Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 537
“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 quick and soft. He acted at home in the woods. He had eyes black as night and sharp as lightnin’. They shore saw about 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, presently.
What a red, strange, rolling flash blazed in his eyes! His body jerked.
“Shore. You might as well know.”
“Between sheepmen and cattlemen?”
“Yes.”
“With y’u, dad, at the haid of one faction and Gaston Isbel the other?”
“Daughter, you have it correct, so far as you go.”
“Oh! ... Dad, can’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. “Y’u 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 overrunnin’. 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 wabbling 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 the reason. Shore there’s another. All the Isbels are crooked. They’re cattle an’ 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 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. 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.”
Then it was not the face of a liar that Jorth disclosed. The present was forgotten. He lived in the past. He even seemed younger ‘in the revivifying flash of hate that made his face radiant. The lines burned out. Hate gave him back the spirit of his youth.
“Gaston Isbel an’ I were boys together in Weston, Texas,” began Jorth, in swift, passionate voice. “We went to school together. We loved the same girl — your mother. When the war broke out she was engaged to Isbel. His family was rich. They influenced her people. But she loved me. When Isbel went to war she married me. He came back an’ faced us. God! I’ll never forget that. Your mother confessed her unfaithfulness — by Heaven! She taunted him with it. Isbel accused me of winnin’ her by lies. But she took the sting out of that.
“Isbel never forgave her an’ he hounded me to ruin. He made me out a card-sharp, cheatin’ my best friends. I was disgraced. Later he tangled me in the courts — he beat me out of property — an’ last by convictin’ me of rustlin’ cattle he run me out of Texas.”
Black and distorted now, Jorth’s face was a spectacle to make Ellen sick with a terrible passion of despair and hate. The truth of her father’s ruin and her own were enough. What mattered all else? Jorth beat the table with fluttering, nerveless hands that seemed all the more significant for their lack of physical force.
“An’ so help me God, it’s got to be wiped out in blood!” he hissed.
That was his answer to the wavering and nobility of Ellen. And she in her turn had no answer to make. She crept away into the corner behind the curtain, and there on her couch in the semidarkness she lay with strained heart, and a resurging, unconquerable tumult in her mind. And she lay there from the middle of that afternoon until the next morning.
When she awakened she expected to be unable to rise — she hoped she could not — but life seemed multiplied in her, and inaction was impossible. Something young and sweet and hopeful that had been in her did not greet the sun this morning. In their place was a woman’s passion to learn for herself, to watch events, to meet what must come, to survive.
After breakfast, at which she sat alone, she decided to put Isbel’s package out of the way, so that it would not be subjecting her to continual annoyance. The moment she picked it up the old curiosity assailed her.
“Shore I’ll see what it is, anyway,” she muttered, and with swift hands she opened the package. The action disclosed two pairs of fine, soft shoes, of a style she had never seen, and four pairs of stockings, two of strong, serviceable wool, and the others of a finer texture. Ellen looked at them in amaze. Of all things in the world, these would have been the last she expected to see. And, strangely, they were what she wanted and needed most. Naturally, then, Ellen made the mistake of taking them in her hands to feel their softness and warmth.
“Shore! He saw my bare legs! And he brought me these presents he’d intended for his sister.... He was ashamed for me — sorry for me.... And I thought he looked at me bold-like, as I’m used to be looked at heah! Isbel or not, he’s shore...”
But Ellen Jorth could not utter aloud the conviction her intelligence tried to force upon her.
“It’d be a pity to burn them,” she mused. “I cain’t do it. Sometime I might send them to Ann Isbel.”
Whereupon she wrapped them up again and hid them in the bottom of the old trunk, and slowly, as she lowered the lid, looking darkly, blankly at the wall, she whispered: “Jean Isbel! ... I hate him!”
Later when Ellen went outdoors she carried her rifle, which was unusual for her, unless she intended to go into the woods.
The morning was sunny and warm. A group of shirt-sleeved men lounged in the hall and before the porch of the double cabin. Her father was pacing up and down, talking forcibly. Ellen heard his hoarse voice. As she approached he ceased talking and his listeners relaxed their attention. Ellen’s glance ran over them swiftly — Daggs, with his superb head, like that of a hawk, uncovered to the sun; Colter with his lowered, secretive looks, his sand-gray lean face; Jackson Jorth, her uncle, huge, gaunt, hulking, with white in his black beard and hair, and the fire of a ghoul in his hollow eyes; Tad Jorth, another brother of her father’s, younger, red of eye and nose, a weak-chinned drinker of rum. Three other limber-legged Texans lounged there, partners of Daggs, and they were sun-browned, light-haired, blue-eyed men singularly alike in appearance, from their dusty high-heeled boots to their broad black sombreros. They claimed to be sheepmen. All Ellen could be sure of was that Rock Wells spent most of his time there, doing nothing but look for a chance to waylay her; Springer was a gambler; and the third, who answered to the strange name of Queen, was a silent, lazy, watchful-eyed man who never wore a glove on his right hand and who never was seen without a gun within easy reach of that hand.
“Howdy, Ellen. Shore you ain’t goin’ to say good mawnin’ to this heah bad lot?” drawled Daggs, with good-natured sarcasm.
“Why, shore! Good morning, y’u hard-working industrious MANANA sheep raisers,” replied Ellen, coolly.
Daggs stared. The others appeared taken back by a greeting so foreign from any to which they were accustomed from her. Jackson Jorth let out a gruff haw-haw. Some of them doffed their sombreros, and Rock Wells managed a lazy, polite good morning. Ellen’s father seemed most significantly struck by her greeting, and the least amused.
“Ellen, I’m not likin’ your talk,” he said, with a frown.
“Dad, when y’u play cards don’t y’u call a spade a spade?”
“Why, shore I do.”
“Well, I’m calling spades spades.”
“Ahuh!” grunted Jorth, furtively dropping his eyes. “Where you goin’ with your gun? I’d rather you hung round heah now.”
“Reckon I might as well get used to packing my gun all the time,” replied Ellen. “Reckon I’ll be treated more like a man.”
Then the event Ellen had been expecting all morning took place. Simm Bruce and Lorenzo rode around the slope of the Knoll and trotted toward the cabin. Interest in Ellen was relegated to the background.
“Shore they’re bustin’ with news,” declared Daggs.
“They been ridin’ some, you bet,” remarked another.
“Huh!” exclaimed Jorth. “Bruce shore looks queer to me.”
“Red liquor,” said Tad Jorth, sententiously. “You-all know the brand Greaves hands out.”
“Naw, Simm ain’t drunk,” said Jackson Jorth. “Look at his bloody shirt.”
The cool, indolent interest of the crowd vanished at the red color pointed out by Jackson Jorth. Daggs rose in a single springy motion to his lofty height. The face Bruce turned to Jorth was swollen and bruised, with unhealed cuts. Where his right eye should have been showed a puffed dark purple bulge. His other eye, however, gleamed with hard and sullen light. He stretched a big shaking hand toward Jorth.
“Thet Nez Perce Isbel beat me half to death,” he bellowed.
Jorth stared hard at the tragic, almost grotesque figure, at the battered face. But speech failed him. It was Daggs who answered Bruce.
“Wal, Simm, I’ll be damned if you don’t look it.”
“Beat you! What with?” burst out Jorth, explosively.
“I thought he was swingin’ an ax, but Greaves swore it was his fists,” bawled Bruce, in misery and fury.
“Where was your gun?” queried Jorth, sharply.
“Gun? Hell!” exclaimed Bruce, flinging wide his arms. “Ask Lorenzo. He had a gun. An’ he got a biff in the jaw before my turn come. Ask him?”
Attention thus directed to the Mexican showed a heavy discolored swelling upon the side of his olive-skinned face. Lorenzo looked only serious.
“Hah! Speak up,” shouted Jorth, impatiently.
“Senor Isbel heet me ver quick,” replied Lorenzo, with expressive gesture. “I see thousand stars — then moocho black — all like night.”
At that some of Daggs’s men lolled back with dry crisp laughter. Daggs’s hard face rippled with a smile. But there was no humor in anything for Colonel Jorth.
“Tell us what come off. Quick!” he ordered. “Where did it happen? Why? Who saw it? What did you do?”
Bruce lapsed into a sullen impressiveness. “Wal, I happened in Greaves’s store an’ run into Jean Isbel. Shore was lookin’ fer him. I had my mind made up what to do, but I got to shootin’ off my gab instead of my gun. I called him Nez Perce — an’ I throwed all thet talk in his face about old Gass Isbel sendin’ fer him — an’ I told him he’d git run out of the Tonto. Reckon I was jest warmin’ up.... But then it all happened. He slugged Lorenzo jest one. An’ Lorenzo slid peaceful-like to bed behind the counter. I hadn’t time to think of throwin’ a gun before he whaled into me. He knocked out two of my teeth. An’ I swallered one of them.”
Ellen stood in the background behind three of the men and in the shadow. She did not join in the laugh that followed Bruce’s remarks. She had known that he would lie. Uncertain yet of her reaction to this, but more bitter and furious as he revealed his utter baseness, she waited for more to be said.
“Wal, I’ll be doggoned,” drawled Daggs.
“What do you make of this kind of fightin’?” queried Jorth,
“Darn if I know,” replied Daggs in perplexity. “Shore an’ sartin it’s not the way of a Texan. Mebbe this young Isbel really is what old Gass swears he is. Shore Bruce ain’t nothin’ to give an edge to a real gun fighter. Looks to me like Isbel bluffed Greaves an’ his gang an’ licked your men without throwin’ a gun.”
“Maybe Isbel doesn’t want the name of drawin’ first blood,” suggested Jorth.
“That ‘d be like Gass,” spoke up Rock Wells, quietly. “I onct rode fer Gass in Texas.”
“Say, Bruce,” said Daggs, “was this heah palaverin’ of yours an’ Jean Isbel’s aboot the old stock dispute? Aboot his father’s range an’ water? An’ partickler aboot, sheep?”
“Wal — I — I yelled a heap,” declared Bruce, haltingly, “but I don’t recollect all I said — I was riled.... Shore, though it was the same old argyment thet’s been fetchin’ us closer an’ closer to trouble.”
Daggs removed his keen hawklike gaze from Bruce. “Wal, Jorth, all I’ll say is this. If Bruce is tellin’ the truth we ain’t got a hell of a lot to fear from this young Isbel. I’ve known a heap of gun fighters in my day. An’ Jean Isbel don’t ran true to class. Shore there never was a gunman who’d risk cripplin’ his right hand by sluggin’ anybody.”
“Wal,” broke in Bruce, sullenly. “You-all can take it daid straight or not. I don’t give a damn. But you’ve shore got my hunch thet Nez Perce Isbel is liable to handle any of you fellars jest as he did me, an’ jest as easy. What’s more, he’s got Greaves figgered. An’ you-all know thet Greaves is as deep in—”
“Shut up that kind of gab,” demanded Jorth, stridently. “An’ answer me. Was the row in Greaves’s barroom aboot sheep?”
“Aw, hell! I said so, didn’t I?” shouted Bruce, with a fierce uplift of his distorted face.
Ellen strode out from the shadow of the tall men who had obscured her.
“Bruce, y’u’re a liar,” she said, bitingly.
The surprise of her sudden appearance seemed to root Bruce to the spot. All but the discolored places on his face turned white. He held his breath a moment, then expelled it hard. His effort to recover from the shock was painfully obvious. He stammered incoherently.
“Shore y’u’re more than a liar, too,” cried Ellen, facing him with blazing eyes. And the rifle, gripped in both hands, seemed to declare her intent of menace. “That row was not about sheep.... Jean Isbel didn’t beat y’u for anythin’ about sheep.... Old John Sprague was in Greaves’s store. He heard y’u. He saw Jean Isbel beat y’u as y’u deserved.... An’ he told ME!”
Ellen saw Bruce shrink in fear of his life; and despite her fury she was filled with disgust that he could imagine she would have his blood on her hands. Then she divined that Bruce saw more in the gathering storm in her father’s eyes than he had to fear from her.
“Girl, what the hell are y’u sayin’?” hoarsely called Jorth, in dark amaze.
“Dad, y’u leave this to me,” she retorted.
Daggs stepped beside Jorth, significantly on his right side. “Let her alone Lee,” he advised, coolly. “She’s shore got a hunch on Bruce.”
“Simm Bruce, y’u cast a dirty slur on my name,” cried Ellen, passionately.
It was then that Daggs grasped Jorth’s right arm and held it tight, “Jest what I thought,” he said. “Stand still, Lee. Let’s see the kid make him showdown.”
“That’s what jean Isbel beat y’u for,” went on Ellen. “For slandering a girl who wasn’t there.... Me! Y’u rotten liar!”
“But, Ellen, it wasn’t all lies,” said Bruce, huskily. “I was half drunk — an’ horrible jealous.... You know Lorenzo seen Isbel kissin’ you. I can prove thet.”
Ellen threw up her head and a scarlet wave of shame and wrath flooded her face.
“Yes,” she cried, ringingly. “He saw Jean Isbel kiss me. Once! ... An’ it was the only decent kiss I’ve had in years. He meant no insult. I didn’t know who he was. An’ through his kiss I learned a difference between men.... Y’u made Lorenzo lie. An’ if I had a shred of good name left in Grass Valley you dishonored it.... Y’u made him think I was your girl! Damn y’u! I ought to kill y’u.... Eat your words now — take them back — or I’ll cripple y’u for life!”
Ellen lowered the cocked rifle toward his feet.
“Shore, Ellen, I take back — all I said,” gulped Bruce. He gazed at the quivering rifle barrel and then into the face of Ellen’s father. Instinct told him where his real peril lay.
Here the cool and tactful Daggs showed himself master of the situation.
“Heah, listen!” he called. “Ellen, I reckon Bruce was drunk an’ out of his haid. He’s shore ate his words. Now, we don’t want any cripples in this camp. Let him alone. Your dad got me heah to lead the Jorths, an’ that’s my say to you.... Simm, you’re shore a low-down lyin’ rascal. Keep away from Ellen after this or I’ll bore you myself.... Jorth, it won’t be a bad idee for you to forget you’re a Texan till you cool off. Let Bruce stop some Isbel lead. Shore the Jorth-Isbel war is aboot on, an’ I reckon we’d be smart to believe old Gass’s talk aboot his Nez Perce son.”
CHAPTER VI
FROM THIS HOUR Ellen Jorth bent all of her lately awakened intelligence and will to the only end that seemed to hold possible salvation for her. In the crisis sure to come she did not want to be blind or weak. Dreaming and indolence, habits born in her which were often a comfort to one as lonely as she, would ill fit her for the hard test she divined and dreaded. In the matter of her father’s fight she must stand by him whatever the issue or the outcome; in what pertained to her own principles, her womanhood, and her soul she stood absolutely alone.
