Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 908
“There. You’ve come to. I reckon I must ask you to excuse me for bein’ rough. But I shore couldn’t stand that talk aboot not lovin’ you.”
“I will not believe — unless you prove it,” returned Hettie, unsteadily, as she reached for her sombrero.
Nevada rose to his feet. “I cain’t prove it your way,” he replied, and his features set stone-cold and gray.
“Oh, what have you done to me?” cried Hettie, wildly, as again passion rose strong and regained the ascendancy over her.
“Reckon nothin’ compared to what you’ve done to me,” he responded, with somber gaze upon her. “Dillon will just aboot beat me to a gun.”
Hettie stood up, holding to the tree trunk. “Nothing. . . . I’ve loved you since I first met you. I’ve been true. I trusted you. I cared not for your past. I believed in your future. I prayed for you. My faith in you was as great as my faith in God. I believed you loved me. That when you rode away from Forlorn River — to escape the consequences — when you killed Less Setter to save Ben — I believed you would be true to me, to the higher self you found through Ben’s love and mine. . . . But you were too little. You went back to the old life — to the old comrades. Rustlers, gamblers, gunmen! You killed just because you wanted to keep that name hated and feared. You are a bloody monster. . . . No doubt you sank to the embrace of vile women — the consorts of thieves! O my God! it would be my death if I could not kill my love. But I will. It will lie dead as my faith. . . . You are a liar, a failure, a weakling. Basest of all is your ingratitude. You stole from my brother — who loved you.”
Nevada’s eyes held a blaze like black lightning.
“Reckon that’ll be aboot all I want to heah,” he said, in tones she had never heard before.
“That is — all.”
He gathered up the reins and vaulted into the saddle, then turned to gaze down the trail.
“Horses comin’,” he said, briefly. “It’s Marvie with his girl, Rose Hatt.”
“Yes, I see,” returned Hettie, with a start. “Oh, I’m glad.”
“Wal, Miss Hettie Ide,” he said, “you might heah somethin’ from Marvie an’ Rose. Anyway, don’t rustle back home too quick.”
Her lips framed a query she could not speak.
“It’s aboot sunset,” he went on, with strange gaze upon the west. “Sunset for Dillon! An’ shore sunset for me!”
Then he spurred the big black, and clattering into the trail soon vanished from sight toward the ranch.
CHAPTER TWENTY
NEVADA APPROACHED THE Ide ranch from that side closest to the forest, where the pines and cedars trooped down the gentle slopes of the benches, clear to the most outwardly of the cattle sheds.
With his brain on fire and his heart like lead, his whole being crushed under the burning weight of Hettie’s outspoken love and terrible scorn, he halted under cover of the last clump of cedars, and dismounted, answering to an instinct, true even in that hour of utter catastrophe, to the instinct which had preserved him so long as Jim Lacy. Not now, however, was it an instinct of self-preservation, but one to meet and kill Ed Richardson, alias Campbell, alias Clan Dillon, late member of the few surviving Lincoln County war desperadoes.
Wedging this purpose into his stunned brain, Nevada kept driving it deeper, while he removed saddle and bridle from his horse and turned it free. He would have no more need of a horse. Then he crouched in the cedars, under tremendous strain, driving himself to the exclusion of all thought, of all emotion, of all faculties except those few cardinally important for the issue at hand.
When he emerged from under cover of the cedars he might have been an automaton, with guidance of some grim-strung spirit.
He glided behind brush to the sage and through this to the pole fence. It led to the back of log cabins, which he marked as the bunkhouses. The sunset hour was near. Silver-edged purple clouds hung over the soft rounded foothills. Soon the sun would sink from behind the broken mass of cloud and slide down into that golden space behind the ranges. Cowboys, riders, range hands, foreman, all would be waiting the call to supper. The day had been hot. Just now, with the first cool breeze breathing down from the hill, all the men would be outdoors.
There was a fate in many meetings of life, and singularly in all those that involved Jim Lacy.
He swept his magnified gaze to the left, over pasture and field, which were open to his sight. A few horses and colts, cows and calves, a burro, and some black pigs dotted the gray-green pastures and the brown fields. No rider in sight!
Nevada stole swiftly along the fence to the first high corral. It contained a number of horses, with saddles and packs stacked in a corner. He would have to cross this corral, and go through the others, to reach the rear of the bunkhouses. Climbing to the top log of the high fence, he peeped over. No man in sight! He climbed and ran and climbed and ran, quickly gaining the open gate of the last corral. The two small log cabins and the long one stood across the open space, with barns to the left and courtyard on the right, leading up to the Ide homes in the edge of the forest.
A Mexican boy appeared leading horses to a watering-trough; a rider came trotting down the long lane between the fields; some one was driving cows in from the pasture. From behind the cabins came the loud rollicking laughter of cowboys.
Nevada did not hesitate a moment. Leisurely he strode from the corral toward the long cabin, making for the nearest end, where cords of firewood were stacked high. That end, where blue smoke curled from a stone chimney, would be the kitchen. There would be a porch on the other side.
Nevada gained the woodpiles. They had been stacked, seemingly, to furnish him perfect passageway and perfect cover, for the fruition of this long-planned moment. It never crossed his mind that Dillon might not be there. Dillon would be there. For the men who had wronged Jim Lacy or incurred his enmity there existed a fatality which operated infallibly. Or else Lacy never made a mistake. It was something that he felt.
He glided between the high stacks of wood. Before he peeped out he saw horsemen riding down the dusty road which wound away to the north and Winthrop. Then Nevada put his eye to an aperture between two billets of cedar that protruded from the stack.
A dozen or more men lounged and sat and stood in plain sight. Cowboys in shirt sleeves, faces shiny and red, hair glossed and wet, sat on the ground, backs to the cabin. Nevada recognized Macklin, the Winthrop sheriff, leaning against the hitching rail, in conversation with two other men, not garbed as riders. Facing Nevada was a tall man in black and he had a bright badge on his vest. He was another sheriff, a stranger to Nevada.
“We sure want to get off by sunup,” he was saying to a man near him.
This man stood with his back toward Nevada. His powerful supple shoulders showed wonderfully through his white clean shirt. Nevada recognized that lithe stalwart build, the leonine neck, the handsome head, with its clustering fair hair.
Dillon! A slight cold thrill ran over Nevada. Following it came an instinct like that of a tiger to leap.
Nevada swiftly ran his glance over the other men, standing near and in the background. Ben Ide was not present!
Then Nevada drew back behind the woodpile, loosened his gun in its sheath, and stood there an instant while the waiting forces of brain and muscle vibrated into a tremendous unity.
“Come an’ get it,” sang out the cheery voice of the cook inside.
“Whoopee! Whoaboy,” shouted the cowboys, scrambling up.
At this instant Nevada bounded out swiftly and ran to a halt.
“HOLD ON!” he yelled, with all the power of his lungs. His piercing voice made statues of all, even the cowboys stiffening in half-erect postures.
In the instant of silence that ensued Dillon was the only man to move and he wheeled swift as a flash, so swiftly that the receding trace of mirth had not yet left his handsome face.
“Howdy, Dillon!” drawled Nevada, slow and cool.
Macklin shuffled erect in great alarm.
“That’s Jim Lacy,” he shouted, hoarsely.
“Shore is. Careful now, you outsiders!” warned Nevada, yet with eye only for Dillon.
Every man in line with Dillon plunged off the porch or darted into the cabin. The cowboys sank back to the ground, sagging against the log wall.
Dillon stood on the porch, facing Nevada, scarcely thirty feet distant. His reaction from careless mirth to recognition of peril was as swift as his sight. But there followed the instant when his faculties had to grasp what that peril was and how he should meet it.
Nevada had gambled on this instant. It was his advantage. He did not underrate Dillon. He read his mind in those dilating eyes.
“Wal, you know me,” cut out Nevada, icily. “An’ I know you — Dillon — Campbell! — ED RICHARDSON!”
That was the paralyzing challenge. The rustler turned a ghastly white. The frontier’s bloody creed, by which he had lived, called him to his death. His green eyes set balefully. He knew. He showed his training. He had no more fear of death than of the swallows flitting under the eaves above. But he had a magnificent and desperate courage to take his enemy with him.
Richardson never uttered a word. Almost imperceptibly his body lowered as if under instinct to crouch. His stiff bent right arm began to quiver.
Nevada saw the thought in Richardson’s eyes — the birth of the message to nerve and muscle. When his hand flashed down Nevada was drawing.
Crash! Nevada’s shot did not beat Richardson’s draw, but it broke his aim. Boom! The rustler’s gun went off half leveled. He lurched with terrible violence and his gun boomed again. The bullet scattered the gravel at Nevada’s feet and spanged away into the air.
A wide red spot appeared as if by magic on the middle of Richardson’s white shirt. How terrible to see him strain to raise his gun-arm!
At Nevada’s second shot one of Richardson’s awful eyes went blank. His gun clattered to the floor. He swayed. His arm hooked round the porch post. Then it sank limp, letting him fall with sodden thud.
Nevada was the first to withdraw his gaze from that twitching body. He flipped his gun into the air and caught it by the barrel.
“Heah, sir,” he said to the sheriff with the star on his vest, and extended the gun butt foremost. “I reckon that’ll be aboot all for Jim Lacy.”
The strain on the watchers relaxed. A murmur of wonder ran through them, growing louder. The sheriff came to a power of movement and speech.
“What? Lacy, are you handin’ — over your gun?” he queried, hoarsely.
“Wal, I’m not pointin’ the right end of it at you,” replied Nevada, and tossed the gun at the sheriff’s feet.
“What — the hell?” gasped a weather-beaten old rider, Raidy, staring hard at Nevada.
Here Macklin came rushing up, to get between Nevada and the other sheriff.
“Jim Lacy, you’re my prisoner,” yelled Macklin, beside himself with the strange opportunity presented and a terror of the enormity of his risk. He drew his gun. “Hands up.”
“Shoot an’ be damned, you four-flush officer of the law,” retorted Nevada, wearily, and turning his back to Macklin he strode to a seat on the porch steps.
“Run for the boss,” shouted Raidy to the cowboys. “Tell him there’s hell come off. Fetch him an’ Judge Franklidge.”
“Hyar comes Tom Day with his outfit,” yelled a cowboy, excitedly, pointing to the horsemen entering the square. “The whole range’s hyar. Haw! Haw!”
Nevada experienced a weariness of soul and body. It was over. He did not care what happened.
“Say, give me a smoke — one of you punchers,” he said, removing his sombrero to wipe his clammy brow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MARVIE BLAINE CAME swinging down the trail at a gallop, with Rose Hatt riding close behind.
Eager excitement lent Hettie the strength to mount her horse. Nevada’s strange eyes and words! What might not Marvie and Rose have to tell her?
“Hey there, Hettie!” shouted Marvie, when still some rods distant. “Look who’s comin’ behind.”
Hettie complied, with emotions changing, rising again in a flood, new, bewildering, looming darkly to threaten her with panic. Marvie rode right upon her before halting.
“Say, you look like the devil!” he ejaculated, with anxious concern.
“Marv, that’s the way I feel,” replied Hettie.
Rose joined them, to crowd her pony close, eager yet shy, with eyes alight and lips parted. “Oh, Miss Hettie!” she cried, rapturously. “Marvie’s brought me to you. I — I’ll never go back — to the brakes.”
“My dear, you’re welcome to my home,” returned Hettie, warmly, leaning to kiss the flushed face.
“Hettie, you’ve seen a ghost — the same ghost I seen,” declared Marvie, shrewdly.
“Oh, Marvie lad — a ghost indeed!” moaned Hettie. “Nevada! . . . He just left me — to — to kill Dillon!”
“No news to me,” shouted Marvie, fiercely. “I’ve got to see that. . . . Fetch Rose. But go round. Keep away from the corrals.”
The last he delivered over his shoulder as he urged his horse into the trail and beat him into a run. In a moment he passed out of sight among the pines. The swift patter of hoofs died away.
“Come, Rose — ride,” suddenly cried Hettie, with a start, striking her horse.
The spirited animal, unused to that, broke into a gallop, and then a run. Hettie looked back. The girl was close behind, her hair flying in the wind, her face flashing. Her pony was fast and she could ride. Hettie turned her attention to the trail and the low branches of pines and the obstructing brush. Soon she was flying at a tremendous gait through the forest. The speed, the violence added to her agitation.
Where the trail emerged from the pines, to drop down on the sage and cedar slope adjacent to the ranch land, Hettie turned her horse and kept to the top of the slope. Soon she passed Nevada’s big black horse grazing on the sage. Her heart took a great bursting leap. “An’ shore sunset for me!” Nevada’s words of resignation and sadness rang in her ears like bells of doom.
Suddenly she imagined she heard a shot. She turned her ear to the left. Another! A gun-shot — then two sharp cracks, clear on the breeze. She reeled in her saddle. Almost she put her horse at the ranch fence. But she kept on in wild flight, forgetting Rose, clutching with left hand at her breast, where uncertainty augmented to supreme agony.
Her fast horse, keen at the freedom afforded him, swept on as in a race, on by the corrals and gardens, up over the low bench, and through the woods to her cabin, where her mother stood waving frantically from the porch. Hettie rode on, over the swaying bridge, into the shady green glade before Ben’s house.
Here she pulled her iron-jawed horse to a snorting halt. She saw men running. She heard Rose’s pony come clattering over the bridge. Then Marvie’s horse appeared over the rise of ground toward the corral. What breakneck speed! How he thundered up the drive!
One sight of Marvie’s flashing face answered Hettie. She could have screamed in her frenzy. Marvie reached her at the moment Rose came up. His horse reared and pounded. Marvie jerked him down with powerful arm, and closed with Hettie.
“Nevada’s down there — handcuffed!” he whispered, pantingly. “Dillon’s dead! . . . Oh, there’ll be — hell now! . . . But not a word from — you an’ Rose!”
The boy’s heated face, the horses, Rose so white and rapt, the running riders, the houses and the pines — all blurred in Hettie’s sight. She had to fight fiercely to recover. She felt the girl’s strong hand on her, steadying her in the saddle. The deadly faintness passed. Her eyes cleared and her breast lifted to give rein to a tumult there.
Ben and Judge Franklidge were striding out to meet the running cowboys.
“Judge, I told you I heard shots,” Ben was saying. “Somethin’s happened!”
“Seems like. But don’t let it upset you,” replied the judge.
“There’s Marvie. . . . Has he gone loco?” exclaimed Ben, in amaze, as the boy, riding wildly, scattered the men coming up the slope.
“By thunder! Ben,” replied Franklidge, suddenly espying Hettie and Rose, as they rode in upon the lawn.
At that juncture the first cowboys reached Ben to blurt out:
“Boss, Jim Lacy’s here! He just killed Dillon.”
“Wha — at?” shouted Ben, incredulously.
As the cowboy repeated his news Raidy arrived at the head of three more of Ben’s hands, and all began to jabber pantingly.
“One at a time,” ordered Ben, harshly. “What the hell’s wrong? Raidy!”
The old foreman drew himself up steadily, though with heaving breast.
“Boss, I have to report — Dillon’s been killed — Jim Lacy!”
Ben Ide leaped straight up in sudden ungovernable fury. His face turned dusk red. He clenched his fists high above his head.
“On my own place?” he thundered.
“Yes, sir. Right on the cook-house porch.”
“Dillon dead?”
“He is indeed, sir,” replied Raidy. “Lacy shot him through the middle — then put out his right eye.”
“Murder!” gasped Ben.
“Not much! . . . It was an even break. Lacy dropped out of the clouds, seems like. Dillon was game, sir, an’ quick — but not quick enough.”
“Killed! My best man,” rasped out Ben, stridently. “Where’s this Jim Lacy?”
“He’s sittin’ on the cook-house porch,” replied Raidy. “Handcuffed, sir. . . . The sheriffs put him in irons.”
Ben cracked a hard fist into his palm. “They got him, then. . . . Judge Franklidge, I knew we’d land that gunman-rustler.”
“Ide, it’s a little embarrassing to know what to do with this — this Jim Lacy — now we’ve got him,” replied the judge, dryly.
“Damn him! I’ll show you.”
“An’, boss,” interrupted Raidy, “Tom Day has rid in with his outfit. They wanted to lynch Lacy. But Tom roared at them like a mad bull. Reckon you’d better hurry down.”
