ll be a hard job. And we must plan so we can positively get away. Give me time, Fay.”
“Suppose HE comes back?” she queried, with a singular depth of voice.
“We’ll have to risk that,” replied Shefford, miserably. “But — he won’t come soon.”
“He said he would,” she flashed.
Shefford seemed to freeze inwardly with her words. Love had made her a woman and now the woman in her was speaking. She saw the truth as he could not see it. And the truth was nature. She had been hidden all her life from the world, from knowledge as he had it, yet when love betrayed her womanhood to her she acquired all its subtlety.
“If I wait and he DOES come will you keep me from him?” she asked.
“How can I? I’m staking all on the chance of his not coming soon. ... But, Fay, if he DOES come and I don’t give up our secret — how on earth can I keep you from him?” demanded Shefford.
“If you love me you will do it,” she said, as simply as if she were fate.
“But how?” cried Shefford, almost beside himself.
“You are a man. Any man would save the woman who loves him from — from — Oh, from a beast!... How would Lassiter do it?”
“Lassiter!”
“YOU CAN KILL HIM!”
It was there, deep and full in her voice, the strength of the elemental forces that had surrounded her, primitive passion and hate and love, as they were in woman in the beginning.
“My God!” Shefford cried aloud with his spirit when all that was red in him sprang again into a flame of hell. That was what had been wrong with him last night. He could kill this stealthy night-rider, and now, face to face with Fay, who had never been so beautiful and wonderful as in this hour when she made love the only and the sacred thing of life, now he had it in him to kill. Yet, murder — even to kill a brute — that was not for John Shefford, not the way for him to save a woman. Reason and wisdom still fought the passion in him. If he could but cling to them — have them with him in the dark and contending hour!
She leaned against him now, exhausted, her soul in her eyes, and they saw only him. Shefford was all but powerless to resist the longing to take her into his arms, to hold her to his heart, to let himself go. Did not her love give her to him? Shefford gazed helplessly at the stricken Joe Lake, at the somber Indian, as if from them he expected help.
“I know him now,” said Fay, breaking the silence with startling suddenness.
“What!”
“I’ve seen him in the light. I flashed a candle in his face. I saw it. I know him now. He was there at Stonebridge with us, and I never knew him. But I know him now. His name is—”
“For God’s sake don’t tell me who he is!” implored Shefford.
Ignorance was Shefford’s safeguard against himself. To make a name of this heretofore intangible man, to give him an identity apart from the crowd, to be able to recognize him — that for Shefford would be fatal.
“Fay — tell me — no more,” he said, brokenly. “I love you and I will give you my life. Trust me. I swear I’ll save you.”
“Will you take me away soon?”
“Yes.”
She appeared satisfied with that and dropped her hands and moved back from him. A light flitted over her white face, and her eyes grew dark and humid, losing their fire in changing, shadowing thought of submission, of trust, of hope.
“I can lead you to Surprise Valley,” she said. “I feel the way. It’s there!” And she pointed to the west.
“Fay, we’ll go — soon. I must plan. I’ll see you to-night. Then we’ll talk. Run home now, before some of the women see you here.”
She said good-by and started away under the cedars, out into the open where her hair shone like gold in the sunlight, and she took the stepping-stones with her old free grace, and strode down the path swift and lithe as an Indian. Once she turned to wave a hand.
Shefford watched her with a torture of pride, love, hope, and fear contending within him.
XIV. THE NAVAJO
THAT MORNING A Piute rode into the valley.
Shefford recognized him as the brave who had been in love with Glen Naspa. The moment Nas Ta Bega saw this visitor he made a singular motion with his hands — a motion that somehow to Shefford suggested despair — and then he waited, somber and statuesque, for the messenger to come to him. It was the Piute who did all the talking, and that was brief. Then the Navajo stood motionless, with his hands crossed over his breast. Shefford drew near and waited.
“Bi Nai,” said the Navajo, “Nas Ta Bega said his sister would come home some day.... Glen Naspa is in the hogan of her grandfather.”
He spoke in his usual slow, guttural voice, and he might have been bronze for all the emotion he expressed; yet Shefford instinctively felt the despair that had been hinted to him, and he put his hand on the Indian’s shoulder.
“If I am the Navajo’s brother, then I am brother to Glen Naspa,” he said. “I will go with you to the hogan of Hosteen Doetin.”
Nas Ta Bega went away into the valley for the horses. Shefford hurried to the village, made his excuses at the school, and then called to explain to Fay that trouble of some kind had come to the Indian.
Soon afterward he was riding Nack-yal on the rough and winding trail up through the broken country of cliffs and canyon to the great league-long sage and cedar slope of the mountain. It was weeks since he had ridden the mustang. Nack-yal was fat and lazy. He loved his master, but he did not like the climb, and so fell far behind the lean and wiry pony that carried Nas Ta Bega. The sage levels were as purple as the haze of the distance, and there was a bitter-sweet tang on the strong, cool wind. The sun was gold behind the dark line of fringe on the mountain-top. A flock of sheep swept down one of the sage levels, looking like a narrow stream of white and black and brown. It was always amazing for Shefford to see how swiftly these Navajo sheep grazed along. Wild mustangs plunged out of the cedar clumps and stood upon the ridges, whistling defiance or curiosity, and their manes and tails waved in the wind.
Shefford mounted slowly to the cedar bench in the midst of which were hidden the few hogans. And he halted at the edge to dismount and take a look at that downward-sweeping world of color, of wide space, at the wild desert upland which from there unrolled its magnificent panorama.
Then he passed on into the cedars. How strange to hear the lambs bleating again! Lambing-time had come early, but still spring was there in the new green of grass, in the bright upland flower. He led his mustang out of the cedars into the cleared circle. It was full of colts and lambs, and there were the shepherd-dogs and a few old rams and ewes. But the circle was a quiet place this day. There were no Indians in sight. Shefford loosened the saddle-girths on Nack-yal and, leaving him to graze, went toward the hogan of Hosteen Doetin. A blanket was hung across the door. Shefford heard a low chanting. He waited beside the door till the covering was pulled in, then he entered.
Hosteen Doetin met him, clasped his hand. The old Navajo could not speak; his fine face was working in grief; tears streamed from his dim old eyes and rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. His sorrow was no different from a white man’s sorrow. Beyond him Shefford saw Nas Ta Bega standing with folded arms, somehow terrible in his somber impassiveness. At his feet crouched the old woman, Hosteen Doetin’s wife, and beside her, prone and quiet, half covered with a blanket, lay Glen Naspa.
She was dead. To Shefford she seemed older than when he had last seen her. And she was beautiful. Calm, cold, dark, with only bitter lips to give the lie to peace! There was a story in those lips.
At her side, half hidden under the fold of blanket, lay a tiny bundle. Its human shape startled Shefford. Then he did not need to be told the tragedy. When he looked again at Glen Naspa’s face he seemed to understand all that had made her older, to feel the pain that had lined and set her lips.
She was dead, and she was the last of Nas Ta Bega’s family. In the old grandfather’s agony, in the wild chant of the stricken grandmother, in the brother’s stern and terrible calmness Shefford felt more than the death of a loved one. The shadow of ruin, of doom, of death hovered over the girl and her family and her tribe and her race. There was no consolation to offer these relatives of Glen Naspa. Shefford took one more fascinated gaze at her dark, eloquent, prophetic face, at the tragic tiny shape by her side, and then with bowed head he left the hogan.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Outside he paced to and fro, with an aching heart for Nas Ta Bega, with something of the white man’s burden of crime toward the Indian weighing upon his soul.
Old Hosteen Doetin came to him with shaking hands and words memorable of the time Glen Naspa left his hogan.
“Me no savvy Jesus Christ. Me hungry. Me no eat Jesus Christ!”
That seemed to be all of his trouble that he could express to Shefford. He could not understand the religion of the missionary, this Jesus Christ who had called his granddaughter away. And the great fear of an old Indian was not death, but hunger. Shefford remembered a custom of the Navajos, a thing barbarous looked at with a white man’s mind. If an old Indian failed on a long march he was inclosed by a wall of stones, given plenty to eat and drink, and left there to die in the desert. Not death did he fear, but hunger! Old Hosteen Doetin expected to starve, now that the young and strong squaw of his family was gone.
Shefford spoke in his halting Navajo and assured the old Indian that Nas Ta Bega would never let him starve.
At sunset Shefford stood with Nas Ta Bega facing the west. The Indian was magnificent in repose. He watched the sun go down upon the day that had seen the burial of the last of his family. He resembled an impassive destiny, upon which no shocks fell. He had the light of that flaring golden sky in his face, the majesty of the mountain in his mien, the silence of the great gulf below on his lips. This educated Navajo, who had reverted to the life of his ancestors, found in the wildness and loneliness of his environment a strength no white teaching could ever have given him. Shefford sensed in him a measureless grief, an impenetrable gloom, a tragic acceptance of the meaning of Glen Naspa’s ruin and death — the vanishing of his race from the earth. Death had written the law of such bitter truth round Glen Naspa’s lips, and the same truth was here in the grandeur and gloom of the Navajo.
“Bi Nai,” he said, with the beautiful sonorous roll in his voice, “Glen Naspa is in her grave and there are no paths to the place of her sleep. Glen Naspa is gone.”
“Gone! Where? Nas Ta Bega, remember I lost my own faith, and I have not yet learned yours.”
“The Navajo has one mother — the earth. Her body has gone to the earth and it will become dust. But her spirit is in the air. It shall whisper to me from the wind. I shall hear it on running waters. It will hide in the morning music of a mocking-bird and in the lonely night cry of the canyon hawk. Her blood will go to make the red of the Indian flowers and her soul will rest at midnight in the lily that opens only to the moon. She will wait in the shadow for me, and live in the great mountain that is my home, and for ever step behind me on the trail.”
“You will kill Willetts?” demanded Shefford.
“The Navajo will not seek the missionary.”
“But if you meet him you’ll kill him?”
“Bi Nai, would Nas Ta Bega kill after it is too late? What good could come? The Navajo is above revenge.”
“If he crosses my trail I think I couldn’t help but kill him,” muttered Shefford in a passion that wrung the threat from him.
The Indian put his arm round the white man’s shoulders.
“Bi Nai, long ago I made you my brother. And now you make me your brother. Is it not so? Glen Naspa’s spirit calls for wisdom, not revenge. Willetts must be a bad man. But we’ll let him live. Life will punish him. Who knows if he was all to blame? Glen Naspa was only one pretty Indian girl. There are many white men in the desert. She loved a white man when she was a baby. The thing was a curse. ... Listen, Bi Nai, and the Navajo will talk.
“Many years ago the Spanish padres, the first white men, came into the land of the Indian. Their search was for gold. But they were not wicked men. They did not steal and kill. They taught the Indian many useful things. They brought him horses. But when they went away they left him unsatisfied with his life and his god.
“Then came the pioneers. They crossed the great river and took the pasture-lands and the hunting-grounds of the Indian. They drove him backward, and the Indian grew sullen. He began to fight. The white man’s government made treaties with the Indian, and these were broken. Then war came — fierce and bloody war. The Indian was driven to the waste places. The stream of pioneers, like a march of ants, spread on into the desert. Every valley where grass grew, every river, became a place for farms and towns. Cattle choked the water-holes where the buffalo and deer had once gone to drink. The forests in the hills were cut and the springs dried up. And the pioneers followed to the edge of the desert.
“Then came the prospectors, mad, like the padres for the gleam of gold. The day was not long enough for them to dig in the creeks and the canyon; they worked in the night. And they brought weapons and rum to the Indian, to buy from him the secret of the places where the shining gold lay hidden.
“Then came the traders. And they traded with the Indian. They gave him little for much, and that little changed his life. He learned a taste for the sweet foods of the white man. Because he could trade for a sack of flour he worked less in the field. And the very fiber of his bones softened.
“Then came the missionaries. They were proselytizers for converts to their religion. The missionaries are good men. There may be a bad missionary, like Willetts, the same as there are bad men in other callings, or bad Indians. They say Shadd is a half-breed. But the Piutes can tell you he is a full-blood, and he, like me, was sent to a white man’s school. In the beginning the missionaries did well for the Indian. They taught him cleaner ways of living, better farming, useful work with tools — many good things. But the wrong to the Indian was the undermining of his faith. It was not humanity that sent the missionary to the Indian. Humanity would have helped the Indian in his ignorance of sickness and work, and left him his god. For to trouble the Indian about his god worked at the roots of his nature.
“The beauty of the Indian’s life is in his love of the open, of all that is nature, of silence, freedom, wildness. It is a beauty of mind and soul. The Indian would have been content to watch and feel. To a white man he might be dirty and lazy — content to dream life away without trouble or what the white man calls evolution. The Indian might seem cruel because he leaves his old father out in the desert to die. But the old man wants to die that way, alone with his spirits and the sunset. And the white man’s medicine keeps his old father alive days and days after he ought to be dead. Which is more cruel? The Navajos used to fight with other tribes, and then they were stronger men than they are to-day.
“But leaving religion, greed, and war out of the question, contact with the white man would alone have ruined the Indian. The Indian and the white man cannot mix. The Indian brave learns the habits of the white man, acquires his diseases, and has not the mind or body to withstand them. The Indian girl learns to love the white man — and that is death of her Indian soul, if not of life.
“So the red man is passing. Tribes once powerful have died in the life of Nas Ta Bega. The curse of the white man is already heavy upon my race in the south. Here in the north, in the wildest corner of the desert, chased here by the great soldier, Carson, the Navajo has made his last stand.
“Bi Nai, you have seen the shadow in the hogan of Hosteen Doetin. Glen Naspa has gone to her grave, and no sisters, no children, will make paths to the place of her sleep. Nas Ta Bega will never have a wife — a child. He sees the end. It is the sunset of the Navajo.... Bi Nai, the Navajo is dying — dying — dying!”
XV. WILD JUSTICE
A CRESCENT MOON hung above the lofty peak over the valley and a train of white stars ran along the bold rim of the western wall. A few young frogs peeped plaintively. The night was cool, yet had a touch of balmy spring, and a sweeter fragrance, as if the cedars and pinyons had freshened in the warm sun of that day.
Shefford and Fay were walking in the aisles of moonlight and the patches of shade, and Nas Ta Bega, more than ever a shadow of his white brother, followed them silently.
“Fay, it’s growing late. Feel the dew?” said Shefford. “Come, I must take you back.”
“But the time’s so short. I have said nothing that I wanted to say,” she replied.
“Say it quickly, then, as we go.”
“After all, it’s only — will you take me away soon?”
“Yes, very soon. The Indian and I have talked. But we’ve made no plan yet. There are only three ways to get out of this country. By Stonebridge, by Kayenta and Durango, and by Red Lake. We must choose one. All are dangerous. We must lose time finding Surprise Valley. I hoped the Indian could find it. Then we’d bring Lassiter and Jane here and hide them near till dark, then take you and go. That would give us a night’s start. But you must help us to Surprise Valley.”
