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To the Last Man

by Zane Grey · English · Gutenberg #2070 · 549,484 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: To the Last Man

Author: Zane Grey


        
Release date: February 1, 2000 [eBook #2070]
                Most recently updated: April 13, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2070


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TO THE LAST MAN ***




To The Last Man


by

Zane Grey




FOREWORD


It was inevitable that in my efforts to write romantic history of the
great West I should at length come to the story of a feud.  For long I
have steered clear of this rock.  But at last I have reached it and
must go over it, driven by my desire to chronicle the stirring events
of pioneer days.

Even to-day it is not possible to travel into the remote corners of the
West without seeing the lives of people still affected by a fighting
past.  How can the truth be told about the pioneering of the West if
the struggle, the fight, the blood be left out?  It cannot be done.
How can a novel be stirring and thrilling, as were those times, unless
it be full of sensation?  My long labors have been devoted to making
stories resemble the times they depict.  I have loved the West for its
vastness, its contrast, its beauty and color and life, for its wildness
and violence, and for the fact that I have seen how it developed great
men and women who died unknown and unsung.

In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of
realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no place
for romance itself.  For many years all the events leading up to the
great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly realistic,
and the aftermath is likewise.  Romance is only another name for
idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living.
Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as
now.  Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise
Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson.  It was Stevenson, particularly, who
wielded a bludgeon against the realists.  People live for the dream in
their hearts.  And I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret
dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the
dusk, some painted window leading to the soul. How strange indeed to
find that the realists have ideals and dreams! To read them one would
think their lives held nothing significant. But they love, they hope,
they dream, they sacrifice, they struggle on with that dream in their
hearts just the same as others.  We all are dreamers, if not in the
heavy-lidded wasting of time, then in the meaning of life that makes us
work on.

It was Wordsworth who wrote, “The world is too much with us”; and if I
could give the secret of my ambition as a novelist in a few words it
would be contained in that quotation.  My inspiration to write has
always come from nature.  Character and action are subordinated to
setting.  In all that I have done I have tried to make people see how
the world is too much with them.  Getting and spending they lay waste
their powers, with never a breath of the free and wonderful life of the
open!

So I come back to the main point of this foreword, in which I am trying
to tell why and how I came to write the story of a feud notorious in
Arizona as the Pleasant Valley War.

Some years ago Mr. Harry Adams, a cattleman of Vermajo Park, New
Mexico, told me he had been in the Tonto Basin of Arizona and thought I
might find interesting material there concerning this Pleasant Valley
War. His version of the war between cattlemen and sheepmen certainly
determined me to look over the ground.  My old guide, Al Doyle of
Flagstaff, had led me over half of Arizona, but never down into that
wonderful wild and rugged basin between the Mogollon Mesa and the
Mazatzal Mountains.  Doyle had long lived on the frontier and his
version of the Pleasant Valley War differed markedly from that of Mr.
Adams.  I asked other old timers about it, and their remarks further
excited my curiosity.

Once down there, Doyle and I found the wildest, most rugged, roughest,
and most remarkable country either of us had visited; and the few
inhabitants were like the country.  I went in ostensibly to hunt bear
and lion and turkey, but what I really was hunting for was the story of
that Pleasant Valley War.  I engaged the services of a bear hunter who
had three strapping sons as reserved and strange and aloof as he was.
No wheel tracks of any kind had ever come within miles of their cabin.
I spent two wonderful months hunting game and reveling in the beauty
and grandeur of that Rim Rock country, but I came out knowing no more
about the Pleasant Valley War.  These Texans and their few neighbors,
likewise from Texas, did not talk.  But all I saw and felt only
inspired me the more.  This trip was in the fall of 1918.

The next year I went again with the best horses, outfit, and men the
Doyles could provide.  And this time I did not ask any questions. But I
rode horses—some of them too wild for me—and packed a rifle many a
hundred miles, riding sometimes thirty and forty miles a day, and I
climbed in and out of the deep canyons, desperately staying at the
heels of one of those long-legged Texans.  I learned the life of those
backwoodsmen, but I did not get the story of the Pleasant Valley War.
I had, however, won the friendship of that hardy people.

In 1920 I went back with a still larger outfit, equipped to stay as
long as I liked.  And this time, without my asking it, different
natives of the Tonto came to tell me about the Pleasant Valley War. No
two of them agreed on anything concerning it, except that only one of
the active participants survived the fighting.  Whence comes my title,
TO THE LAST MAN.  Thus I was swamped in a mass of material out of which
I could only flounder to my own conclusion.  Some of the stories told
me are singularly tempting to a novelist.  But, though I believe them
myself, I cannot risk their improbability to those who have no idea of
the wildness of wild men at a wild time.  There really was a terrible
and bloody feud, perhaps the most deadly and least known in all the
annals of the West.  I saw the ground, the cabins, the graves, all so
darkly suggestive of what must have happened.

I never learned the truth of the cause of the Pleasant Valley War, or
if I did hear it I had no means of recognizing it.  All the given
causes were plausible and convincing.  Strange to state, there is still
secrecy and reticence all over the Tonto Basin as to the facts of this
feud.  Many descendents of those killed are living there now. But no
one likes to talk about it.  Assuredly many of the incidents told me
really occurred, as, for example, the terrible one of the two women, in
the face of relentless enemies, saving the bodies of their dead
husbands from being devoured by wild hogs.  Suffice it to say that this
romance is true to my conception of the war, and I base it upon the
setting I learned to know and love so well, upon the strange passions
of primitive people, and upon my instinctive reaction to the facts and
rumors that I gathered.

ZANE GREY.
  AVALON, CALIFORNIA,
    April, 1921




CHAPTER I


At the end of a dry, uphill ride over barren country Jean Isbel
unpacked to camp at the edge of the cedars where a little rocky canyon
green with willow and cottonwood, promised water and grass.

His animals were tired, especially the pack mule that had carried a
heavy load; and with slow heave of relief they knelt and rolled in the
dust.  Jean experienced something of relief himself as he threw off his
chaps.  He had not been used to hot, dusty, glaring days on the barren
lands.  Stretching his long length beside a tiny rill of clear water
that tinkled over the red stones, he drank thirstily. The water was
cool, but it had an acrid taste—an alkali bite that he did not like.
Not since he had left Oregon had he tasted clear, sweet, cold water;
and he missed it just as he longed for the stately shady forests he had
loved.  This wild, endless Arizona land bade fair to earn his hatred.

By the time he had leisurely completed his tasks twilight had fallen
and coyotes had begun their barking.  Jean listened to the yelps and to
the moan of the cool wind in the cedars with a sense of satisfaction
that these lonely sounds were familiar.  This cedar wood burned into a
pretty fire and the smell of its smoke was newly pleasant.

“Reckon maybe I’ll learn to like Arizona,” he mused, half aloud. “But
I’ve a hankerin’ for waterfalls an’ dark-green forests. Must be the
Indian in me.... Anyway, dad needs me bad, an’ I reckon I’m here for
keeps.”

Jean threw some cedar branches on the fire, in the light of which he
opened his father’s letter, hoping by repeated reading to grasp more of
its strange portent.  It had been two months in reaching him, coming by
traveler, by stage and train, and then by boat, and finally by stage
again.  Written in lead pencil on a leaf torn from an old ledger, it
would have been hard to read even if the writing had been more legible.

“Dad’s writin’ was always bad, but I never saw it so shaky,” said Jean,
thinking aloud.


   GRASS VALLY, ARIZONA.

   Son Jean,—Come home.  Here is your home and here your needed.
   When we left Oregon we all reckoned you would not be long behind.
   But its years now.  I am growing old, son, and you was always my
   steadiest boy.  Not that you ever was so dam steady.  Only your
   wildness seemed more for the woods.  You take after mother, and
   your brothers Bill and Guy take after me.  That is the red and
   white of it.  Your part Indian, Jean, and that Indian I reckon
   I am going to need bad.  I am rich in cattle and horses.  And my
   range here is the best I ever seen.  Lately we have been losing
   stock.  But that is not all nor so bad.  Sheepmen have moved into
   the Tonto and are grazing down on Grass Vally.  Cattlemen and
   sheepmen can never bide in this country.  We have bad times ahead.
   Reckon I have more reasons to worry and need you, but you must wait
   to hear that by word of mouth.  Whatever your doing, chuck it and
   rustle for Grass Vally so to make here by spring.  I am asking you
   to take pains to pack in some guns and a lot of shells.  And hide
   them in your outfit.  If you meet anyone when your coming down into
   the Tonto, listen more than you talk.  And last, son, dont let
   anything keep you in Oregon.  Reckon you have a sweetheart, and
   if so fetch her along.  With love from your dad,

   GASTON ISBEL.


Jean pondered over this letter.  Judged by memory of his father, who
had always been self-sufficient, it had been a surprise and somewhat of
a shock.  Weeks of travel and reflection had not helped him to grasp
the meaning between the lines.

“Yes, dad’s growin’ old,” mused Jean, feeling a warmth and a sadness
stir in him.  “He must be ‘way over sixty.  But he never looked old....
So he’s rich now an’ losin’ stock, an’ goin’ to be sheeped off his
range.  Dad could stand a lot of rustlin’, but not much from sheepmen.”

The softness that stirred in Jean merged into a cold, thoughtful
earnestness which had followed every perusal of his father’s letter. A
dark, full current seemed flowing in his veins, and at times he felt it
swell and heat.  It troubled him, making him conscious of a deeper,
stronger self, opposed to his careless, free, and dreamy nature.  No
ties had bound him in Oregon, except love for the great, still forests
and the thundering rivers; and this love came from his softer side.  It
had cost him a wrench to leave.  And all the way by ship down the coast
to San Diego and across the Sierra Madres by stage, and so on to this
last overland travel by horseback, he had felt a retreating of the self
that was tranquil and happy and a dominating of this unknown somber
self, with its menacing possibilities.  Yet despite a nameless regret
and a loyalty to Oregon, when he lay in his blankets he had to confess
a keen interest in his adventurous future, a keen enjoyment of this
stark, wild Arizona.  It appeared to be a different sky stretching in
dark, star-spangled dome over him—closer, vaster, bluer.  The strong
fragrance of sage and cedar floated over him with the camp-fire smoke,
and all seemed drowsily to subdue his thoughts.

At dawn he rolled out of his blankets and, pulling on his boots, began
the day with a zest for the work that must bring closer his calling
future.  White, crackling frost and cold, nipping air were the same
keen spurs to action that he had known in the uplands of Oregon, yet
they were not wholly the same.  He sensed an exhilaration similar to
the effect of a strong, sweet wine.  His horse and mule had fared well
during the night, having been much refreshed by the grass and water of
the little canyon.  Jean mounted and rode into the cedars with gladness
that at last he had put the endless leagues of barren land behind him.

The trail he followed appeared to be seldom traveled.  It led,
according to the meager information obtainable at the last settlement,
directly to what was called the Rim, and from there Grass Valley could
be seen down in the Basin.  The ascent of the ground was so gradual
that only in long, open stretches could it be seen.  But the nature of
the vegetation showed Jean how he was climbing.  Scant, low, scraggy
cedars gave place to more numerous, darker, greener, bushier ones, and
these to high, full-foliaged, green-berried trees.  Sage and grass in
the open flats grew more luxuriously.  Then came the pinyons, and
presently among them the checker-barked junipers.  Jean hailed the
first pine tree with a hearty slap on the brown, rugged bark.  It was a
small dwarf pine struggling to live.  The next one was larger, and
after that came several, and beyond them pines stood up everywhere
above the lower trees.  Odor of pine needles mingled with the other dry
smells that made the wind pleasant to Jean.  In an hour from the first
line of pines he had ridden beyond the cedars and pinyons into a slowly
thickening and deepening forest.  Underbrush appeared scarce except in
ravines, and the ground in open patches held a bleached grass. Jean’s
eye roved for sight of squirrels, birds, deer, or any moving creature.
It appeared to be a dry, uninhabited forest.  About midday Jean halted
at a pond of surface water, evidently melted snow, and gave his animals
a drink.  He saw a few old deer tracks in the mud and several huge bird
tracks new to him which he concluded must have been made by wild
turkeys.

The trail divided at this pond.  Jean had no idea which branch he ought
to take.  “Reckon it doesn’t matter,” he muttered, as he was about to
remount.  His horse was standing with ears up, looking back along the
trail.  Then Jean heard a clip-clop of trotting hoofs, and presently
espied a horseman.

Jean made a pretense of tightening his saddle girths while he peered
over his horse at the approaching rider.  All men in this country were
going to be of exceeding interest to Jean Isbel.  This man at a
distance rode and looked like all the Arizonians Jean had seen, he had
a superb seat in the saddle, and he was long and lean.  He wore a huge
black sombrero and a soiled red scarf.  His vest was open and he was
without a coat.

The rider came trotting up and halted several paces from Jean

“Hullo, stranger!” he said, gruffly.

“Howdy yourself!” replied Jean.  He felt an instinctive importance in
the meeting with the man.  Never had sharper eyes flashed over Jean and
his outfit.  He had a dust-colored, sun-burned face, long, lean, and
hard, a huge sandy mustache that hid his mouth, and eyes of piercing
light intensity.  Not very much hard Western experience had passed by
this man, yet he was not old, measured by years. When he dismounted
Jean saw he was tall, even for an Arizonian.

“Seen your tracks back a ways,” he said, as he slipped the bit to let
his horse drink.  “Where bound?”

“Reckon I’m lost, all right,” replied Jean.  “New country for me.”

“Shore.  I seen thet from your tracks an’ your last camp.  Wal, where
was you headin’ for before you got lost?”

The query was deliberately cool, with a dry, crisp ring.  Jean felt the
lack of friendliness or kindliness in it.

“Grass Valley.  My name’s Isbel,” he replied, shortly.

The rider attended to his drinking horse and presently rebridled him;
then with long swing of leg he appeared to step into the saddle.

“Shore I knowed you was Jean Isbel,” he said.  “Everybody in the Tonto
has heerd old Gass Isbel sent fer his boy.”

“Well then, why did you ask?” inquired Jean, bluntly.

“Reckon I wanted to see what you’d say.”

“So?  All right.  But I’m not carin’ very much for what YOU say.”

Their glances locked steadily then and each measured the other by the
intangible conflict of spirit.

“Shore thet’s natural,” replied the rider.  His speech was slow, and
the motions of his long, brown hands, as he took a cigarette from his
vest, kept time with his words.  “But seein’ you’re one of the Isbels,
I’ll hev my say whether you want it or not.  My name’s Colter an’ I’m
one of the sheepmen Gass Isbel’s riled with.”

“Colter.  Glad to meet you,” replied Jean.  “An’ I reckon who riled my
father is goin’ to rile me.”

“Shore.  If thet wasn’t so you’d not be an Isbel,” returned Colter,
with a grim little laugh.  “It’s easy to see you ain’t run into any
Tonto Basin fellers yet.  Wal, I’m goin’ to tell you thet your old man
gabbed like a woman down at Greaves’s store.  Bragged aboot you an’ how
you could fight an’ how you could shoot an’ how you could track a hoss
or a man!  Bragged how you’d chase every sheep herder back up on the
Rim.... I’m tellin’ you because we want you to git our stand right.
We’re goin’ to run sheep down in Grass Valley.”

“Ahuh!  Well, who’s we?” queried Jean, curtly.

“What-at?... We—I mean the sheepmen rangin’ this Rim from Black Butte
to the Apache country.”

“Colter, I’m a stranger in Arizona,” said Jean, slowly.  “I know little
about ranchers or sheepmen.  It’s true my father sent for me.  It’s
true, I dare say, that he bragged, for he was given to bluster an’
blow. An’ he’s old now.  I can’t help it if he bragged about me.  But
if he has, an’ if he’s justified in his stand against you sheepmen, I’m
goin’ to do my best to live up to his brag.”

“I get your hunch.  Shore we understand each other, an’ thet’s a
powerful help.  You take my hunch to your old man,” replied Colter, as
he turned his horse away toward the left.  “Thet trail leadin’ south is
yours.  When you come to the Rim you’ll see a bare spot down in the
Basin.  Thet ’ll be Grass Valley.”

He rode away out of sight into the woods.  Jean leaned against his
horse and pondered.  It seemed difficult to be just to this Colter, not
because of his claims, but because of a subtle hostility that emanated
from him.  Colter had the hard face, the masked intent, the turn of
speech that Jean had come to associate with dishonest men. Even if Jean
had not been prejudiced, if he had known nothing of his father’s
trouble with these sheepmen, and if Colter had met him only to exchange
glances and greetings, still Jean would never have had a favorable
impression.  Colter grated upon him, roused an antagonism seldom felt.

“Heigho!” sighed the young man, “Good-by to huntin’ an’ fishing’! Dad’s
given me a man’s job.”

With that he mounted his horse and started the pack mule into the
right-hand trail.  Walking and trotting, he traveled all afternoon,
toward sunset getting into heavy forest of pine.  More than one snow
bank showed white through the green, sheltered on the north slopes of
shady ravines.  And it was upon entering this zone of richer, deeper
forestland that Jean sloughed off his gloomy forebodings.  These
stately pines were not the giant firs of Oregon, but any lover of the
woods could be happy under them.  Higher still he climbed until the
forest spread before and around him like a level park, with thicketed
ravines here and there on each side.  And presently that deceitful
level led to a higher bench upon which the pines towered, and were
matched by beautiful trees he took for spruce.  Heavily barked, with
regular spreading branches, these conifers rose in symmetrical shape to
spear the sky with silver plumes.  A graceful gray-green moss, waved
like veils from the branches.  The air was not so dry and it was
colder, with a scent and touch of snow.  Jean made camp at the first
likely site, taking the precaution to unroll his bed some little
distance from his fire.  Under the softly moaning pines he felt
comfortable, having lost the sense of an immeasurable open space
falling away from all around him.

The gobbling of wild turkeys awakened Jean, “Chuga-lug, chug-a-lug,
chug-a-lug-chug.”  There was not a great difference between the gobble
of a wild turkey and that of a tame one.  Jean got up, and taking his
rifle went out into the gray obscurity of dawn to try to locate the
turkeys.  But it was too dark, and finally when daylight came they
appeared to be gone.  The mule had strayed, and, what with finding it
and cooking breakfast and packing, Jean did not make a very early
start.  On this last lap of his long journey he had slowed down. He was
weary of hurrying; the change from weeks in the glaring sun and
dust-laden wind to this sweet coot darkly green and brown forest was
very welcome; he wanted to linger along the shaded trail.  This day he
made sure would see him reach the Rim.  By and by he lost the trail.
It had just worn out from lack of use.  Every now and then Jean would
cross an old trail, and as he penetrated deeper into the forest every
damp or dusty spot showed tracks of turkey, deer, and bear.  The amount
of bear sign surprised him.  Presently his keen nostrils were assailed
by a smell of sheep, and soon he rode into a broad sheep, trail.  From
the tracks Jean calculated that the sheep had passed there the day
before.

An unreasonable antipathy seemed born in him.  To be sure he had been
prepared to dislike sheep, and that was why he was unreasonable.  But
on the other hand this band of sheep had left a broad bare swath,
weedless, grassless, flowerless, in their wake.  Where sheep grazed
they destroyed.  That was what Jean had against them.

An hour later he rode to the crest of a long parklike slope, where new
green grass was sprouting and flowers peeped everywhere.  The pines
appeared far apart; gnarled oak trees showed rugged and gray against
the green wall of woods.  A white strip of snow gleamed like a moving
stream away down in the woods.

Jean heard the musical tinkle of bells and the baa-baa of sheep and the
faint, sweet bleating of lambs.  As he road toward these sounds a dog
ran out from an oak thicket and barked at him.  Next Jean smelled a
camp fire and soon he caught sight of a curling blue column of smoke,
and then a small peaked tent.  Beyond the clump of oaks Jean
encountered a Mexican lad carrying a carbine.  The boy had a swarthy,
pleasant face, and to Jean’s greeting he replied, “BUENAS DIAS.”  Jean
understood little Spanish, and about all he gathered by his simple
queries was that the lad was not alone—and that it was “lambing time.”

This latter circumstance grew noisily manifest.  The forest seemed
shrilly full of incessant baas and plaintive bleats.  All about the
camp, on the slope, in the glades, and everywhere, were sheep.  A few
were grazing; many were lying down; most of them were ewes suckling
white fleecy little lambs that staggered on their feet.  Everywhere
Jean saw tiny lambs just born.  Their pin-pointed bleats pierced the
heavier baa-baa of their mothers.

Jean dismounted and led his horse down toward the camp, where he rather
expected to see another and older Mexican, from whom he might get
information.  The lad walked with him.  Down this way the plaintive
uproar made by the sheep was not so loud.

“Hello there!” called Jean, cheerfully, as he approached the tent. No
answer was forthcoming.  Dropping his bridle, he went on, rather
slowly, looking for some one to appear.  Then a voice from one side
startled him.

“Mawnin’, stranger.”

A girl stepped out from beside a pine.  She carried a rifle.  Her face
flashed richly brown, but she was not Mexican.  This fact, and the
sudden conviction that she had been watching him, somewhat disconcerted
Jean.

“Beg pardon—miss,” he floundered.  “Didn’t expect, to see a—girl....
I’m sort of lost—lookin’ for the Rim—an’ thought I’d find a sheep
herder who’d show me.  I can’t savvy this boy’s lingo.”

While he spoke it seemed to him an intentness of expression, a strain
relaxed from her face.  A faint suggestion of hostility likewise
disappeared.  Jean was not even sure that he had caught it, but there
had been something that now was gone.

“Shore I’ll be glad to show y’u,” she said.

“Thanks, miss.  Reckon I can breathe easy now,” he replied,

“It’s a long ride from San Diego.  Hot an’ dusty!  I’m pretty tired.
An’ maybe this woods isn’t good medicine to achin’ eyes!”

“San Diego!  Y’u’re from the coast?”

“Yes.”

Jean had doffed his sombrero at sight of her and he still held it,
rather deferentially, perhaps.  It seemed to attract her attention.

“Put on y’ur hat, stranger.... Shore I can’t recollect when any man
bared his haid to me.”  She uttered a little laugh in which surprise
and frankness mingled with a tint of bitterness.

Jean sat down with his back to a pine, and, laying the sombrero by his
side, he looked full at her, conscious of a singular eagerness, as if
he wanted to verify by close scrutiny a first hasty impression. If
there had been an instinct in his meeting with Colter, there was more
in this.  The girl half sat, half leaned against a log, with the shiny
little carbine across her knees.  She had a level, curious gaze upon
him, and Jean had never met one just like it.  Her eyes were rather a
wide oval in shape, clear and steady, with shadows of thought in their
amber-brown depths.  They seemed to look through Jean, and his gaze
dropped first.  Then it was he saw her ragged homespun skirt and a few
inches of brown, bare ankles, strong and round, and crude worn-out
moccasins that failed to hide the shapeliness, of her feet. Suddenly
she drew back her stockingless ankles and ill-shod little feet. When
Jean lifted his gaze again he found her face half averted and a stain
of red in the gold tan of her cheek.  That touch of embarrassment
somehow removed her from this strong, raw, wild woodland setting.  It
changed her poise.  It detracted from the curious, unabashed, almost
bold, look that he had encountered in her eyes.

“Reckon you’re from Texas,” said Jean, presently.

“Shore am,” she drawled.  She had a lazy Southern voice, pleasant to
hear.  “How’d y’u-all guess that?”

“Anybody can tell a Texan.  Where I came from there were a good many
pioneers an’ ranchers from the old Lone Star state.  I’ve worked for
several.  An’, come to think of it, I’d rather hear a Texas girl talk
than anybody.”

“Did y’u know many Texas girls?” she inquired, turning again to face
him.

“Reckon I did—quite a good many.”

“Did y’u go with them?”

“Go with them?  Reckon you mean keep company.  Why, yes, I guess I
did—a little,” laughed Jean.  “Sometimes on a Sunday or a dance once
in a blue moon, an’ occasionally a ride.”

“Shore that accounts,” said the girl, wistfully.

“For what?” asked Jean.

“Y’ur bein’ a gentleman,” she replied, with force.  “Oh, I’ve not
forgotten.  I had friends when we lived in Texas.... Three years ago.
Shore it seems longer.  Three miserable years in this damned country!”

Then she bit her lip, evidently to keep back further unwitting
utterance to a total stranger.  And it was that biting of her lip that
drew Jean’s attention to her mouth.  It held beauty of curve and
fullness and color that could not hide a certain sadness and
bitterness.  Then the whole flashing brown face changed for Jean. He
saw that it was young, full of passion and restraint, possessing a
power which grew on him.  This, with her shame and pathos and the fact
that she craved respect, gave a leap to Jean’s interest.

“Well, I reckon you flatter me,” he said, hoping to put her at her ease
again.  “I’m only a rough hunter an’ fisherman-woodchopper an’ horse
tracker.  Never had all the school I needed—nor near enough company of
nice girls like you.”

“Am I nice?” she asked, quickly.

“You sure are,” he replied, smiling.

“In these rags,” she demanded, with a sudden flash of passion that
thrilled him.  “Look at the holes.”  She showed rips and worn-out
places in the sleeves of her buckskin blouse, through which gleamed a
round, brown arm.  “I sew when I have anythin’ to sew with.... Look at
my skirt—a dirty rag.  An’ I have only one other to my name.... Look!”
Again a color tinged her cheeks, most becoming, and giving the lie to
her action.  But shame could not check her violence now.  A dammed-up
resentment seemed to have broken out in flood.  She lifted the ragged
skirt almost to her knees.  “No stockings!  No Shoes!... How can a
girl be nice when she has no clean, decent woman’s clothes to wear?”

“How—how can a girl...” began Jean.  “See here, miss, I’m beggin’ your
pardon for—sort of stirrin’ you to forget yourself a little. Reckon I
understand.  You don’t meet many strangers an’ I sort of hit you
wrong—makin’ you feel too much—an’ talk too much.  Who an’ what you
are is none of my business.  But we met.... An’ I reckon somethin’ has
happened—perhaps more to me than to you.... Now let me put you
straight about clothes an’ women.  Reckon I know most women love nice
things to wear an’ think because clothes make them look pretty that
they’re nicer or better.  But they’re wrong.  You’re wrong. Maybe it ’d
be too much for a girl like you to be happy without clothes.  But you
can be—you axe just as nice, an’—an’ fine—an’, for all you know, a
good deal more appealin’ to some men.”

“Stranger, y’u shore must excuse my temper an’ the show I made of
myself,” replied the girl, with composure.  “That, to say the least,
was not nice.  An’ I don’t want anyone thinkin’ better of me than I
deserve.  My mother died in Texas, an’ I’ve lived out heah in this wild
country—a girl alone among rough men.  Meetin’ y’u to-day makes me see
what a hard lot they are—an’ what it’s done to me.”

Jean smothered his curiosity and tried to put out of his mind a growing
sense that he pitied her, liked her.

“Are you a sheep herder?” he asked.

“Shore I am now an’ then.  My father lives back heah in a canyon. He’s
a sheepman.  Lately there’s been herders shot at.  Just now we’re short
an’ I have to fill in.  But I like shepherdin’ an’ I love the woods,
and the Rim Rock an’ all the Tonto.  If they were all, I’d shore be
happy.”

“Herders shot at!” exclaimed Jean, thoughtfully.  “By whom? An’ what
for?”

“Trouble brewin’ between the cattlemen down in the Basin an’ the
sheepmen up on the Rim.  Dad says there’ll shore be hell to pay. I tell
him I hope the cattlemen chase him back to Texas.”

“Then—  Are you on the ranchers’ side?” queried Jean, trying to
pretend casual interest.

“No.  I’ll always be on my father’s side,” she replied, with spirit.
“But I’m bound to admit I think the cattlemen have the fair side of the
argument.”

“How so?”

“Because there’s grass everywhere.  I see no sense in a sheepman goin’
out of his way to surround a cattleman an’ sheep off his range.  That
started the row.  Lord knows how it’ll end.  For most all of them heah
are from Texas.”

“So I was told,” replied Jean.  “An’ I heard’ most all these Texans got
run out of Texas.  Any truth in that?”

“Shore I reckon there is,” she replied, seriously.  “But, stranger, it
might not be healthy for y’u to, say that anywhere.  My dad, for one,
was not run out of Texas.  Shore I never can see why he came heah. He’s
accumulated stock, but he’s not rich nor so well off as he was back
home.”

“Are you goin’ to stay here always?” queried Jean, suddenly.

“If I do so it ’ll be in my grave,” she answered, darkly.  “But what’s
the use of thinkin’?  People stay places until they drift away.  Y’u
can never tell.... Well, stranger, this talk is keepin’ y’u.”

She seemed moody now, and a note of detachment crept into her voice.
Jean rose at once and went for his horse.  If this girl did not desire
to talk further he certainly had no wish to annoy her.  His mule had
strayed off among the bleating sheep.  Jean drove it back and then led
his horse up to where the girl stood.  She appeared taller and, though
not of robust build, she was vigorous and lithe, with something about
her that fitted the place.  Jean was loath to bid her good-by.

“Which way is the Rim?” he asked, turning to his saddle girths.

“South,” she replied, pointing.  “It’s only a mile or so.  I’ll walk
down with y’u.... Suppose y’u’re on the way to Grass Valley?”

“Yes; I’ve relatives there,” he returned.  He dreaded her next
question, which he suspected would concern his name.  But she did not
ask.  Taking up her rifle she turned away.  Jean strode ahead to her
side.  “Reckon if you walk I won’t ride.”

So he found himself beside a girl with the free step of a Mountaineer.
Her bare, brown head came up nearly to his shoulder.  It was a small,
pretty head, graceful, well held, and the thick hair on it was a shiny,
soft brown.  She wore it in a braid, rather untidily and tangled, he
thought, and it was tied with a string of buckskin.  Altogether her
apparel proclaimed poverty.

Jean let the conversation languish for a little.  He wanted to think
what to say presently, and then he felt a rather vague pleasure in
stalking beside her.  Her profile was straight cut and exquisite in
line.  From this side view the soft curve of lips could not be seen.

She made several attempts to start conversation, all of which Jean
ignored, manifestly to her growing constraint.  Presently Jean, having
decided what he wanted to say, suddenly began: “I like this adventure.
Do you?”

“Adventure! Meetin’ me in the woods?”  And she laughed the laugh of
youth.  “Shore you must be hard up for adventure, stranger.”

“Do you like it?” he persisted, and his eyes searched the half-averted
face.

“I might like it,” she answered, frankly, “if—if my temper had not
made a fool of me.  I never meet anyone I care to talk to.  Why should
it not be pleasant to run across some one new—some one strange in this
heah wild country?”

“We are as we are,” said Jean, simply.  “I didn’t think you made a fool
of yourself.  If I thought so, would I want to see you again?”

“Do y’u?”  The brown face flashed on him with surprise, with a light he
took for gladness.  And because he wanted to appear calm and friendly,
not too eager, he had to deny himself the thrill of meeting those
changing eyes.

“Sure I do.  Reckon I’m overbold on such short acquaintance.  But I
might not have another chance to tell you, so please don’t hold it
against me.”

This declaration over, Jean felt relief and something of exultation. He
had been afraid he might not have the courage to make it.  She walked
on as before, only with her head bowed a little and her eyes downcast.
No color but the gold-brown tan and the blue tracery of veins showed in
her cheeks.  He noticed then a slight swelling quiver of her throat;
and he became alive to its graceful contour, and to how full and
pulsating it was, how nobly it set into the curve of her shoulder.
Here in her quivering throat was the weakness of her, the evidence of
her sex, the womanliness that belied the mountaineer stride and the
grasp of strong brown hands on a rifle.  It had an effect on Jean
totally inexplicable to him, both in the strange warmth that stole over
him and in the utterance he could not hold back.

“Girl, we’re strangers, but what of that?  We’ve met, an’ I tell you it
means somethin’ to me.  I’ve known girls for months an’ never felt this
way.  I don’t know who you are an’ I don’t care.  You betrayed a good
deal to me.  You’re not happy.  You’re lonely.  An’ if I didn’t want to
see you again for my own sake I would for yours.  Some things you said
I’ll not forget soon.  I’ve got a sister, an’ I know you have no
brother.  An’ I reckon ...”

At this juncture Jean in his earnestness and quite without thought
grasped her hand.  The contact checked the flow of his speech and
suddenly made him aghast at his temerity.  But the girl did not make
any effort to withdraw it.  So Jean, inhaling a deep breath and trying
to see through his bewilderment, held on bravely.  He imagined he felt
a faint, warm, returning pressure.  She was young, she was friendless,
she was human.  By this hand in his Jean felt more than ever the
loneliness of her.  Then, just as he was about to speak again, she
pulled her hand free.

“Heah’s the Rim,” she said, in her quaint Southern drawl. “An’ there’s
Y’ur Tonto Basin.”

Jean had been intent only upon the girl.  He had kept step beside her
without taking note of what was ahead of him.  At her words he looked
up expectantly, to be struck mute.

He felt a sheer force, a downward drawing of an immense abyss beneath
him. As he looked afar he saw a black basin of timbered country, the
darkest and wildest he had ever gazed upon, a hundred miles of blue
distance across to an unflung mountain range, hazy purple against the
sky. It seemed to be a stupendous gulf surrounded on three sides by
bold, undulating lines of peaks, and on his side by a wall so high that
he felt lifted aloft on the run of the sky.

“Southeast y’u see the Sierra Anchas,” said the girl pointing. “That
notch in the range is the pass where sheep are driven to Phoenix an’
Maricopa.  Those big rough mountains to the south are the Mazatzals.
Round to the west is the Four Peaks Range.  An’ y’u’re standin’ on the
Rim.”

Jean could not see at first just what the Rim was, but by shifting his
gaze westward he grasped this remarkable phenomenon of nature. For
leagues and leagues a colossal red and yellow wall, a rampart, a
mountain-faced cliff, seemed to zigzag westward.  Grand and bold were
the promontories reaching out over the void.  They ran toward the
westering sun.  Sweeping and impressive were the long lines slanting
away from them, sloping darkly spotted down to merge into the black
timber.  Jean had never seen such a wild and rugged manifestation of
nature’s depths and upheavals.  He was held mute.

“Stranger, look down,” said the girl.

Jean’s sight was educated to judge heights and depths and distances.
This wall upon which he stood sheered precipitously down, so far that
it made him dizzy to look, and then the craggy broken cliffs merged
into red-slided, cedar-greened slopes running down and down into gorges
choked with forests, and from which soared up a roar of rushing waters.
Slope after slope, ridge beyond ridge, canyon merging into canyon—so
the tremendous bowl sunk away to its black, deceiving depths, a
wilderness across which travel seemed impossible.

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Jean.

“Indeed it is!” murmured the girl.  “Shore that is Arizona.  I reckon I
love THIS.  The heights an’ depths—the awfulness of its wilderness!”

“An’ you want to leave it?”

“Yes an’ no.  I don’t deny the peace that comes to me heah.  But not
often do I see the Basin, an’ for that matter, one doesn’t live on
grand scenery.”

“Child, even once in a while—this sight would cure any misery, if you
only see.  I’m glad I came.  I’m glad you showed it to me first.”

She too seemed under the spell of a vastness and loneliness and beauty
and grandeur that could not but strike the heart.

Jean took her hand again.  “Girl, say you will meet me here,” he said,
his voice ringing deep in his ears.

“Shore I will,” she replied, softly, and turned to him.  It seemed then
that Jean saw her face for the first time.  She was beautiful as he had
never known beauty.  Limned against that scene, she gave it life—wild,
sweet, young life—the poignant meaning of which haunted yet eluded
him.  But she belonged there.  Her eyes were again searching his, as if
for some lost part of herself, unrealized, never known before.
Wondering, wistful, hopeful, glad—they were eyes that seemed surprised,
to reveal part of her soul.

Then her red lips parted.  Their tremulous movement was a magnet to
Jean. An invisible and mighty force pulled him down to kiss them.
Whatever the spell had been, that rude, unconscious action broke it.

He jerked away, as if he expected to be struck. “Girl—I—I”—he gasped
in amaze and sudden-dawning contrition—“I kissed you—but I swear it
wasn’t intentional—I never thought....”

The anger that Jean anticipated failed to materialize.  He stood,
breathing hard, with a hand held out in unconscious appeal.  By the
same magic, perhaps, that had transfigured her a moment past, she was
now invested again by the older character.

“Shore I reckon my callin’ y’u a gentleman was a little previous,” she
said, with a rather dry bitterness.  “But, stranger, yu’re sudden.”

“You’re not insulted?” asked Jean, hurriedly.

“Oh, I’ve been kissed before.  Shore men are all alike.”

“They’re not,” he replied, hotly, with a subtle rush of disillusion, a
dulling of enchantment.  “Don’t you class me with other men who’ve
kissed you.  I wasn’t myself when I did it an’ I’d have gone on my
knees to ask your forgiveness.... But now I wouldn’t—an’ I wouldn’t
kiss you again, either—even if you—you wanted it.”

Jean read in her strange gaze what seemed to him a vague doubt, as if
she was questioning him.

“Miss, I take that back,” added Jean, shortly.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t
mean to be rude.  It was a mean trick for me to kiss you.  A girl alone
in the woods who’s gone out of her way to be kind to me!  I don’t know
why I forgot my manners.  An’ I ask your pardon.”

She looked away then, and presently pointed far out and down into the
Basin.

“There’s Grass Valley.  That long gray spot in the black.  It’s about
fifteen miles.  Ride along the Rim that way till y’u cross a trail.
Shore y’u can’t miss it.  Then go down.”

“I’m much obliged to you,” replied Jean, reluctantly accepting what he
regarded as his dismissal.  Turning his horse, he put his foot in the
stirrup, then, hesitating, he looked across the saddle at the girl. Her
abstraction, as she gazed away over the purple depths suggested
loneliness and wistfulness.  She was not thinking of that scene spread
so wondrously before her.  It struck Jean she might be pondering a
subtle change in his feeling and attitude, something he was conscious
of, yet could not define.

“Reckon this is good-by,” he said, with hesitation.

“ADIOS, SENOR,” she replied, facing him again.  She lifted the little
carbine to the hollow of her elbow and, half turning, appeared ready to
depart.

“Adios means good-by?” he queried.

“Yes, good-by till to-morrow or good-by forever.  Take it as y’u like.”

“Then you’ll meet me here day after to-morrow?”  How eagerly he spoke,
on impulse, without a consideration of the intangible thing that had
changed him!

“Did I say I wouldn’t?”

“No.  But I reckoned you’d not care to after—” he replied, breaking
off in some confusion.

“Shore I’ll be glad to meet y’u.  Day after to-morrow about
mid-afternoon.  Right heah.  Fetch all the news from Grass Valley.”

“All right.  Thanks.  That’ll be—fine,” replied Jean, and as he spoke
he experienced a buoyant thrill, a pleasant lightness of enthusiasm,
such as always stirred boyishly in him at a prospect of adventure.
Before it passed he wondered at it and felt unsure of himself. He
needed to think.

“Stranger shore I’m not recollectin’ that y’u told me who y’u are,” she
said.

“No, reckon I didn’t tell,” he returned.  “What difference does that
make?  I said I didn’t care who or what you are.  Can’t you feel the
same about me?”

“Shore—I felt that way,” she replied, somewhat non-plussed, with the
level brown gaze steadily on his face.  “But now y’u make me think.”

“Let’s meet without knowin’ any more about each other than we do now.”

“Shore.  I’d like that.  In this big wild Arizona a girl—an’ I reckon
a man—feels so insignificant.  What’s a name, anyhow?  Still, people
an’ things have to be distinguished.  I’ll call y’u ‘Stranger’ an’ be
satisfied—if y’u say it’s fair for y’u not to tell who y’u are.”

“Fair!  No, it’s not,” declared Jean, forced to confession.  “My name’s
Jean—Jean Isbel.”

“ISBEL!” she exclaimed, with a violent start.  “Shore y’u can’t be son
of old Gass Isbel.... I’ve seen both his sons.”

“He has three,” replied Jean, with relief, now the secret was out. “I’m
the youngest.  I’m twenty-four.  Never been out of Oregon till now.  On
my way—”

The brown color slowly faded out of her face, leaving her quite pale,
with eyes that began to blaze.  The suppleness of her seemed to stiffen.

“My name’s Ellen Jorth,” she burst out, passionately.  “Does it mean
anythin’ to y’u?”

“Never heard it in my life,” protested Jean.  “Sure I reckoned you
belonged to the sheep raisers who ’re on the outs with my father.
That’s why I had to tell you I’m Jean Isbel.... Ellen Jorth. It’s
strange an’ pretty.... Reckon I can be just as good a—a friend to
you—”

“No Isbel, can ever be a friend to me,” she said, with bitter coldness.
Stripped of her ease and her soft wistfulness, she stood before him one
instant, entirely another girl, a hostile enemy.  Then she wheeled and
strode off into the woods.

Jean, in amaze, in consternation, watched her swiftly draw away with
her lithe, free step, wanting to follow her, wanting to call to her;
but the resentment roused by her suddenly avowed hostility held him
mute in his tracks.  He watched her disappear, and when the
brown-and-green wall of forest swallowed the slender gray form he
fought against the insistent desire to follow her, and fought in vain.




CHAPTER II


But Ellen Jorth’s moccasined feet did not leave a distinguishable trail
on the springy pine needle covering of the ground, and Jean could not
find any trace of her.

A little futile searching to and fro cooled his impulse and called
pride to his rescue.  Returning to his horse, he mounted, rode out
behind the pack mule to start it along, and soon felt the relief of
decision and action.  Clumps of small pines grew thickly in spots on
the Rim, making it necessary for him to skirt them; at which times he
lost sight of the purple basin.  Every time he came back to an opening
through which he could see the wild ruggedness and colors and
distances, his appreciation of their nature grew on him. Arizona from
Yuma to the Little Colorado had been to him an endless waste of
wind-scoured, sun-blasted barrenness.  This black-forested rock-rimmed
land of untrodden ways was a world that in itself would satisfy him.
Some instinct in Jean called for a lonely, wild land, into the
fastnesses of which he could roam at will and be the other strange self
that he had always yearned to be but had never been.

Every few moments there intruded into his flowing consciousness the
flashing face of Ellen Jorth, the way she had looked at him, the things
she had said.  “Reckon I was a fool,” he soliloquized, with an acute
sense of humiliation.  “She never saw how much in earnest I was.”  And
Jean began to remember the circumstances with a vividness that
disturbed and perplexed him.

The accident of running across such a girl in that lonely place might
be out of the ordinary—but it had happened.  Surprise had made him
dull. The charm of her appearance, the appeal of her manner, must have
drawn him at the very first, but he had not recognized that.  Only at
her words, “Oh, I’ve been kissed before,” had his feelings been checked
in their heedless progress.  And the utterance of them had made a
difference he now sought to analyze.  Some personality in him, some
voice, some idea had begun to defend her even before he was conscious
that he had arraigned her before the bar of his judgment.  Such defense
seemed clamoring in him now and he forced himself to listen.  He
wanted, in his hurt pride, to justify his amazing surrender to a sweet
and sentimental impulse.

He realized now that at first glance he should have recognized in her
look, her poise, her voice the quality he called thoroughbred.  Ragged
and stained apparel did not prove her of a common sort.  Jean had known
a number of fine and wholesome girls of good family; and he remembered
his sister.  This Ellen Jorth was that kind of a girl irrespective of
her present environment.  Jean championed her loyally, even after he
had gratified his selfish pride.

It was then—contending with an intangible and stealing glamour, unreal
and fanciful, like the dream of a forbidden enchantment—that Jean
arrived at the part in the little woodland drama where he had kissed
Ellen Jorth and had been unrebuked.  Why had she not resented his
action?  Dispelled was the illusion he had been dreamily and nobly
constructing.  “Oh, I’ve been kissed before!”  The shock to him now
exceeded his first dismay.  Half bitterly she had spoken, and wholly
scornful of herself, or of him, or of all men.  For she had said all
men were alike.  Jean chafed under the smart of that, a taunt every
decent man hated.  Naturally every happy and healthy young man would
want to kiss such red, sweet lips.  But if those lips had been for
others—never for him!  Jean reflected that not since childish games
had he kissed a girl—until this brown-faced Ellen Jorth came his way.
He wondered at it.  Moreover, he wondered at the significance he placed
upon it.  After all, was it not merely an accident?  Why should he
remember?  Why should he ponder?  What was the faint, deep, growing
thrill that accompanied some of his thoughts?

Riding along with busy mind, Jean almost crossed a well-beaten trail,
leading through a pine thicket and down over the Rim.  Jean’s pack mule
led the way without being driven.  And when Jean reached the edge of
the bluff one look down was enough to fetch him off his horse. That
trail was steep, narrow, clogged with stones, and as full of sharp
corners as a crosscut saw.  Once on the descent with a packed mule and
a spirited horse, Jean had no time for mind wanderings and very little
for occasional glimpses out over the cedar tops to the vast blue hollow
asleep under a westering sun.

The stones rattled, the dust rose, the cedar twigs snapped, the little
avalanches of red earth slid down, the iron-shod hoofs rang on the
rocks. This slope had been narrow at the apex in the Rim where the
trail led down a crack, and it widened in fan shape as Jean descended.
He zigzagged down a thousand feet before the slope benched into
dividing ridges.  Here the cedars and junipers failed and pines once
more hid the sun.  Deep ravines were black with brush.  From somewhere
rose a roar of running water, most pleasant to Jean’s ears.  Fresh deer
and bear tracks covered old ones made in the trail.

Those timbered ridges were but billows of that tremendous slope that
now sheered above Jean, ending in a magnificent yellow wall of rock,
greened in niches, stained by weather rust, carved and cracked and
caverned.  As Jean descended farther the hum of bees made melody, the
roar of rapid water and the murmur of a rising breeze filled him with
the content of the wild.  Sheepmen like Colter and wild girls like
Ellen Jorth and all that seemed promising or menacing in his father’s
letter could never change the Indian in Jean.  So he thought.  Hard
upon that conclusion rushed another—one which troubled with its
stinging revelation.  Surely these influences he had defied were just
the ones to bring out in him the Indian he had sensed but had never
known.  The eventful day had brought new and bitter food for Jean to
reflect upon.

The trail landed him in the bowlder-strewn bed of a wide canyon, where
the huge trees stretched a canopy of foliage which denied the sunlight,
and where a beautiful brook rushed and foamed.  Here at last Jean
tasted water that rivaled his Oregon springs.  “Ah,” he cried, “that
sure is good!”  Dark and shaded and ferny and mossy was this streamway;
and everywhere were tracks of game, from the giant spread of a grizzly
bear to the tiny, birdlike imprints of a squirrel.  Jean heard familiar
sounds of deer crackling the dead twigs; and the chatter of squirrels
was incessant.  This fragrant, cool retreat under the Rim brought back
to him the dim recesses of Oregon forests.  After all, Jean felt that
he would not miss anything that he had loved in the Cascades.  But what
was the vague sense of all not being well with him—the essence of a
faint regret—the insistence of a hovering shadow?  And then flashed
again, etched more vividly by the repetition in memory, a picture of
eyes, of lips—of something he had to forget.

Wild and broken as this rolling Basin floor had appeared from the Rim,
the reality of traveling over it made that first impression a deceit of
distance.  Down here all was on a big, rough, broken scale.  Jean did
not find even a few rods of level ground.  Bowlders as huge as houses
obstructed the stream bed; spruce trees eight feet thick tried to lord
it over the brawny pines; the ravine was a veritable canyon from which
occasional glimpses through the foliage showed the Rim as a lofty
red-tipped mountain peak.

Jean’s pack mule became frightened at scent of a bear or lion and ran
off down the rough trail, imperiling Jean’s outfit.  It was not an easy
task to head him off nor, when that was accomplished, to keep him to a
trot.  But his fright and succeeding skittishness at least made for
fast traveling.  Jean calculated that he covered ten miles under the
Rim before the character of ground and forest began to change.

The trail had turned southeast.  Instead of gorge after gorge,
red-walled and choked with forest, there began to be rolling ridges,
some high; others were knolls; and a thick cedar growth made up for a
falling off of pine.  The spruce had long disappeared.  Juniper
thickets gave way more and more to the beautiful manzanita; and soon on
the south slopes appeared cactus and a scrubby live oak.  But for the
well-broken trail, Jean would have fared ill through this tough brush.

Jean espied several deer, and again a coyote, and what he took to be a
small herd of wild horses.  No more turkey tracks showed in the dusty
patches.  He crossed a number of tiny brooklets, and at length came to
a place where the trail ended or merged in a rough road that showed
evidence of considerable travel.  Horses, sheep, and cattle had passed
along there that day.  This road turned southward, and Jean began to
have pleasurable expectations.

The road, like the trail, led down grade, but no longer at such steep
angles, and was bordered by cedar and pinyon, jack-pine and juniper,
mescal and manzanita.  Quite sharply, going around a ridge, the road
led Jean’s eye down to a small open flat of marshy, or at least grassy,
ground.  This green oasis in the wilderness of red and timbered ridges
marked another change in the character of the Basin.  Beyond that the
country began to spread out and roll gracefully, its dark-green forest
interspersed with grassy parks, until Jean headed into a long, wide
gray-green valley surrounded by black-fringed hills.  His pulses
quickened here.  He saw cattle dotting the expanse, and here and there
along the edge log cabins and corrals.

As a village, Grass Valley could not boast of much, apparently, in the
way of population.  Cabins and houses were widely scattered, as if the
inhabitants did not care to encroach upon one another.  But the one
store, built of stone, and stamped also with the characteristic
isolation, seemed to Jean to be a rather remarkable edifice.  Not
exactly like a fort did it strike him, but if it had not been designed
for defense it certainly gave that impression, especially from the
long, low side with its dark eye-like windows about the height of a
man’s shoulder.  Some rather fine horses were tied to a hitching rail.
Otherwise dust and dirt and age and long use stamped this Grass Valley
store and its immediate environment.

Jean threw his bridle, and, getting down, mounted the low porch and
stepped into the wide open door.  A face, gray against the background
of gloom inside, passed out of sight just as Jean entered.  He knew he
had been seen.  In front of the long, rather low-ceiled store were four
men, all absorbed, apparently, in a game of checkers.  Two were playing
and two were looking on.  One of these, a gaunt-faced man past middle
age, casually looked up as Jean entered.  But the moment of that casual
glance afforded Jean time enough to meet eyes he instinctively
distrusted. They masked their penetration.  They seemed neither curious
nor friendly. They saw him as if he had been merely thin air.

“Good evenin’,” said Jean.

After what appeared to Jean a lapse of time sufficient to impress him
with a possible deafness of these men, the gaunt-faced one said,
“Howdy, Isbel!”

The tone was impersonal, dry, easy, cool, laconic, and yet it could not
have been more pregnant with meaning.  Jean’s sharp sensibilities
absorbed much.  None of the slouch-sombreroed, long-mustached
Texans—for so Jean at once classed them—had ever seen Jean, but they
knew him and knew that he was expected in Grass Valley.  All but the
one who had spoken happened to have their faces in shadow under the
wide-brimmed black hats.  Motley-garbed, gun-belted, dusty-booted, they
gave Jean the same impression of latent force that he had encountered
in Colter.

“Will somebody please tell me where to find my father, Gaston Isbel?”
inquired Jean, with as civil a tongue as he could command.

Nobody paid the slightest attention.  It was the same as if Jean had
not spoken.  Waiting, half amused, half irritated, Jean shot a rapid
glance around the store.  The place had felt bare; and Jean, peering
back through gloomy space, saw that it did not contain much.  Dry goods
and sacks littered a long rude counter; long rough shelves divided
their length into stacks of canned foods and empty sections; a low
shelf back of the counter held a generous burden of cartridge boxes,
and next to it stood a rack of rifles.  On the counter lay open cases
of plug tobacco, the odor of which was second in strength only to that
of rum.

Jean’s swift-roving eye reverted to the men, three of whom were
absorbed in the greasy checkerboard.  The fourth man was the one who
had spoken and he now deigned to look at Jean.  Not much flesh was
there stretched over his bony, powerful physiognomy.  He stroked a lean
chin with a big mobile hand that suggested more of bridle holding than
familiarity with a bucksaw and plow handle.  It was a lazy hand.  The
man looked lazy.  If he spoke at all it would be with lazy speech, yet
Jean had not encountered many men to whom he would have accorded more
potency to stir in him the instinct of self-preservation.

“Shore,” drawled this gaunt-faced Texan, “old Gass lives aboot a mile
down heah.”  With slow sweep of the big hand he indicated a general
direction to the south; then, appearing to forget his questioner, he
turned his attention to the game.

Jean muttered his thanks and, striding out, he mounted again, and drove
the pack mule down the road.  “Reckon I’ve ran into the wrong folds
to-day,” he said.  “If I remember dad right he was a man to make an’
keep friends.  Somehow I’ll bet there’s goin’ to be hell.”  Beyond the
store were some rather pretty and comfortable homes, little ranch
houses back in the coves of the hills.  The road turned west and Jean
saw his first sunset in the Tonto Basin.  It was a pageant of purple
clouds with silver edges, and background of deep rich gold.  Presently
Jean met a lad driving a cow.  “Hello, Johnny!” he said, genially, and
with a double purpose.  “My name’s Jean Isbel.  By Golly! I’m lost in
Grass Valley.  Will you tell me where my dad lives?”

“Yep.  Keep right on, an’ y’u cain’t miss him,” replied the lad, with a
bright smile.  “He’s lookin’ fer y’u.”

“How do you know, boy?” queried Jean, warmed by that smile.

“Aw, I know.  It’s all over the valley thet y’u’d ride in ter-day.
Shore I wus the one thet tole yer dad an’ he give me a dollar.”

“Was he glad to hear it?” asked Jean, with a queer sensation in his
throat.

“Wal, he plumb was.”

“An’ who told you I was goin’ to ride in to-day?”

“I heerd it at the store,” replied the lad, with an air of confidence.
“Some sheepmen was talkin’ to Greaves.  He’s the storekeeper.  I was
settin’ outside, but I heerd.  A Mexican come down off the Rim ter-day
an’ he fetched the news.”  Here the lad looked furtively around, then
whispered.  “An’ thet greaser was sent by somebody.  I never heerd no
more, but them sheepmen looked pretty plumb sour.  An’ one of them,
comin’ out, give me a kick, darn him.  It shore is the luckedest day
fer us cowmen.”

“How’s that, Johnny?”

“Wal, that’s shore a big fight comin’ to Grass Valley.  My dad says so
an’ he rides fer yer dad.  An’ if it comes now y’u’ll be heah.”

“Ahuh!” laughed Jean.  “An’ what then, boy?”

The lad turned bright eyes upward.  “Aw, now, yu’all cain’t come thet
on me.  Ain’t y’u an Injun, Jean Isbel?  Ain’t y’u a hoss tracker thet
rustlers cain’t fool?  Ain’t y’u a plumb dead shot?  Ain’t y’u wuss’ern
a grizzly bear in a rough-an’-tumble?... Now ain’t y’u, shore?”

Jean bade the flattering lad a rather sober good day and rode on his
way.  Manifestly a reputation somewhat difficult to live up to had
preceded his entry into Grass Valley.

Jean’s first sight of his future home thrilled him through.  It was a
big, low, rambling log structure standing well out from a wooded knoll
at the edge of the valley.  Corrals and barns and sheds lay off at the
back.  To the fore stretched broad pastures where numberless cattle and
horses grazed.  At sunset the scene was one of rich color. Prosperity
and abundance and peace seemed attendant upon that ranch; lusty voices
of burros braying and cows bawling seemed welcoming Jean. A hound
bayed.  The first cool touch of wind fanned Jean’s cheek and brought a
fragrance of wood smoke and frying ham.

Horses in the Pasture romped to the fence and whistled at these
newcomers.  Jean espied a white-faced black horse that gladdened his
sight.  “Hello, Whiteface!  I’ll sure straddle you,” called Jean. Then
up the gentle slope he saw the tall figure of his father—the same as
he had seen him thousands of times, bareheaded, shirt sleeved, striding
with long step.  Jean waved and called to him.

“Hi, You Prodigal!” came the answer.  Yes, the voice of his father—and
Jean’s boyhood memories flashed.  He hurried his horse those last few
rods.  No—dad was not the same.  His hair shone gray.

“Here I am, dad,” called Jean, and then he was dismounting.  A deep,
quiet emotion settled over him, stilling the hurry, the eagerness, the
pang in his breast.

“Son, I shore am glad to see you,” said his father, and wrung his hand.
“Wal, wal, the size of you!  Shore you’ve grown, any how you favor your
mother.”

Jean felt in the iron clasp of hand, in the uplifting of the handsome
head, in the strong, fine light of piercing eyes that there was no
difference in the spirit of his father.  But the old smile could not
hide lines and shades strange to Jean.

“Dad, I’m as glad as you,” replied Jean, heartily.  “It seems long
we’ve been parted, now I see you.  Are You well, dad, an’ all right?”

“Not complainin’, son. I can ride all day same as ever,” he said.
“Come.  Never mind your hosses.  They’ll be looked after. Come meet the
folks.... Wal, wal, you got heah at last.”

On the porch of the house a group awaited Jean’s coming, rather
silently, he thought.  Wide-eyed children were there, very shy and
watchful.  The dark face of his sister corresponded with the image of
her in his memory.  She appeared taller, more womanly, as she embraced
him.  “Oh, Jean, Jean, I’m glad you’ve come!” she cried, and pressed
him close.  Jean felt in her a woman’s anxiety for the present as well
as affection for the past.  He remembered his aunt Mary, though he had
not seen her for years.  His half brothers, Bill and Guy, had changed
but little except perhaps to grow lean and rangy.  Bill resembled his
father, though his aspect was jocular rather than serious.  Guy was
smaller, wiry, and hard as rock, with snapping eyes in a brown, still
face, and he had the bow-legs of a cattleman.  Both had married in
Arizona.  Bill’s wife, Kate, was a stout, comely little woman, mother
of three of the children.  The other wife was young, a strapping girl,
red headed and freckled, with wonderful lines of pain and strength in
her face.  Jean remembered, as he looked at her, that some one had
written him about the tragedy in her life.  When she was only a child
the Apaches had murdered all her family.  Then next to greet Jean were
the little children, all shy, yet all manifestly impressed by the
occasion.  A warmth and intimacy of forgotten home emotions flooded
over Jean.  Sweet it was to get home to these relatives who loved him
and welcomed him with quiet gladness.  But there seemed more.  Jean was
quick to see the shadow in the eyes of the women in that household and
to sense a strange reliance which his presence brought.

“Son, this heah Tonto is a land of milk an’ honey,” said his father, as
Jean gazed spellbound at the bounteous supper.

Jean certainly performed gastronomic feats on this occasion, to the
delight of Aunt Mary and the wonder of the children.  “Oh, he’s
starv-ved to death,” whispered one of the little boys to his sister.
They had begun to warm to this stranger uncle.  Jean had no chance to
talk, even had he been able to, for the meal-time showed a relaxation
of restraint and they all tried to tell him things at once.  In the
bright lamplight his father looked easier and happier as he beamed upon
Jean.

After supper the men went into an adjoining room that appeared most
comfortable and attractive.  It was long, and the width of the house,
with a huge stone fireplace, low ceiling of hewn timbers and walls of
the same, small windows with inside shutters of wood, and home-made
table and chairs and rugs.

“Wal, Jean, do you recollect them shootin’-irons?” inquired the
rancher, pointing above the fireplace.  Two guns hung on the spreading
deer antlers there.  One was a musket Jean’s father had used in the war
of the rebellion and the other was a long, heavy, muzzle-loading
flintlock Kentucky, rifle with which Jean had learned to shoot.

“Reckon I do, dad,” replied Jean, and with reverent hands and a rush of
memory he took the old gun down.

“Jean, you shore handle thet old arm some clumsy,” said Guy Isbel,
dryly.  And Bill added a remark to the effect that perhaps Jean had
been leading a luxurious and tame life back there in Oregon, and then
added,  “But I reckon he’s packin’ that six-shooter like a Texan.”

“Say, I fetched a gun or two along with me,” replied Jean, jocularly.
“Reckon I near broke my poor mule’s back with the load of shells an’
guns.  Dad, what was the idea askin’ me to pack out an arsenal?”

“Son, shore all shootin’ arms an’ such are at a premium in the Tonto,”
replied his father.  “An’ I was givin’ you a hunch to come loaded.”

His cool, drawling voice seemed to put a damper upon the pleasantries.
Right there Jean sensed the charged atmosphere.  His brothers were
bursting with utterance about to break forth, and his father suddenly
wore a look that recalled to Jean critical times of days long past. But
the entrance of the children and the women folk put an end to
confidences.  Evidently the youngsters were laboring under subdued
excitement.  They preceded their mother, the smallest boy in the lead.
For him this must have been both a dreadful and a wonderful experience,
for he seemed to be pushed forward by his sister and brother and
mother, and driven by yearnings of his own.  “There now, Lee.  Say,
‘Uncle Jean, what did you fetch us?’  The lad hesitated for a shy,
frightened look at Jean, and then, gaining something from his scrutiny
of his uncle, he toddled forward and bravely delivered the question of
tremendous importance.

“What did I fetch you, hey?” cried Jean, in delight, as he took the lad
up on his knee.  “Wouldn’t you like to know?  I didn’t forget, Lee. I
remembered you all.  Oh! the job I had packin’ your bundle of
presents.... Now, Lee, make a guess.”

“I dess you fetched a dun,” replied Lee.

“A dun!—I’ll bet you mean a gun,” laughed Jean.  “Well, you
four-year-old Texas gunman!  Make another guess.”

That appeared too momentous and entrancing for the other two
youngsters, and, adding their shrill and joyous voices to Lee’s, they
besieged Jean.

“Dad, where’s my pack?” cried Jean.  “These young Apaches are after my
scalp.”

“Reckon the boys fetched it onto the porch,” replied the rancher.

Guy Isbel opened the door and went out.  “By golly! heah’s three
packs,” he called.  “Which one do you want, Jean?”

“It’s a long, heavy bundle, all tied up,” replied Jean.

Guy came staggering in under a burden that brought a whoop from the
youngsters and bright gleams to the eyes of the women.  Jean lost
nothing of this.  How glad he was that he had tarried in San Francisco
because of a mental picture of this very reception in far-off wild
Arizona.

When Guy deposited the bundle on the floor it jarred the room. It gave
forth metallic and rattling and crackling sounds.

“Everybody stand back an’ give me elbow room,” ordered Jean,
majestically.  “My good folks, I want you all to know this is somethin’
that doesn’t happen often.  The bundle you see here weighed about a
hundred pounds when I packed it on my shoulder down Market Street in
Frisco.  It was stolen from me on shipboard. I got it back in San Diego
an’ licked the thief.  It rode on a burro from San Diego to Yuma an’
once I thought the burro was lost for keeps. It came up the Colorado
River from Yuma to Ehrenberg an’ there went on top of a stage.  We got
chased by bandits an’ once when the horses were gallopin’ hard it near
rolled off.  Then it went on the back of a pack horse an’ helped wear
him out.  An’ I reckon it would be somewhere else now if I hadn’t
fallen in with a freighter goin’ north from Phoenix to the Santa Fe
Trail.  The last lap when it sagged the back of a mule was the riskiest
an’ full of the narrowest escapes. Twice my mule bucked off his pack
an’ left my outfit scattered. Worst of all, my precious bundle made the
mule top heavy comin’ down that place back here where the trail seems
to drop off the earth. There I was hard put to keep sight of my pack.
Sometimes it was on top an’ other times the mule.  But it got here at
last.... An’ now I’ll open it.”

After this long and impressive harangue, which at least augmented the
suspense of the women and worked the children into a frenzy, Jean
leisurely untied the many knots round the bundle and unrolled it. He
had packed that bundle for just such travel as it had sustained. Three
cloth-bound rifles he laid aside, and with them a long, very heavy
package tied between two thin wide boards.  From this came the metallic
clink.  “Oo, I know what dem is!” cried Lee, breaking the silence of
suspense.  Then Jean, tearing open a long flat parcel, spread before
the mute, rapt-eyed youngsters such magnificent things, as they had
never dreamed of—picture books, mouth-harps, dolls, a toy gun and a
toy pistol, a wonderful whistle and a fox horn, and last of all a box
of candy.  Before these treasures on the floor, too magical to be
touched at first, the two little boys and their sister simply knelt.
That was a sweet, full moment for Jean; yet even that was clouded by
the something which shadowed these innocent children fatefully born in
a wild place at a wild time.  Next Jean gave to his sister the presents
he had brought her—beautiful cloth for a dress, ribbons and a bit of
lace, handkerchiefs and buttons and yards of linen, a sewing case and a
whole box of spools of thread, a comb and brush and mirror, and lastly
a Spanish brooch inlaid with garnets.  “There, Ann,” said Jean, “I
confess I asked a girl friend in Oregon to tell me some things my
sister might like.”  Manifestly there was not much difference in girls.
Ann seemed stunned by this munificence, and then awakening, she hugged
Jean in a way that took his breath.  She was not a child any more, that
was certain.  Aunt Mary turned knowing eyes upon Jean.  “Reckon you
couldn’t have pleased Ann more.  She’s engaged, Jean, an’ where girls
are in that state these things mean a heap.... Ann, you’ll be married
in that!”  And she pointed to the beautiful folds of material that Ann
had spread out.

“What’s this?” demanded Jean.  His sister’s blushes were enough to
convict her, and they were mightily becoming, too.

“Here, Aunt Mary,” went on Jean, “here’s yours, an’ here’s somethin’
for each of my new sisters.”  This distribution left the women as happy
and occupied, almost, as the children.  It left also another package,
the last one in the bundle.  Jean laid hold of it and, lifting it, he
was about to speak when he sustained a little shock of memory. Quite
distinctly he saw two little feet, with bare toes peeping out of
worn-out moccasins, and then round, bare, symmetrical ankles that had
been scratched by brush.  Next he saw Ellen Jorth’s passionate face as
she looked when she had made the violent action so disconcerting to
him.  In this happy moment the memory seemed farther off than a few
hours.  It had crystallized.  It annoyed while it drew him.  As a
result he slowly laid this package aside and did not speak as he had
intended to.

“Dad, I reckon I didn’t fetch a lot for you an’ the boys,” continued
Jean.  “Some knives, some pipes an’ tobacco.  An’ sure the guns.”

“Shore, you’re a regular Santa Claus, Jean,” replied his father. “Wal,
wal, look at the kids.  An’ look at Mary.  An’ for the land’s sake look
at Ann!  Wal, wal, I’m gettin’ old.  I’d forgotten the pretty stuff an’
gimcracks that mean so much to women.  We’re out of the world heah.
It’s just as well you’ve lived apart from us, Jean, for comin’ back
this way, with all that stuff, does us a lot of good.  I cain’t say,
son, how obliged I am.  My mind has been set on the hard side of life.
An’ it’s shore good to forget—to see the smiles of the women an’ the
joy of the kids.”

At this juncture a tall young man entered the open door.  He looked a
rider.  All about him, even his face, except his eyes, seemed old, but
his eyes were young, fine, soft, and dark.

“How do, y’u-all!” he said, evenly.

Ann rose from her knees.  Then Jean did not need to be told who this
newcomer was.

“Jean, this is my friend, Andrew Colmor.”

Jean knew when he met Colmor’s grip and the keen flash of his eyes that
he was glad Ann had set her heart upon one of their kind.  And his
second impression was something akin to the one given him in the road
by the admiring lad.  Colmor’s estimate of him must have been a
monument built of Ann’s eulogies.  Jean’s heart suffered misgivings.
Could he live up to the character that somehow had forestalled his
advent in Grass Valley?  Surely life was measured differently here in
the Tonto Basin.

The children, bundling their treasures to their bosoms, were dragged
off to bed in some remote part of the house, from which their laughter
and voices came back with happy significance.  Jean forthwith had an
interested audience.  How eagerly these lonely pioneer people listened
to news of the outside world!  Jean talked until he was hoarse. In
their turn his hearers told him much that had never found place in the
few and short letters he had received since he had been left in Oregon.
Not a word about sheepmen or any hint of rustlers! Jean marked the
omission and thought all the more seriously of probabilities because
nothing was said.  Altogether the evening was a happy reunion of a
family of which all living members were there present.  Jean grasped
that this fact was one of significant satisfaction to his father.

“Shore we’re all goin’ to live together heah,” he declared.  “I started
this range.  I call most of this valley mine.  We’ll run up a cabin for
Ann soon as she says the word.  An’ you, Jean, where’s your girl? I
shore told you to fetch her.”

“Dad, I didn’t have one,” replied Jean.

“Wal, I wish you had,” returned the rancher.  “You’ll go courtin’ one
of these Tonto hussies that I might object to.”

“Why, father, there’s not a girl in the valley Jean would look twice
at,” interposed Ann Isbel, with spirit.

Jean laughed the matter aside, but he had an uneasy memory.  Aunt Mary
averred, after the manner of relatives, that Jean would play havoc
among the women of the settlement.  And Jean retorted that at least one
member of the Isbels; should hold out against folly and fight and love
and marriage, the agents which had reduced the family to these few
present.  “I’ll be the last Isbel to go under,” he concluded.

“Son, you’re talkin’ wisdom,” said his father.  “An’ shore that reminds
me of the uncle you’re named after.  Jean Isbel!... Wal, he was my
youngest brother an’ shore a fire-eater.  Our mother was a French
creole from Louisiana, an’ Jean must have inherited some of his
fightin’ nature from her.  When the war of the rebellion started Jean
an’ I enlisted. I was crippled before we ever got to the front.  But
Jean went through three Years before he was killed.  His company had
orders to fight to the last man.  An’ Jean fought an’ lived long enough
just to be that last man.”

At length Jean was left alone with his father.

“Reckon you’re used to bunkin’ outdoors?” queried the rancher, rather
abruptly.

“Most of the time,” replied Jean.

“Wal, there’s room in the house, but I want you to sleep out. Come get
your beddin’ an’ gun. I’ll show you.”

They went outside on the porch, where Jean shouldered his roll of
tarpaulin and blankets.  His rifle, in its saddle sheath, leaned
against the door.  His father took it up and, half pulling it out,
looked at it by the starlight.  “Forty-four, eh?  Wal, wal, there’s
shore no better, if a man can hold straight.”  At the moment a big gray
dog trotted up to sniff at Jean.  “An’ heah’s your bunkmate, Shepp.
He’s part lofer, Jean.  His mother was a favorite shepherd dog of mine.
His father was a big timber wolf that took us two years to kill.  Some
bad wolf packs runnin’ this Basin.”

The night was cold and still, darkly bright under moon and stars; the
smell of hay seemed to mingle with that of cedar.  Jean followed his
father round the house and up a gentle slope of grass to the edge of
the cedar line.  Here several trees with low-sweeping thick branches
formed a dense, impenetrable shade.

“Son, your uncle Jean was scout for Liggett, one of the greatest rebels
the South had,” said the rancher.  “An’ you’re goin’ to be scout for
the Isbels of Tonto.  Reckon you’ll find it ’most as hot as your uncle
did.... Spread your bed inside.  You can see out, but no one can see
you.  Reckon there’s been some queer happenin’s ’round heah lately.  If
Shepp could talk he’d shore have lots to tell us.  Bill an’ Guy have
been sleepin’ out, trailin’ strange hoss tracks, an’ all that.  But
shore whoever’s been prowlin’ around heah was too sharp for them.  Some
bad, crafty, light-steppin’ woodsmen ’round heah, Jean.... Three
mawnin’s ago, just after daylight, I stepped out the back door an’ some
one of these sneaks I’m talkin’ aboot took a shot at me.  Missed my
head a quarter of an inch! To-morrow I’ll show you the bullet hole in
the doorpost.  An’ some of my gray hairs that ’re stickin’ in it!”

“Dad!” ejaculated Jean, with a hand outstretched.  “That’s awful! You
frighten me.”

“No time to be scared,” replied his father, calmly.  “They’re shore
goin’ to kill me.  That’s why I wanted you home.... In there with you,
now!  Go to sleep.  You shore can trust Shepp to wake you if he gets
scent or sound.... An’ good night, my son.  I’m sayin’ that I’ll rest
easy to-night.”

Jean mumbled a good night and stood watching his father’s shining white
head move away under the starlight.  Then the tall, dark form vanished,
a door closed, and all was still.  The dog Shepp licked Jean’s hand.
Jean felt grateful for that warm touch.  For a moment he sat on his
roll of bedding, his thought still locked on the shuddering revelation
of his father’s words, “They’re shore goin’ to kill me.”  The shock of
inaction passed.  Jean pushed his pack in the dark opening and,
crawling inside, he unrolled it and made his bed.

When at length he was comfortably settled for the night he breathed a
long sigh of relief.  What bliss to relax!  A throbbing and burning of
his muscles seemed to begin with his rest.  The cool starlit night, the
smell of cedar, the moan of wind, the silence—an were real to his
senses.  After long weeks of long, arduous travel he was home.  The
warmth of the welcome still lingered, but it seemed to have been
pierced by an icy thrust.  What lay before him?  The shadow in the eyes
of his aunt, in the younger, fresher eyes of his sister—Jean connected
that with the meaning of his father’s tragic words.  Far past was the
morning that had been so keen, the breaking of camp in the sunlit
forest, the riding down the brown aisles under the pines, the music of
bleating lambs that had called him not to pass by. Thought of Ellen
Jorth recurred.  Had he met her only that morning? She was up there in
the forest, asleep under the starlit pines. Who was she?  What was her
story?  That savage fling of her skirt, her bitter speech and
passionate flaming face—they haunted Jean. They were crystallizing
into simpler memories, growing away from his bewilderment, and
therefore at once sweeter and more doubtful. “Maybe she meant
differently from what I thought,” Jean soliloquized. “Anyway, she was
honest.”  Both shame and thrill possessed him at the recall of an
insidious idea—dare he go back and find her and give her the last
package of gifts he had brought from the city?  What might they mean to
poor, ragged, untidy, beautiful Ellen Jorth?  The idea grew on Jean.
It could not be dispelled.  He resisted stubbornly. It was bound to go
to its fruition.  Deep into his mind had sunk an impression of her
need—a material need that brought spirit and pride to abasement.  From
one picture to another his memory wandered, from one speech and act of
hers to another, choosing, selecting, casting aside, until clear and
sharp as the stars shone the words, “Oh, I’ve been kissed before!”
That stung him now.  By whom?  Not by one man, but by several, by many,
she had meant.  Pshaw! he had only been sympathetic and drawn by a
strange girl in the woods.  To-morrow he would forget.  Work there was
for him in Grass Valley.  And he reverted uneasily to the remarks of
his father until at last sleep claimed him.

A cold nose against his cheek, a low whine, awakened Jean.  The big dog
Shepp was beside him, keen, wary, intense.  The night appeared far
advanced toward dawn.  Far away a cock crowed; the near-at-hand one
answered in clarion voice.  “What is it, Shepp?” whispered Jean, and he
sat up.  The dog smelled or heard something suspicious to his nature,
but whether man or animal Jean could not tell.




CHAPTER III


The morning star, large, intensely blue-white, magnificent in its
dominance of the clear night sky, hung over the dim, dark valley
ramparts. The moon had gone down and all the other stars were wan, pale
ghosts.

Presently the strained vacuum of Jean’s ears vibrated to a low roar of
many hoofs.  It came from the open valley, along the slope to the
south.  Shepp acted as if he wanted the word to run.  Jean laid a hand
on the dog.  “Hold on, Shepp,” he whispered.  Then hauling on his boots
and slipping into his coat Jean took his rifle and stole out into the
open.  Shepp appeared to be well trained, for it was evident that he
had a strong natural tendency to run off and hunt for whatever had
roused him.  Jean thought it more than likely that the dog scented an
animal of some kind.  If there were men prowling around the ranch
Shepp, might have been just as vigilant, but it seemed to Jean that the
dog would have shown less eagerness to leave him, or none at all.

In the stillness of the morning it took Jean a moment to locate the
direction of the wind, which was very light and coming from the south.
In fact that little breeze had borne the low roar of trampling hoofs.
Jean circled the ranch house to the right and kept along the slope at
the edge of the cedars.  It struck him suddenly how well fitted he was
for work of this sort.  All the work he had ever done, except for his
few years in school, had been in the open.  All the leisure he had ever
been able to obtain had been given to his ruling passion for hunting
and fishing.  Love of the wild had been born in Jean.  At this moment
he experienced a grim assurance of what his instinct and his training
might accomplish if directed to a stern and daring end.  Perhaps his
father understood this; perhaps the old Texan had some little reason
for his confidence.

Every few paces Jean halted to listen.  All objects, of course, were
indistinguishable in the dark-gray obscurity, except when he came close
upon them.  Shepp showed an increasing eagerness to bolt out into the
void.  When Jean had traveled half a mile from the house he heard a
scattered trampling of cattle on the run, and farther out a low
strangled bawl of a calf.  “Ahuh!” muttered Jean.  “Cougar or some
varmint pulled down that calf.”  Then he discharged his rifle in the
air and yelled with all his might.  It was necessary then to yell again
to hold Shepp back.

Thereupon Jean set forth down the valley, and tramped out and across
and around, as much to scare away whatever had been after the stock as
to look for the wounded calf.  More than once he heard cattle moving
away ahead of him, but he could not see them.  Jean let Shepp go,
hoping the dog would strike a trail.  But Shepp neither gave tongue nor
came back.  Dawn began to break, and in the growing light Jean searched
around until at last he stumbled over a dead calf, lying in a little
bare wash where water ran in wet seasons.  Big wolf tracks showed in
the soft earth.  “Lofers,” said Jean, as he knelt and just covered one
track with his spread hand.  “We had wolves in Oregon, but not as big
as these.... Wonder where that half-wolf dog, Shepp, went.  Wonder if
he can be trusted where wolves are concerned. I’ll bet not, if there’s
a she-wolf runnin’ around.”

Jean found tracks of two wolves, and he trailed them out of the wash,
then lost them in the grass.  But, guided by their direction, he went
on and climbed a slope to the cedar line, where in the dusty patches he
found the tracks again.  “Not scared much,” he muttered, as he noted
the slow trotting tracks.  “Well, you old gray lofers, we’re goin’ to
clash.”  Jean knew from many a futile hunt that wolves were the wariest
and most intelligent of wild animals in the quest.  From the top of a
low foothill he watched the sun rise; and then no longer wondered why
his father waxed eloquent over the beauty and location and luxuriance
of this grassy valley.  But it was large enough to make rich a good
many ranchers.  Jean tried to restrain any curiosity as to his father’s
dealings in Grass Valley until the situation had been made clear.

Moreover, Jean wanted to love this wonderful country.  He wanted to be
free to ride and hunt and roam to his heart’s content; and therefore he
dreaded hearing his father’s claims.  But Jean threw off forebodings.
Nothing ever turned out so badly as it presaged.  He would think the
best until certain of the worst.  The morning was gloriously bright,
and already the frost was glistening wet on the stones.  Grass Valley
shone like burnished silver dotted with innumerable black spots. Burros
were braying their discordant messages to one another; the colts were
romping in the fields; stallions were whistling; cows were bawling.  A
cloud of blue smoke hung low over the ranch house, slowly wafting away
on the wind.  Far out in the valley a dark group of horsemen were
riding toward the village.  Jean glanced thoughtfully at them and
reflected that he seemed destined to harbor suspicion of all men new
and strange to him.  Above the distant village stood the darkly green
foothills leading up to the craggy slopes, and these ending in the Rim,
a red, black-fringed mountain front, beautiful in the morning sunlight,
lonely, serene, and mysterious against the level skyline.  Mountains,
ranges, distances unknown to Jean, always called to him—to come, to
seek, to explore, to find, but no wild horizon ever before beckoned to
him as this one.  And the subtle vague emotion that had gone to sleep
with him last night awoke now hauntingly. It took effort to dispel the
desire to think, to wonder.

Upon his return to the house, he went around on the valley side, so as
to see the place by light of day.  His father had built for permanence;
and evidently there had been three constructive periods in the history
of that long, substantial, picturesque log house. But few nails and
little sawed lumber and no glass had been used. Strong and skillful
hands, axes and a crosscut saw, had been the prime factors in erecting
this habitation of the Isbels.

“Good mawnin’, son,” called a cheery voice from the porch.  “Shore
we-all heard you shoot; an’ the crack of that forty-four was as welcome
as May flowers.”

Bill Isbel looked up from a task over a saddle girth and inquired
pleasantly if Jean ever slept of nights.  Guy Isbel laughed and there
was warm regard in the gaze he bent on Jean.

“You old Indian!” he drawled, slowly.  “Did you get a bead on anythin’?”

“No.  I shot to scare away what I found to be some of your lofers,”
replied Jean.  “I heard them pullin’ down a calf.  An’ I found tracks
of two whoppin’ big wolves.  I found the dead calf, too.  Reckon the
meat can be saved.  Dad, you must lose a lot of stock here.”

“Wal, son, you shore hit the nail on the haid,” replied the rancher.
“What with lions an’ bears an’ lofers—an’ two-footed lofers of another
breed—I’ve lost five thousand dollars in stock this last year.”

“Dad!  You don’t mean it!” exclaimed Jean, in astonishment. To him that
sum represented a small fortune.

“I shore do,” answered his father.

Jean shook his head as if he could not understand such an enormous loss
where there were keen able-bodied men about.  “But that’s awful, dad.
How could it happen?  Where were your herders an’ cowboys? An’ Bill an’
Guy?”

Bill Isbel shook a vehement fist at Jean and retorted in earnest,
having manifestly been hit in a sore spot.  “Where was me an’ Guy, huh?
Wal, my Oregon brother, we was heah, all year, sleepin’ more or less
aboot three hours out of every twenty-four—ridin’ our boots off—an’
we couldn’t keep down that loss.”

“Jean, you-all have a mighty tumble comin’ to you out heah,” said Guy,
complacently.

“Listen, son,” spoke up the rancher.  “You want to have some hunches
before you figure on our troubles.  There’s two or three packs of
lofers, an’ in winter time they are hell to deal with.  Lions thick as
bees, an’ shore bad when the snow’s on.  Bears will kill a cow now an’
then.  An’ whenever an’ old silvertip comes mozyin’ across from the
Mazatzals he kills stock.  I’m in with half a dozen cattlemen. We all
work together, an’ the whole outfit cain’t keep these vermints down.
Then two years ago the Hash Knife Gang come into the Tonto.”

“Hash Knife Gang?  What a pretty name!” replied Jean.  “Who’re they?”

“Rustlers, son.  An’ shore the real old Texas brand.  The old Lone Star
State got too hot for them, an’ they followed the trail of a lot of
other Texans who needed a healthier climate.  Some two hundred Texans
around heah, Jean, an’ maybe a matter of three hundred inhabitants in
the Tonto all told, good an’ bad.  Reckon it’s aboot half an’ half.”

A cheery call from the kitchen interrupted the conversation of the men.

“You come to breakfast.”

During the meal the old rancher talked to Bill and Guy about the day’s
order of work; and from this Jean gathered an idea of what a big cattle
business his father conducted.  After breakfast Jean’s brothers
manifested keen interest in the new rifles.  These were unwrapped and
cleaned and taken out for testing.  The three rifles were forty-four
calibre Winchesters, the kind of gun Jean had found most effective. He
tried them out first, and the shots he made were satisfactory to him
and amazing to the others.  Bill had used an old Henry rifle. Guy did
not favor any particular rifle.  The rancher pinned his faith to the
famous old single-shot buffalo gun, mostly called needle gun. “Wal,
reckon I’d better stick to mine.  Shore you cain’t teach an old dog new
tricks.  But you boys may do well with the forty-fours. Pack ’em on
your saddles an’ practice when you see a coyote.”

Jean found it difficult to convince himself that this interest in guns
and marksmanship had any sinister propulsion back of it.  His father
and brothers had always been this way.  Rifles were as important to
pioneers as plows, and their skillful use was an achievement every
frontiersman tried to attain.  Friendly rivalry had always existed
among the members of the Isbel family: even Ann Isbel was a good shot.
But such proficiency in the use of firearms—and life in the open that
was correlative with it—had not dominated them as it had Jean. Bill
and Guy Isbel were born cattlemen—chips of the old block. Jean began
to hope that his father’s letter was an exaggeration, and particularly
that the fatalistic speech of last night, “they are goin’ to kill me,”
was just a moody inclination to see the worst side. Still, even as Jean
tried to persuade himself of this more hopeful view, he recalled many
references to the peculiar reputation of Texans for gun-throwing, for
feuds, for never-ending hatreds.  In Oregon the Isbels had lived among
industrious and peaceful pioneers from all over the States; to be sure,
the life had been rough and primitive, and there had been fights on
occasions, though no Isbel had ever killed a man.  But now they had
become fixed in a wilder and sparsely settled country among men of
their own breed.  Jean was afraid his hopes had only sentiment to
foster them.  Nevertheless, be forced back a strange, brooding, mental
state and resolutely held up the brighter side.  Whatever the evil
conditions existing in Grass Valley, they could be met with
intelligence and courage, with an absolute certainty that it was
inevitable they must pass away.  Jean refused to consider the old,
fatal law that at certain wild times and wild places in the West
certain men had to pass away to change evil conditions.

“Wal, Jean, ride around the range with the boys,” said the rancher.
“Meet some of my neighbors, Jim Blaisdell, in particular.  Take a look
at the cattle.  An’ pick out some hosses for yourself.”

“I’ve seen one already,” declared Jean, quickly.  “A black with white
face.  I’ll take him.”

“Shore you know a hoss.  To my eye he’s my pick.  But the boys don’t
agree.  Bill ‘specially has degenerated into a fancier of pitchin’
hosses.  Ann can ride that black.  You try him this mawnin’.... An’,
son, enjoy yourself.”

True to his first impression, Jean named the black horse Whiteface and
fell in love with him before ever he swung a leg over him. Whiteface
appeared spirited, yet gentle.  He had been trained instead of being
broken.  Of hard hits and quirts and spurs he had no experience.  He
liked to do what his rider wanted him to do.

A hundred or more horses grazed in the grassy meadow, and as Jean rode
on among them it was a pleasure to see stallions throw heads and ears
up and whistle or snort.  Whole troops of colts and two-year-olds raced
with flying tails and manes.

Beyond these pastures stretched the range, and Jean saw the gray-green
expanse speckled by thousands of cattle.  The scene was inspiring.
Jean’s brothers led him all around, meeting some of the herders and
riders employed on the ranch, one of whom was a burly, grizzled man
with eyes reddened and narrowed by much riding in wind and sun and
dust. His name was Evans and he was father of the lad whom Jean had met
near the village.  Everts was busily skinning the calf that had been
killed by the wolves.  “See heah, y’u Jean Isbel,” said Everts, “it
shore was aboot time y’u come home.  We-all heahs y’u hev an eye fer
tracks. Wal, mebbe y’u can kill Old Gray, the lofer thet did this job.
He’s pulled down nine calves as’ yearlin’s this last two months thet I
know of.  An’ we’ve not hed the spring round-up.”

Grass Valley widened to the southeast.  Jean would have been backward
about estimating the square miles in it.  Yet it was not vast acreage
so much as rich pasture that made it such a wonderful range.  Several
ranches lay along the western slope of this section.  Jean was informed
that open parks and swales, and little valleys nestling among the
foothills, wherever there was water and grass, had been settled by
ranchers.  Every summer a few new families ventured in.

Blaisdell struck Jean as being a lionlike type of Texan, both in his
broad, bold face, his huge head with its upstanding tawny hair like a
mane, and in the speech and force that betokened the nature of his
heart.  He was not as old as Jean’s father.  He had a rolling voice,
with the same drawling intonation characteristic of all Texans, and
blue eyes that still held the fire of youth.  Quite a marked contrast
he presented to the lean, rangy, hard-jawed, intent-eyed men Jean had
begun to accept as Texans.

Blaisdell took time for a curious scrutiny and study of Jean, that,
frank and kindly as it was, and evidently the adjustment of impressions
gotten from hearsay, yet bespoke the attention of one used to judging
men for himself, and in this particular case having reasons of his own
for so doing.

“Wal, you’re like your sister Ann,” said Blaisdell.  “Which you may
take as a compliment, young man.  Both of you favor your mother. But
you’re an Isbel.  Back in Texas there are men who never wear a glove on
their right hands, an’ shore I reckon if one of them met up with you
sudden he’d think some graves had opened an’ he’d go for his gun.”

Blaisdell’s laugh pealed out with deep, pleasant roll.  Thus he planted
in Jean’s sensitive mind a significant thought-provoking idea about the
past-and-gone Isbels.

His further remarks, likewise, were exceedingly interesting to Jean.
The settling of the Tonto Basin by Texans was a subject often in
dispute.  His own father had been in the first party of adventurous
pioneers who had traveled up from the south to cross over the Reno Pass
of the Mazatzals into the Basin.  “Newcomers from outside get
impressions of the Tonto accordin’ to the first settlers they meet,”
declared Blaisdell.  “An’ shore it’s my belief these first impressions
never change, just so strong they are!  Wal, I’ve heard my father say
there were men in his wagon train that got run out of Texas, but he
swore he wasn’t one of them.  So I reckon that sort of talk held good
for twenty years, an’ for all the Texans who emigrated, except, of
course, such notorious rustlers as Daggs an’ men of his ilk.  Shore
we’ve got some bad men heah.  There’s no law.  Possession used to mean
more than it does now.  Daggs an’ his Hash Knife Gang have begun to
hold forth with a high hand.  No small rancher can keep enough stock to
pay for his labor.”

At the time of which Blaisdell spoke there were not many sheepmen and
cattlemen in the Tonto, considering its vast area.  But these, on
account of the extreme wildness of the broken country, were limited to
the comparatively open Grass Valley and its adjacent environs.
Naturally, as the inhabitants increased and stock raising grew in
proportion the grazing and water rights became matters of extreme
importance.  Sheepmen ran their flocks up on the Rim in summer time and
down into the Basin in winter time.  A sheepman could throw a few
thousand sheep round a cattleman’s ranch and ruin him.  The range was
free.  It was as fair for sheepmen to graze their herds anywhere as it
was for cattlemen.  This of course did not apply to the few acres of
cultivated ground that a rancher could call his own; but very few
cattle could have been raised on such limited area.  Blaisdell said
that the sheepmen were unfair because they could have done just as
well, though perhaps at more labor, by keeping to the ridges and
leaving the open valley and little flats to the ranchers.  Formerly
there had been room enough for all; now the grazing ranges were being
encroached upon by sheepmen newly come to the Tonto.  To Blaisdell’s
way of thinking the rustler menace was more serious than the
sheeping-off of the range, for the simple reason that no cattleman knew
exactly who the rustlers were and for the more complex and significant
reason that the rustlers did not steal sheep.

“Texas was overstocked with bad men an’ fine steers,” concluded
Blaisdell.  “Most of the first an’ some of the last have struck the
Tonto.  The sheepmen have now got distributin’ points for wool an’
sheep at Maricopa an’ Phoenix.  They’re shore waxin’ strong an’ bold.”

“Ahuh!... An’ what’s likely to come of this mess?” queried Jean.

“Ask your dad,” replied Blaisdell.

“I will.  But I reckon I’d be obliged for your opinion.”

“Wal, short an’ sweet it’s this: Texas cattlemen will never allow the
range they stocked to be overrun by sheepmen.”

“Who’s this man Greaves?” went on Jean.  “Never run into anyone like
him.”

“Greaves is hard to figure.  He’s a snaky customer in deals.  But he
seems to be good to the poor people ’round heah.  Says he’s from
Missouri.  Ha-ha!  He’s as much Texan as I am.  He rode into the Tonto
without even a pack to his name.  An’ presently he builds his stone
house an’ freights supplies in from Phoenix.  Appears to buy an’ sell a
good deal of stock.  For a while it looked like he was steerin’ a
middle course between cattlemen an’ sheepmen.  Both sides made a
rendezvous of his store, where he heard the grievances of each. Laterly
he’s leanin’ to the sheepmen.  Nobody has accused him of that yet.  But
it’s time some cattleman called his bluff.”

“Of course there are honest an’ square sheepmen in the Basin?” queried
Jean.

“Yes, an’ some of them are not unreasonable.  But the new fellows that
dropped in on us the last few year—they’re the ones we’re goin’ to
clash with.”

“This—sheepman, Jorth?” went on Jean, in slow hesitation, as if
compelled to ask what he would rather not learn.

“Jorth must be the leader of this sheep faction that’s harryin’ us
ranchers.  He doesn’t make threats or roar around like some of them.
But he goes on raisin’ an’ buyin’ more an’ more sheep.  An’ his herders
have been grazin’ down all around us this winter.  Jorth’s got to be
reckoned with.”

“Who is he?”

“Wal, I don’t know enough to talk aboot.  Your dad never said so, but I
think he an’ Jorth knew each other in Texas years ago.  I never saw
Jorth but once.  That was in Greaves’s barroom.  Your dad an’ Jorth met
that day for the first time in this country.  Wal, I’ve not known men
for nothin’.  They just stood stiff an’ looked at each other. Your dad
was aboot to draw.  But Jorth made no sign to throw a gun.”

Jean saw the growing and weaving and thickening threads of a tangle
that had already involved him.  And the sudden pang of regret he
sustained was not wholly because of sympathies with his own people.

“The other day back up in the woods on the Rim I ran into a sheepman
who said his name was Colter.  Who is he?

“Colter?  Shore he’s a new one.  What’d he look like?”

Jean described Colter with a readiness that spoke volumes for the
vividness of his impressions.

“I don’t know him,” replied Blaisdell.  “But that only goes to prove my
contention—any fellow runnin’ wild in the woods can say he’s a
sheepman.”

“Colter surprised me by callin’ me by my name,” continued Jean. “Our
little talk wasn’t exactly friendly.  He said a lot about my bein’ sent
for to run sheep herders out of the country.”

“Shore that’s all over,” replied Blaisdell, seriously.  “You’re a
marked man already.”

“What started such rumor?”

“Shore you cain’t prove it by me.  But it’s not taken as rumor. It’s
got to the sheepmen as hard as bullets.”

“Ahuh!  That accunts for Colter’s seemin’ a little sore under the
collar.  Well, he said they were goin’ to run sheep over Grass Valley,
an’ for me to take that hunch to my dad.”

Blaisdell had his chair tilted back and his heavy boots against a post
of the porch.  Down he thumped.  His neck corded with a sudden rush of
blood and his eyes changed to blue fire.

“The hell he did!” he ejaculated, in furious amaze.

Jean gauged the brooding, rankling hurt of this old cattleman by his
sudden break from the cool, easy Texan manner.  Blaisdell cursed under
his breath, swung his arms violently, as if to throw a last doubt or
hope aside, and then relapsed to his former state.  He laid a brown
hand on Jean’s knee.

“Two years ago I called the cards,” he said, quietly.  “It means a
Grass Valley war.”

Not until late that afternoon did Jean’s father broach the subject
uppermost in his mind.  Then at an opportune moment he drew Jean away
into the cedars out of sight.

“Son, I shore hate to make your home-comin’ unhappy,” he said, with
evidence of agitation, “but so help me God I have to do it!”

“Dad, you called me Prodigal, an’ I reckon you were right.  I’ve
shirked my duty to you.  I’m ready now to make up for it,” replied
Jean, feelingly.

“Wal, wal, shore thats fine-spoken, my boy.... Let’s set down heah an’
have a long talk.  First off, what did Jim Blaisdell tell you?”

Briefly Jean outlined the neighbor rancher’s conversation.  Then Jean
recounted his experience with Colter and concluded with Blaisdell’s
reception of the sheepman’s threat.  If Jean expected to see his father
rise up like a lion in his wrath he made a huge mistake.  This news of
Colter and his talk never struck even a spark from Gaston Isbel.

“Wal,” he began, thoughtfully, “reckon there are only two points in
Jim’s talk I need touch on.  There’s shore goin’ to be a Grass Valley
war.  An’ Jim’s idea of the cause of it seems to be pretty much the
same as that of all the other cattlemen.  It ’ll go down a black blot
on the history page of the Tonto Basin as a war between rival sheepmen
an’ cattlemen.  Same old fight over water an’ grass!... Jean, my son,
that is wrong.  It ’ll not be a war between sheepmen an’ cattlemen. But
a war of honest ranchers against rustlers maskin’ as sheep-raisers!...
Mind you, I don’t belittle the trouble between sheepmen an’ cattlemen
in Arizona.  It’s real an’ it’s vital an’ it’s serious. It ’ll take law
an’ order to straighten out the grazin’ question. Some day the
government will keep sheep off of cattle ranges.... So get things right
in your mind, my son.  You can trust your dad to tell the absolute
truth.  In this fight that ’ll wipe out some of the Isbels—maybe all
of them—you’re on the side of justice an’ right. Knowin’ that, a man
can fight a hundred times harder than he who knows he is a liar an’ a
thief.”

The old rancher wiped his perspiring face and breathed slowly and
deeply.  Jean sensed in him the rise of a tremendous emotional strain.
Wonderingly he watched the keen lined face.  More than material worries
were at the root of brooding, mounting thoughts in his father’s eyes.

“Now next take what Jim said aboot your comin’ to chase these
sheep-herders out of the valley.... Jean, I started that talk. I had my
tricky reasons.  I know these greaser sheep-herders an’ I know the
respect Texans have for a gunman.  Some say I bragged. Some say I’m an
old fool in his dotage, ravin’ aboot a favorite son. But they are
people who hate me an’ are afraid.  True, son, I talked with a purpose,
but shore I was mighty cold an’ steady when I did it. My feelin’ was
that you’d do what I’d do if I were thirty years younger. No, I
reckoned you’d do more.  For I figured on your blood.  Jean, you’re
Indian, an’ Texas an’ French, an’ you’ve trained yourself in the Oregon
woods.  When you were only a boy, few marksmen I ever knew could beat
you, an’ I never saw your equal for eye an’ ear, for trackin’ a hoss,
for all the gifts that make a woodsman.... Wal, rememberin’ this an’
seein’ the trouble ahaid for the Isbels, I just broke out whenever I
had a chance.  I bragged before men I’d reason to believe would take my
words deep.  For instance, not long ago I missed some stock, an’,
happenin’ into Greaves’s place one Saturday night, I shore talked loud.
His barroom was full of men an’ some of them were in my black book.
Greaves took my talk a little testy.  He said. ‘Wal, Gass, mebbe you’re
right aboot some of these cattle thieves livin’ among us, but ain’t
they jest as liable to be some of your friends or relatives as Ted
Meeker’s or mine or any one around heah?’  That was where Greaves an’
me fell out.  I yelled at him: ‘No, by God, they’re not! My record heah
an’ that of my people is open.  The least I can say for you, Greaves,
an’ your crowd, is that your records fade away on dim trails.’  Then he
said, nasty-like, ‘Wal, if you could work out all the dim trails in the
Tonto you’d shore be surprised.’  An’ then I roared.  Shore that was
the chance I was lookin’ for.  I swore the trails he hinted of would be
tracked to the holes of the rustlers who made them.  I told him I had
sent for you an’ when you got heah these slippery, mysterious thieves,
whoever they were, would shore have hell to pay.  Greaves said he hoped
so, but he was afraid I was partial to my Indian son.  Then we had hot
words.  Blaisdell got between us. When I was leavin’ I took a partin’
fling at him.  ‘Greaves, you ought to know the Isbels, considerin’
you’re from Texas.  Maybe you’ve got reasons for throwin’ taunts at my
claims for my son Jean.  Yes, he’s got Indian in him an’ that ’ll be
the worse for the men who will have to meet him.  I’m tellin’ you,
Greaves, Jean Isbel is the black sheep of the family.  If you ride down
his record you’ll find he’s shore in line to be another Poggin, or
Reddy Kingfisher, or Hardin’, or any of the Texas gunmen you ought to
remember.... Greaves, there are men rubbin’ elbows with you right heah
that my Indian son is goin’ to track down!’”

Jean bent his head in stunned cognizance of the notoriety with which
his father had chosen to affront any and all Tonto Basin men who were
under the ban of his suspicion.  What a terrible reputation and trust
to have saddled upon him!  Thrills and strange, heated sensations
seemed to rush together inside Jean, forming a hot ball of fire that
threatened to explode.  A retreating self made feeble protests. He saw
his own pale face going away from this older, grimmer man.

“Son, if I could have looked forward to anythin’ but blood spillin’ I’d
never have given you such a name to uphold,” continued the rancher.
“What I’m goin’ to tell you now is my secret.  My other sons an’ Ann
have never heard it.  Jim Blaisdell suspects there’s somethin’ strange,
but he doesn’t know.  I’ll shore never tell anyone else but you. An’
you must promise to keep my secret now an’ after I am gone.”

“I promise,” said Jean.

“Wal, an’ now to get it out,” began his father, breathing hard. His
face twitched and his hands clenched.  “The sheepman heah I have to
reckon with is Lee Jorth, a lifelong enemy of mine.  We were born in
the same town, played together as children, an’ fought with each other
as boys.  We never got along together.  An’ we both fell in love with
the same girl.  It was nip an’ tuck for a while. Ellen Sutton belonged
to one of the old families of the South. She was a beauty, an’ much
courted, an’ I reckon it was hard for her to choose.  But I won her an’
we became engaged.  Then the war broke out.  I enlisted with my brother
Jean.  He advised me to marry Ellen before I left.  But I would not.
That was the blunder of my life. Soon after our partin’ her letters
ceased to come.  But I didn’t distrust her.  That was a terrible time
an’ all was confusion. Then I got crippled an’ put in a hospital.  An’
in aboot a year I was sent back home.”

At this juncture Jean refrained from further gaze at his father’s face.

“Lee Jorth had gotten out of goin’ to war,” went on the rancher, in
lower, thicker voice.  “He’d married my sweetheart, Ellen.... I knew
the story long before I got well.  He had run after her like a hound
after a hare.... An’ Ellen married him.  Wal, when I was able to get
aboot I went to see Jorth an’ Ellen.  I confronted them. I had to know
why she had gone back on me.  Lee Jorth hadn’t changed any with all his
good fortune.  He’d made Ellen believe in my dishonor. But, I reckon,
lies or no lies, Ellen Sutton was faithless.  In my absence he had won
her away from me.  An’ I saw that she loved him as she never had me.  I
reckon that killed all my generosity.  If she’d been imposed upon an’
weaned away by his lies an’ had regretted me a little I’d have
forgiven, perhaps.  But she worshiped him.  She was his slave.  An’ I,
wal, I learned what hate was.

“The war ruined the Suttons, same as so many Southerners.  Lee Jorth
went in for raisin’ cattle.  He’d gotten the Sutton range an’ after a
few years he began to accumulate stock.  In those days every cattleman
was a little bit of a thief.  Every cattleman drove in an’ branded
calves he couldn’t swear was his.  Wal, the Isbels were the strongest
cattle raisers in that country.  An’ I laid a trap for Lee Jorth,
caught him in the act of brandin’ calves of mine I’d marked, an’ I
proved him a thief.  I made him a rustler.  I ruined him.  We met once.
But Jorth was one Texan not strong on the draw, at least against an
Isbel.  He left the country.  He had friends an’ relatives an’ they
started him at stock raisin’ again.  But he began to gamble an’ he got
in with a shady crowd.  He went from bad to worse an’ then he came back
home.  When I saw the change in proud, beautiful Ellen Sutton, an’ how
she still worshiped Jorth, it shore drove me near mad between pity an’
hate.... Wal, I reckon in a Texan hate outlives any other feelin’.
There came a strange turn of the wheel an’ my fortunes changed. Like
most young bloods of the day, I drank an’ gambled.  An’ one night I run
across Jorth an’ a card-sharp friend.  He fleeced me.  We quarreled.
Guns were thrown.  I killed my man.... Aboot that period the Texas
Rangers had come into existence.... An’, son, when I said I never was
run out of Texas I wasn’t holdin’ to strict truth.  I rode out on a
hoss.

“I went to Oregon.  There I married soon, an’ there Bill an’ Guy were
born.  Their mother did not live long.  An’ next I married your mother,
Jean.  She had some Indian blood, which, for all I could see, made her
only the finer.  She was a wonderful woman an’ gave me the only
happiness I ever knew.  You remember her, of course, an’ those home
days in Oregon.  I reckon I made another great blunder when I moved to
Arizona.  But the cattle country had always called me.  I had heard of
this wild Tonto Basin an’ how Texans were settlin’ there.  An’ Jim
Blaisdell sent me word to come—that this shore was a garden spot of
the West.  Wal, it is.  An’ your mother was gone—

“Three years ago Lee Jorth drifted into the Tonto.  An’, strange to me,
along aboot a year or so after his comin’ the Hash Knife Gang rode up
from Texas.  Jorth went in for raisin’ sheep.  Along with some other
sheepmen he lives up in the Rim canyons.  Somewhere back in the wild
brakes is the hidin’ place of the Hash Knife Gang.  Nobody but me, I
reckon, associates Colonel Jorth, as he’s called, with Daggs an’ his
gang.  Maybe Blaisdell an’ a few others have a hunch.  But that’s no
matter.  As a sheepman Jorth has a legitimate grievance with the
cattlemen.  But what could be settled by a square consideration for the
good of all an’ the future Jorth will never settle.  He’ll never settle
because he is now no longer an honest man.  He’s in with Daggs. I
cain’t prove this, son, but I know it.  I saw it in Jorth’s face when I
met him that day with Greaves.  I saw more.  I shore saw what he is up
to.  He’d never meet me at an even break.  He’s dead set on usin’ this
sheep an’ cattle feud to ruin my family an’ me, even as I ruined him.
But he means more, Jean.  This will be a war between Texans, an’ a
bloody war.  There are bad men in this Tonto—some of the worst that
didn’t get shot in Texas.  Jorth will have some of these fellows....
Now, are we goin’ to wait to be sheeped off our range an’ to be
murdered from ambush?”

“No, we are not,” replied Jean, quietly.

“Wal, come down to the house,” said the rancher, and led the way
without speaking until he halted by the door.  There he placed his
finger on a small hole in the wood at about the height of a man’s head.
Jean saw it was a bullet hole and that a few gray hairs stuck to its
edges.  The rancher stepped closer to the door-post, so that his head
was within an inch of the wood.  Then he looked at Jean with eyes in
which there glinted dancing specks of fire, like wild sparks.

“Son, this sneakin’ shot at me was made three mawnin’s ago.  I
recollect movin’ my haid just when I heard the crack of a rifle.  Shore
was surprised.  But I got inside quick.”

Jean scarcely heard the latter part of this speech.  He seemed doubled
up inwardly, in hot and cold convulsions of changing emotion.  A
terrible hold upon his consciousness was about to break and let go. The
first shot had been fired and he was an Isbel.  Indeed, his father had
made him ten times an Isbel.  Blood was thick.  His father did not
speak to dull ears.  This strife of rising tumult in him seemed the
effect of years of calm, of peace in the woods, of dreamy waiting for
he knew not what.  It was the passionate primitive life in him that had
awakened to the call of blood ties.

“That’s aboot all, son,” concluded the rancher.  “You understand now
why I feel they’re goin’ to kill me.  I feel it heah.”  With solemn
gesture he placed his broad hand over his heart.  “An’, Jean, strange
whispers come to me at night.  It seems like your mother was callin’ or
tryin’ to warn me.  I cain’t explain these queer whispers.  But I know
what I know.”

“Jorth has his followers.  You must have yours,” replied Jean, tensely.

“Shore, son, an’ I can take my choice of the best men heah,” replied
the rancher, with pride.  “But I’ll not do that.  I’ll lay the deal
before them an’ let them choose.  I reckon it ’ll not be a long-winded
fight.  It ’ll be short an bloody, after the way of Texans.  I’m
lookin’ to you, Jean, to see that an Isbel is the last man!”

“My God—dad! is there no other way?  Think of my sister Ann—of my
brothers’ wives—of—of other women!  Dad, these damned Texas feuds are
cruel, horrible!” burst out Jean, in passionate protest.

“Jean, would it be any easier for our women if we let these men shoot
us down in cold blood?”

“Oh no—no, I see, there’s no hope of—of.... But, dad, I wasn’t
thinkin’ about myself.  I don’t care.  Once started I’ll—I’ll be what
you bragged I was.  Only it’s so hard to-to give in.”

Jean leaned an arm against the side of the cabin and, bowing his face
over it, he surrendered to the irresistible contention within his
breast.  And as if with a wrench that strange inward hold broke. He let
down.  He went back.  Something that was boyish and hopeful—and in its
place slowly rose the dark tide of his inheritance, the savage instinct
of self-preservation bequeathed by his Indian mother, and the fierce,
feudal blood lust of his Texan father.

Then as he raised himself, gripped by a sickening coldness in his
breast, he remembered Ellen Jorth’s face as she had gazed dreamily down
off the Rim—so soft, so different, with tremulous lips, sad, musing,
with far-seeing stare of dark eyes, peering into the unknown, the
instinct of life still unlived.  With confused vision and nameless pain
Jean thought of her.

“Dad, it’s hard on—the—the young folks,” he said, bitterly.  “The
sins of the father, you know.  An’ the other side.  How about Jorth?
Has he any children?”

What a curious gleam of surprise and conjecture Jean encountered in his
father’s gaze!

“He has a daughter.  Ellen Jorth.  Named after her mother.  The first
time I saw Ellen Jorth I thought she was a ghost of the girl I had
loved an’ lost.  Sight of her was like a blade in my side.  But the
looks of her an’ what she is—they don’t gibe.  Old as I am, my
heart—Bah! Ellen Jorth is a damned hussy!”

Jean Isbel went off alone into the cedars.  Surrender and resignation
to his father’s creed should have ended his perplexity and worry. His
instant and burning resolve to be as his father had represented him
should have opened his mind to slow cunning, to the craft of the
Indian, to the development of hate.  But there seemed to be an
obstacle. A cloud in the way of vision.  A face limned on his memory.

Those damning words of his father’s had been a shock—how little or
great he could not tell.  Was it only a day since he had met Ellen
Jorth?  What had made all the difference?  Suddenly like a breath the
fragrance of her hair came back to him.  Then the sweet coolness of her
lips!  Jean trembled.  He looked around him as if he were pursued or
surrounded by eyes, by instincts, by fears, by incomprehensible things.

“Ahuh!  That must be what ails me,” he muttered.  “The look of her—an’
that kiss—they’ve gone hard me.  I should never have stopped to talk.
An’ I’m to kill her father an’ leave her to God knows what.”

Something was wrong somewhere.  Jean absolutely forgot that within the
hour he had pledged his manhood, his life to a feud which could be
blotted out only in blood.  If he had understood himself he would have
realized that the pledge was no more thrilling and unintelligible in
its possibilities than this instinct which drew him irresistibly.

“Ellen Jorth!  So—my dad calls her a damned hussy!  So—that explains
the—the way she acted—why she never hit me when I kissed her.  An’
her words, so easy an’ cool-like.  Hussy?  That means she’s bad—bad!
Scornful of me—maybe disappointed because my kiss was innocent! It
was, I swear.  An’ all she said: ‘Oh, I’ve been kissed before.’”

Jean grew furious with himself for the spreading of a new sensation in
his breast that seemed now to ache.  Had he become infatuated, all in a
day, with this Ellen Jorth?  Was he jealous of the men who had the
privilege of her kisses?  No!  But his reply was hot with shame, with
uncertainty.  The thing that seemed wrong was outside of himself. A
blunder was no crime.  To be attracted by a pretty girl in the
woods—to yield to an impulse was no disgrace, nor wrong.  He had been
foolish over a girl before, though not to such a rash extent.  Ellen
Jorth had stuck in his consciousness, and with her a sense of regret.

Then swiftly rang his father’s bitter words, the revealing: “But the
looks of her an’ what she is—they don’t gibe!”  In the import of these
words hid the meaning of the wrong that troubled him. Broodingly he
pondered over them.

“The looks of her.  Yes, she was pretty.  But it didn’t dawn on me at
first.  I—I was sort of excited.  I liked to look at her, but didn’t
think.”  And now consciously her face was called up, infinitely sweet
and more impelling for the deliberate memory.  Flash of brown skin,
smooth and clear; level gaze of dark, wide eyes, steady, bold,
unseeing; red curved lips, sad and sweet; her strong, clean, fine face
rose before Jean, eager and wistful one moment, softened by dreamy
musing thought, and the next stormily passionate, full of hate, full of
longing, but the more mysterious and beautiful.

“She looks like that, but she’s bad,” concluded Jean, with bitter
finality.  “I might have fallen in love with Ellen Jorth if—if she’d
been different.”

But the conviction forced upon Jean did not dispel the haunting memory
of her face nor did it wholly silence the deep and stubborn voice of
his consciousness.  Later that afternoon he sought a moment with his
sister.

“Ann, did you ever meet Ellen Jorth?” he asked.

“Yes, but not lately,” replied Ann.

“Well, I met her as I was ridin’ along yesterday.  She was herdin’
sheep,” went on Jean, rapidly.  “I asked her to show me the way to the
Rim.  An’ she walked with me a mile or so.  I can’t say the meetin’ was
not interestin’, at least to me.... Will you tell me what you know
about her?”

“Sure, Jean,” replied his sister, with her dark eyes fixed wonderingly
and kindly on his troubled face.  “I’ve heard a great deal, but in this
Tonto Basin I don’t believe all I hear.  What I know I’ll tell you. I
first met Ellen Jorth two years ago.  We didn’t know each other’s names
then.  She was the prettiest girl I ever saw.  I liked her. She liked
me.  She seemed unhappy.  The next time we met was at a round-up.
There were other girls with me and they snubbed her. But I left them
and went around with her.  That snub cut her to the heart.  She was
lonely.  She had no friends.  She talked about herself—how she hated
the people, but loved Arizona.  She had nothin’ fit to wear.  I didn’t
need to be told that she’d been used to better things.  Just when it
looked as if we were goin’ to be friends she told me who she was and
asked me my name.  I told her.  Jean, I couldn’t have hurt her more if
I’d slapped her face.  She turned white.  She gasped.  And then she ran
off.  The last time I saw her was about a year ago.  I was ridin’ a
short-cut trail to the ranch where a friend lived.  And I met Ellen
Jorth ridin’ with a man I’d never seen.  The trail was overgrown and
shady.  They were ridin’ close and didn’t see me right off.  The man
had his arm round her. She pushed him away.  I saw her laugh.  Then he
got hold of her again and was kissin’ her when his horse shied at sight
of mine.  They rode by me then.  Ellen Jorth held her head high and
never looked at me.”

“Ann, do you think she’s a bad girl?” demanded Jean, bluntly.

“Bad?  Oh, Jean!” exclaimed Ann, in surprise and embarrassment.

“Dad said she was a damned hussy.”

“Jean, dad hates the Jorths.”

“Sister, I’m askin’ you what you think of Ellen Jorth.  Would you be
friends with her if you could?”

“Yes.”

“Then you don’t believe she’s bad.”

“No.  Ellen Jorth is lonely, unhappy.  She has no mother.  She lives
alone among rough men.  Such a girl can’t keep men from handlin’ her
and kissin’ her.  Maybe she’s too free.  Maybe she’s wild.  But she’s
honest, Jean.  You can trust a woman to tell.  When she rode past me
that day her face was white and proud.  She was a Jorth and I was an
Isbel.  She hated herself—she hated me.  But no bad girl could look
like that.  She knows what’s said of her all around the valley. But she
doesn’t care.  She’d encourage gossip.”

“Thank you, Ann,” replied Jean, huskily.  “Please keep this—this
meetin’ of mine with her all to yourself, won’t you?”

“Why, Jean, of course I will.”

Jean wandered away again, peculiarly grateful to Ann for reviving and
upholding something in him that seemed a wavering part of the best of
him—a chivalry that had demanded to be killed by judgment of a
righteous woman.  He was conscious of an uplift, a gladdening of his
spirit.  Yet the ache remained.  More than that, he found himself
plunged deeper into conjecture, doubt.  Had not the Ellen Jorth
incident ended?  He denied his father’s indictment of her and accepted
the faith of his sister.  “Reckon that’s aboot all, as dad says,” he
soliloquized.  Yet was that all?  He paced under the cedars. He watched
the sun set.  He listened to the coyotes.  He lingered there after the
call for supper; until out of the tumult of his conflicting emotions
and ponderings there evolved the staggering consciousness that he must
see Ellen Jorth again.




CHAPTER IV


Ellen Jorth hurried back into the forest, hotly resentful of the
accident that had thrown her in contact with an Isbel.

Disgust filled her—disgust that she had been amiable to a member of
the hated family that had ruined her father.  The surprise of this
meeting did not come to her while she was under the spell of stronger
feeling.  She walked under the trees, swiftly, with head erect, looking
straight before her, and every step seemed a relief.

Upon reaching camp, her attention was distracted from herself.  Pepe,
the Mexican boy, with the two shepherd dogs, was trying to drive sheep
into a closer bunch to save the lambs from coyotes.  Ellen loved the
fleecy, tottering little lambs, and at this season she hated all the
prowling beast of the forest.  From this time on for weeks the flock
would be besieged by wolves, lions, bears, the last of which were often
bold and dangerous.  The old grizzlies that killed the ewes to eat only
the milk-bags were particularly dreaded by Ellen.  She was a good shot
with a rifle, but had orders from her father to let the bears alone.
Fortunately, such sheep-killing bears were but few, and were left to be
hunted by men from the ranch.  Mexican sheep herders could not be
depended upon to protect their flocks from bears. Ellen helped Pepe
drive in the stragglers, and she took several shots at coyotes skulking
along the edge of the brush.  The open glade in the forest was
favorable for herding the sheep at night, and the dogs could be
depended upon to guard the flock, and in most cases to drive predatory
beasts away.

After this task, which brought the time to sunset, Ellen had supper to
cook and eat.  Darkness came, and a cool night wind set in. Here and
there a lamb bleated plaintively.  With her work done for the day,
Ellen sat before a ruddy camp fire, and found her thoughts again
centering around the singular adventure that had befallen her.
Disdainfully she strove to think of something else.  But there was
nothing that could dispel the interest of her meeting with Jean Isbel.
Thereupon she impatiently surrendered to it, and recalled every word
and action which she could remember.  And in the process of this
meditation she came to an action of hers, recollection of which brought
the blood tingling to her neck and cheeks, so unusually and burningly
that she covered them with her hands.  “What did he think of me?” she
mused, doubtfully.  It did not matter what he thought, but she could
not help wondering.  And when she came to the memory of his kiss she
suffered more than the sensation of throbbing scarlet cheeks.
Scornfully and bitterly she burst out, “Shore he couldn’t have thought
much good of me.”

The half hour following this reminiscence was far from being pleasant.
Proud, passionate, strong-willed Ellen Jorth found herself a victim of
conflicting emotions.  The event of the day was too close.  She could
not understand it.  Disgust and disdain and scorn could not make this
meeting with Jean Isbel as if it had never been.  Pride could not
efface it from her mind.  The more she reflected, the harder she tried
to forget, the stronger grew a significance of interest.  And when a
hint of this dawned upon her consciousness she resented it so forcibly
that she lost her temper, scattered the camp fire, and went into the
little teepee tent to roll in her blankets.

Thus settled snug and warm for the night, with a shepherd dog curled at
the opening of her tent, she shut her eyes and confidently bade sleep
end her perplexities.  But sleep did not come at her invitation. She
found herself wide awake, keenly sensitive to the sputtering of the
camp fire, the tinkling of bells on the rams, the bleating of lambs,
the sough of wind in the pines, and the hungry sharp bark of coyotes
off in the distance.  Darkness was no respecter of her pride.  The
lonesome night with its emphasis of solitude seemed to induce clamoring
and strange thoughts, a confusing ensemble of all those that had
annoyed her during the daytime.  Not for long hours did sheer weariness
bring her to slumber.

Ellen awakened late and failed of her usual alacrity.  Both Pepe and
the shepherd dog appeared to regard her with surprise and solicitude.
Ellen’s spirit was low this morning; her blood ran sluggishly; she had
to fight a mournful tendency to feel sorry for herself.  And at first
she was not very successful.  There seemed to be some kind of pleasure
in reveling in melancholy which her common sense told her had no reason
for existence.  But states of mind persisted in spite of common sense.

“Pepe, when is Antonio comin’ back?” she asked.

The boy could not give her a satisfactory answer.  Ellen had willingly
taken the sheep herder’s place for a few days, but now she was
impatient to go home.  She looked down the green-and-brown aisles of
the forest until she was tired.  Antonio did not return.  Ellen spent
the day with the sheep; and in the manifold task of caring for a
thousand new-born lambs she forgot herself.  This day saw the end of
lambing-time for that season.  The forest resounded to a babel of baas
and bleats.  When night came she was glad to go to bed, for what with
loss of sleep, and weariness she could scarcely keep her eyes open.

The following morning she awakened early, bright, eager, expectant,
full of bounding life, strangely aware of the beauty and sweetness of
the scented forest, strangely conscious of some nameless stimulus to
her feelings.

Not long was Ellen in associating this new and delightful variety of
sensations with the fact that Jean Isbel had set to-day for his ride up
to the Rim to see her.  Ellen’s joyousness fled; her smiles faded. The
spring morning lost its magic radiance.

“Shore there’s no sense in my lyin’ to myself,” she soliloquized,
thoughtfully.  “It’s queer of me—feelin’ glad aboot him—without
knowin’.  Lord!  I must be lonesome!  To be glad of seein’ an Isbel,
even if he is different!”

Soberly she accepted the astounding reality.  Her confidence died with
her gayety; her vanity began to suffer.  And she caught at her
admission that Jean Isbel was different; she resented it in amaze; she
ridiculed it; she laughed at her naive confession.  She could arrive at
no conclusion other than that she was a weak-minded, fluctuating,
inexplicable little fool.

But for all that she found her mind had been made up for her, without
consent or desire, before her will had been consulted; and that
inevitably and unalterably she meant to see Jean Isbel again. Long she
battled with this strange decree.  One moment she won a victory over,
this new curious self, only to lose it the next. And at last out of her
conflict there emerged a few convictions that left her with some shreds
of pride.  She hated all Isbels, she hated any Isbel, and particularly
she hated Jean Isbel.  She was only curious—intensely curious to see
if he would come back, and if he did come what he would do.  She wanted
only to watch him from some covert.  She would not go near him, not let
him see her or guess of her presence.

Thus she assuaged her hurt vanity—thus she stifled her miserable
doubts.

Long before the sun had begun to slant westward toward the
mid-afternoon Jean Isbel had set as a meeting time Ellen directed her
steps through the forest to the Rim.  She felt ashamed of her
eagerness.  She had a guilty conscience that no strange thrills could
silence.  It would be fun to see him, to watch him, to let him wait for
her, to fool him.

Like an Indian, she chose the soft pine-needle mats to tread upon, and
her light-moccasined feet left no trace.  Like an Indian also she made
a wide detour, and reached the Rim a quarter of a mile west of the spot
where she had talked with Jean Isbel; and here, turning east, she took
care to step on the bare stones.  This was an adventure, seemingly the
first she had ever had in her life.  Assuredly she had never before
come directly to the Rim without halting to look, to wonder, to
worship. This time she scarcely glanced into the blue abyss.  All
absorbed was she in hiding her tracks.  Not one chance in a thousand
would she risk. The Jorth pride burned even while the feminine side of
her dominated her actions.  She had some difficult rocky points to
cross, then windfalls to round, and at length reached the covert she
desired. A rugged yellow point of the Rim stood somewhat higher than
the spot Ellen wanted to watch.  A dense thicket of jack pines grew to
the very edge.  It afforded an ambush that even the Indian eyes Jean
Isbel was credited with could never penetrate.  Moreover, if by
accident she made a noise and excited suspicion, she could retreat
unobserved and hide in the huge rocks below the Rim, where a ferret
could not locate her.

With her plan decided upon, Ellen had nothing to do but wait, so she
repaired to the other side  of the pine thicket and to the edge of the
Rim where she could watch and listen.  She knew that long before she
saw Isbel she would hear his horse.  It was altogether unlikely that he
would come on foot.

“Shore, Ellen Jorth, y’u’re a queer girl,” she mused.  “I reckon I
wasn’t well acquainted with y’u.”

Beneath her yawned a wonderful deep canyon, rugged and rocky with but
few pines on the north slope, thick with dark green timber on the south
slope.  Yellow and gray crags, like turreted castles, stood up out of
the sloping forest on the side opposite her.  The trees were all sharp,
spear pointed.  Patches of light green aspens showed strikingly against
the dense black.  The great slope beneath Ellen was serrated with
narrow, deep gorges, almost canyons in themselves. Shadows alternated
with clear bright spaces.  The mile-wide mouth of the canyon opened
upon the Basin, down into a world of wild timbered ranges and ravines,
valleys and hills, that rolled and tumbled in dark-green waves to the
Sierra Anchas.

But for once Ellen seemed singularly unresponsive to this panorama of
wildness and grandeur.  Her ears were like those of a listening deer,
and her eyes continually reverted to the open places along the Rim. At
first, in her excitement, time flew by.  Gradually, however, as the sun
moved westward, she began to be restless.  The soft thud of dropping
pine cones, the rustling of squirrels up and down the shaggy-barked
spruces, the cracking of weathered bits of rock, these caught her keen
ears many times and brought her up erect and thrilling.  Finally she
heard a sound which resembled that of an unshod hoof on stone.
Stealthily then she took her rifle and slipped back through the pine
thicket to the spot she had chosen.  The little pines were so close
together that she had to crawl between their trunks. The ground was
covered with a soft bed of pine needles, brown and fragrant.  In her
hurry she pricked her ungloved hand on a sharp pine cone and drew the
blood.  She sucked the tiny wound.  “Shore I’m wonderin’ if that’s a
bad omen,” she muttered, darkly thoughtful. Then she resumed her
sinuous approach to the edge of the thicket, and presently reached it.

Ellen lay flat a moment to recover her breath, then raised herself on
her elbows.  Through an opening in the fringe of buck brush she could
plainly see the promontory where she had stood with Jean Isbel, and
also the approaches by which he might come.  Rather nervously she
realized that her covert was hardly more than a hundred feet from the
promontory.  It was imperative that she be absolutely silent. Her eyes
searched the openings along the Rim.  The gray form of a deer crossed
one of these, and she concluded it had made the sound she had heard.
Then she lay down more comfortably and waited. Resolutely she held, as
much as possible, to her sensorial perceptions. The meaning of Ellen
Jorth lying in ambush just to see an Isbel was a conundrum she refused
to ponder in the present.  She was doing it, and the physical act had
its fascination.  Her ears, attuned to all the sounds of the lonely
forest, caught them and arranged them according to her knowledge of
woodcraft.

A long hour passed by.  The sun had slanted to a point halfway between
the zenith and the horizon.  Suddenly a thought confronted Ellen Jorth:
“He’s not comin’,” she whispered.  The instant that idea presented
itself she felt a blank sense of loss, a vague regret—something that
must have been disappointment.  Unprepared for this, she was held by
surprise for a moment, and then she was stunned.  Her spirit, swift and
rebellious, had no time to rise in her defense.  She was a lonely,
guilty, miserable girl, too weak for pride to uphold, too fluctuating
to know her real self.  She stretched there, burying her face in the
pine needles, digging her fingers into them, wanting nothing so much as
that they might hide her.  The moment was incomprehensible to Ellen,
and utterly intolerable.  The sharp pine needles, piercing her wrists
and cheeks, and her hot heaving breast, seemed to give her exquisite
relief.

The shrill snort of a horse sounded near at hand.  With a shock Ellen’s
body stiffened.  Then she  quivered a little and her feelings underwent
swift change.  Cautiously and noiselessly she raised herself upon her
elbows and peeped through the opening in the brush.  She saw a man
tying a horse to a bush somewhat back from the Rim.  Drawing a rifle
from its saddle sheath he threw it in the hollow of his arm and walked
to the edge of the precipice.  He gazed away across the Basin and
appeared lost in contemplation or thought.  Then he turned to look back
into the forest, as if he expected some one.

Ellen recognized the lithe figure, the dark face so like an Indian’s.
It was Isbel.  He had come.  Somehow his coming seemed wonderful and
terrible.  Ellen shook as she leaned on her elbows.  Jean Isbel, true
to his word, in spite of her scorn, had come back to see her.  The fact
seemed monstrous.  He was an enemy of her father.  Long had range rumor
been bandied from lip to lip—old Gass Isbel had sent for his Indian
son to fight the Jorths.  Jean Isbel—son of a Texan—unerring
shot—peerless tracker—a bad and dangerous man!  Then there flashed
over Ellen a burning thought—if it were true, if he was an enemy of
her father’s, if a fight between Jorth and Isbel was inevitable, she
ought to kill this Jean Isbel right there in his tracks as he boldly
and confidently waited for her.  Fool he was to think she would come.
Ellen sank down and dropped her head until the strange tremor of her
arms ceased.  That dark and grim flash of thought retreated.  She had
not come to murder a man from ambush, but only to watch him, to try to
see what he meant, what he thought, to allay a strange curiosity.

After a while she looked again.  Isbel was sitting on an upheaved
section of the Rim, in a comfortable position from which he could watch
the openings in the forest and gaze as well across the west curve of
the Basin to the Mazatzals.  He had composed himself to wait. He was
clad in a buckskin suit, rather new, and it certainly showed off to
advantage, compared with the ragged and soiled apparel Ellen
remembered.  He did not look so large.  Ellen was used to the long,
lean, rangy Arizonians and Texans.  This man was built differently. He
had the widest shoulders of any man she had ever seen, and they made
him appear rather short.  But his lithe, powerful limbs proved he was
not short.  Whenever he moved the muscles rippled.  His hands were
clasped round a knee—brown, sinewy hands, very broad, and fitting the
thick muscular wrists.  His collar was open, and he did not wear a
scarf, as did the men Ellen knew.  Then her intense curiosity at last
brought her steady gaze to Jean Isbel’s head and face.  He wore a cap,
evidently of some thin fur.  His hair was straight and short, and in
color a dead raven black.  His complexion was dark, clear tan, with no
trace of red.  He did not have the prominent cheek bones nor the
high-bridged nose usual with white men who were part Indian.  Still he
had the Indian look.  Ellen caught that in the dark, intent, piercing
eyes, in the wide, level, thoughtful brows, in the stern impassiveness
of his smooth face.  He had a straight, sharp-cut profile.

Ellen whispered to herself: “I saw him right the other day.  Only, I’d
not admit it.... The finest-lookin’ man I ever saw in my life is a
damned Isbel!  Was that what I come out heah for?”

She lowered herself once more and, folding her arms under her breast,
she reclined comfortably on them, and searched out a smaller peephole
from which she could spy upon Isbel.  And as she watched him the new
and perplexing side of her mind waxed busier.  Why had he come back?
What did he want of her?  Acquaintance, friendship, was impossible for
them.  He had been respectful, deferential toward her, in a way that
had strangely pleased, until the surprising moment when he had kissed
her.  That had only disrupted her rather dreamy pleasure in a situation
she had not experienced before.  All the men she had met in this wild
country were rough and bold; most of them had wanted to marry her, and,
failing that, they had persisted in amorous attentions not particularly
flattering or honorable.  They were a bad lot.  And contact with them
had dulled some of her sensibilities.  But this Jean Isbel had seemed a
gentleman.  She struggled to be fair, trying to forget her antipathy,
as much to understand herself as to give him due credit.  True, he had
kissed her, crudely and forcibly.  But that kiss had not been an
insult.  Ellen’s finer feeling forced her to believe this.  She
remembered the honest amaze and shame and contrition with which he had
faced her, trying awkwardly to explain his bold act. Likewise she
recalled the subtle swift change in him at her words,  “Oh, I’ve been
kissed before!”  She was glad she had said that.   Still—was she glad,
after all?

She watched him.  Every little while he shifted his gaze from the blue
gulf beneath him to the forest.  When he turned thus the sun shone on
his face and she caught the piercing gleam of his dark eyes. She saw,
too, that he was listening.  Watching and listening for her! Ellen had
to still a tumult within her.  It made her feel very young, very shy,
very strange.  All the while she hated him because he manifestly
expected her to come.  Several times he rose and walked a little way
into the woods.  The last time he looked at the westering sun and shook
his head.  His confidence had gone.  Then he sat and gazed down into
the void.  But Ellen knew he did not see anything there.  He seemed an
image carved in the stone of the Rim, and he gave Ellen a singular
impression of loneliness and sadness.  Was he thinking of the miserable
battle his father had summoned him to lead—of what it would cost—of
its useless pain and hatred?  Ellen seemed to divine his thoughts.  In
that moment she softened toward him, and in her soul quivered and
stirred an intangible something that was like pain, that was too deep
for her understanding.  But she felt sorry for an Isbel until the old
pride resurged.  What if he admired her?  She remembered his interest,
the wonder and admiration, the growing light in his eyes.  And it had
not been repugnant to her until he disclosed his name.  “What’s in a
name?” she mused, recalling poetry learned in her girlhood.  “‘A rose
by any other name would smell as sweet’.... He’s an Isbel—yet he might
be splendid—noble.... Bah! he’s not—and I’d hate him anyhow.”

All at once Ellen felt cold shivers steal over her.  Isbel’s piercing
gaze was directed straight at her hiding place.  Her heart stopped
beating.  If he discovered her there she felt that she would die of
shame.  Then she became aware that a blue jay was screeching in a pine
above her, and a red squirrel somewhere near was chattering his shrill
annoyance.  These two denizens of the woods could be depended upon to
espy the wariest hunter and make known his presence to their kind.
Ellen had a moment of more than dread.  This keen-eyed, keen-eared
Indian might see right through her brushy covert, might hear the
throbbing of her heart.  It relieved her immeasurably to see him turn
away and take to pacing the promontory, with his head bowed and his
hands behind his back.  He had stopped looking off into the forest.
Presently he wheeled to the west, and by the light upon his face Ellen
saw that the time was near sunset.  Turkeys were beginning to gobble
back on the ridge.

Isbel walked to his horse and appeared to be untying something from the
back of his saddle.  When he came back Ellen saw that he carried a
small package apparently wrapped in paper.  With this under his arm he
strode off in the direction of Ellen’s camp and soon disappeared in the
forest.

For a little while Ellen lay there in bewilderment.  If she had made
conjectures before, they were now multiplied.  Where was Jean Isbel
going?  Ellen sat up suddenly.  “Well, shore this heah beats me,” she
said.  “What did he have in that package?  What was he goin’ to do with
it?”

It took no little will power to hold her there when she wanted to steal
after him through the woods and find out what he meant.  But his
reputation influenced even her and she refused to pit her cunning in
the forest against his.  It would be better to wait until he returned
to his horse.  Thus decided, she lay back again in her covert and gave
her mind over to pondering curiosity.  Sooner than she expected she
espied Isbel approaching through the forest, empty handed.  He had not
taken his rifle.  Ellen averted her glance a moment and thrilled to see
the rifle leaning against a rock.  Verily Jean Isbel had been far
removed from hostile intent that day.  She watched him stride swiftly
up to his horse, untie the halter, and mount.  Ellen had an impression
of his arrowlike straight figure, and sinuous grace and ease.  Then he
looked back at the promontory, as if to fix a picture of it in his
mind, and rode away along the Rim.  She watched him out of sight.  What
ailed her? Something was wrong with her, but she recognized only relief.

When Isbel had been gone long enough to assure Ellen that she might
safely venture forth she crawled through the pine thicket to the Rim on
the other side of the point.  The sun was setting behind the Black
Range, shedding a golden glory over the Basin.  Westward the zigzag Rim
reached like a streamer of fire into the sun.  The vast promontories
jutted out with blazing beacon lights upon their stone-walled faces.
Deep down, the Basin was turning shadowy dark blue, going to sleep for
the night.

Ellen bent swift steps toward her camp.  Long shafts of gold preceded
her through the forest.  Then they paled and vanished.  The tips of
pines and spruces turned gold.  A hoarse-voiced old turkey gobbler was
booming his chug-a-lug from the highest ground, and the softer chick of
hen turkeys answered him.  Ellen was almost breathless when she
arrived. Two packs and a couple of lop-eared burros attested to the
fact of Antonio’s return.  This was good news for Ellen.  She heard the
bleat of lambs and tinkle of bells coming nearer and nearer.  And she
was glad to feel that if Isbel had visited her camp, most probably it
was during the absence of the herders.

The instant she glanced into her tent she saw the package Isbel had
carried.  It lay on her bed.  Ellen stared blankly.  “The—the
impudence of him!” she ejaculated.  Then she kicked the package out of
the tent. Words and action seemed to liberate a dammed-up hot fury.
She kicked the package again, and thought she would kick it into the
smoldering camp-fire.  But somehow she stopped short of that.  She left
the thing there on the ground.

Pepe and Antonio hove in sight, driving in the tumbling woolly flock.
Ellen did not want them to see the package, so with contempt for
herself, and somewhat lessening anger, she kicked it back into the
tent.  What was in it?  She peeped inside the tent, devoured by
curiosity.  Neat, well wrapped and tied packages like that were not
often seen in the Tonto Basin.  Ellen decided she would wait until
after supper, and at a favorable moment lay it unopened on the fire.
What did she care what it contained?  Manifestly it was a gift.  She
argued that she was highly incensed with this insolent Isbel who had
the effrontery to approach her with some sort of present.

It developed that the usually cheerful Antonio had returned taciturn
and gloomy.  All Ellen could get out of him was that the job of sheep
herder had taken on hazards inimical to peace-loving Mexicans.  He had
heard something he would not tell.  Ellen helped prepare the supper and
she ate in silence.  She had her own brooding troubles.  Antonio
presently told her that her father had said she was not to start back
home after dark.  After supper the herders repaired to their own tents,
leaving Ellen the freedom of her camp-fire.  Wherewith she secured the
package and brought it forth to burn.  Feminine curiosity rankled
strong in her breast.  Yielding so far as to shake the parcel and press
it, and finally tear a corner off the paper, she saw some words written
in lead pencil.  Bending nearer the blaze, she read,  “For my sister
Ann.” Ellen gazed at the big, bold hand-writing, quite legible and
fairly well done.  Suddenly she tore the outside wrapper completely
off.  From printed words on the inside she gathered that the package
had come from a store in San Francisco.  “Reckon he fetched home a lot
of presents for his folks—the kids—and his sister,” muttered Ellen.
“That was nice of him.  Whatever this is he shore meant it for sister
Ann.... Ann Isbel.  Why, she must be that black-eyed girl I met and
liked so well before I knew she was an Isbel.... His sister!”

Whereupon for the second time Ellen deposited the fascinating package
in her tent.  She could not burn it up just then.  She had other
emotions besides scorn and hate.  And memory of that soft-voiced,
kind-hearted, beautiful Isbel girl checked her resentment.  “I wonder
if he is like his sister,” she said, thoughtfully.  It appeared to be
an unfortunate thought.  Jean Isbel certainly resembled his sister.
“Too bad they belong to the family that ruined dad.”

Ellen went to bed without opening the package or without burning it.
And to her annoyance, whatever way she lay she appeared to touch this
strange package.  There was not much room in the little tent.  First
she put it at her head beside her rifle, but when she turned over her
cheek came in contact with it.  Then she felt as if she had been stung.
She moved it again, only to touch it presently with her hand.  Next she
flung it to the bottom of her bed, where it fell upon her feet, and
whatever way she moved them she could not escape the pressure of this
undesirable and mysterious gift.

By and by she fell asleep, only to dream that the package was a
caressing hand stealing about her, feeling for hers, and holding it
with soft, strong clasp.  When she awoke she had the strangest
sensation in her right palm.  It was moist, throbbing, hot, and the
feel of it on her cheek was strangely thrilling and comforting. She lay
awake then.  The night was dark and still.  Only a low moan of wind in
the pines and the faint tinkle of a sheep bell broke the serenity.  She
felt very small and lonely lying there in the deep forest, and, try how
she would, it was impossible to think the same then as she did in the
clear light of day.  Resentment, pride, anger—these seemed abated now.
If the events of the day had not changed her, they had at least brought
up softer and kinder memories and emotions than she had known for long.
Nothing hurt and saddened her so much as to remember the gay, happy
days of her childhood, her sweet mother, her, old home.  Then her
thought returned to Isbel and his gift.  It had been years since anyone
had made her a gift. What could this one be?  It did not matter.  The
wonder was that Jean Isbel should bring it to her and that she could be
perturbed by its presence.  “He meant it for his sister and so he
thought well of me,” she said, in finality.

Morning brought Ellen further vacillation.  At length she rolled the
obnoxious package inside her blankets, saying that she would wait until
she got home and then consign it cheerfully to the flames. Antonio tied
her pack on a burro.  She did not have a horse, and therefore had to
walk the several miles, to her father’s ranch.

She set off at a brisk pace, leading the burro and carrying her rifle.
And soon she was deep in the fragrant forest.  The morning was clear
and cool, with just enough frost to make the sunlit grass sparkle as if
with diamonds.  Ellen felt fresh, buoyant, singularly full of, life.
Her youth would not be denied.  It was pulsing, yearning.  She hummed
an old Southern tune and every step seemed one of pleasure in action,
of advance toward some intangible future happiness.  All the unknown of
life before her called.  Her heart beat high in her breast and she
walked as one in a dream.  Her thoughts were swift-changing, intimate,
deep, and vague, not of yesterday or to-day, nor of reality.

The big, gray, white-tailed squirrels crossed ahead of her on the
trail, scampered over the piny ground to hop on tree trunks, and there
they paused to watch her pass.  The vociferous little red squirrels
barked and chattered at her.  From every thicket sounded the gobble of
turkeys. The blue jays squalled in the tree tops.  A deer lifted its
head from browsing and stood motionless, with long ears erect, watching
her go by.

Thus happily and dreamily absorbed, Ellen covered the forest miles and
soon reached the trail that led down into the wild brakes of Chevelon
Canyon.  It was rough going and less conducive to sweet wanderings of
mind.  Ellen slowly lost them.  And then a familiar feeling assailed
her, one she never failed to have upon returning to her father’s
ranch—a reluctance, a bitter dissatisfaction with her home, a loyal
struggle against the vague sense that all was not as it should be.

At the head of this canyon in a little, level, grassy meadow stood a
rude one-room log shack, with a leaning red-stone chimney on the
outside. This was the abode of a strange old man who had long lived
there.  His name was John Sprague and his occupation was raising
burros.  No sheep or cattle or horses did he own, not even a dog.
Rumor had said Sprague was a prospector, one of the many who had
searched that country for the Lost Dutchman gold mine.  Sprague knew
more about the Basin and Rim than any of the sheepmen or ranchers.
From Black Butte to the Cibique and from Chevelon Butte to Reno Pass he
knew every trail, canyon, ridge, and spring, and could find his way to
them on the darkest night.  His fame, however, depended mostly upon the
fact that he did nothing but raise burros, and would raise none but
black burros with white faces. These burros were the finest bred in all
the Basin and were in great demand.  Sprague sold a few every year.  He
had made a present of one to Ellen, although he hated to part with
them.  This old man was Ellen’s one and only friend.

Upon her trip out to the Rim with the sheep, Uncle John, as Ellen
called him, had been away on one of his infrequent visits to Grass
Valley.  It pleased her now to see a blue column of smoke lazily
lifting from the old chimney and to hear the discordant bray of burros.
As she entered the clearing Sprague saw her from the door of his shack.

“Hello, Uncle John!” she called.

“Wal, if it ain’t Ellen!” he replied, heartily.  “When I seen thet
white-faced jinny I knowed who was leadin’ her.  Where you been, girl?”

Sprague was a little, stoop-shouldered old man, with grizzled head and
face, and shrewd gray eyes that beamed kindly on her over his ruddy
cheeks.  Ellen did not like the tobacco stain on his grizzled beard nor
the dirty, motley, ragged, ill-smelling garb he wore, but she had
ceased her useless attempts to make him more cleanly.

“I’ve been herdin’ sheep,” replied Ellen.  “And where have y’u been,
uncle?  I missed y’u on the way over.”

“Been packin’ in some grub.  An’ I reckon I stayed longer in Grass
Valley than I recollect.  But thet was only natural, considerin’—”

“What?” asked Ellen, bluntly, as the old man paused.

Sprague took a black pipe out of his vest pocket and began rimming the
bowl with his fingers.  The glance he bent on Ellen was thoughtful and
earnest, and so kind that she feared it was pity.  Ellen suddenly
burned for news from the village.

“Wal, come in an’ set down, won’t you?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” replied Ellen, and she took a seat on the chopping block.
“Tell me, uncle, what’s goin’ on down in the Valley?”

“Nothin’ much yet—except talk.  An’ there’s a heap of thet.”

“Humph!  There always was talk,” declared Ellen, contemptuously. “A
nasty, gossipy, catty hole, that Grass Valley!”

“Ellen, thar’s goin’ to be war—a bloody war in the ole Tonto Basin,”
went on Sprague, seriously.

“War!... Between whom?”

“The Isbels an’ their enemies.  I reckon most people down thar, an’
sure all the cattlemen, air on old Gass’s side.  Blaisdell, Gordon,
Fredericks, Blue—they’ll all be in it.”

“Who are they goin’ to fight?” queried Ellen, sharply.

“Wal, the open talk is thet the sheepmen are forcin’ this war.  But
thar’s talk not so open, an’ I reckon not very healthy for any man to
whisper hyarbouts.”

“Uncle John, y’u needn’t be afraid to tell me anythin’,” said Ellen.
“I’d never give y’u away.  Y’u’ve been a good friend to me.”

“Reckon I want to be, Ellen,” he returned, nodding his shaggy head. “It
ain’t easy to be fond of you as I am an’ keep my mouth shet.... I’d
like to know somethin’.  Hev you any relatives away from hyar thet you
could go to till this fight’s over?”

“No.  All I have, so far as I know, are right heah.”

“How aboot friends?”

“Uncle John, I have none,” she said, sadly, with bowed head.

“Wal, wal, I’m sorry.  I was hopin’ you might git away.”

She lifted her face.  “Shore y’u don’t think I’d run off if my dad got
in a fight?” she flashed.

“I hope you will.”

“I’m a Jorth,” she said, darkly, and dropped her head again.

Sprague nodded gloomily.  Evidently he was perplexed and worried, and
strongly swayed by affection for her.

“Would you go away with me?” he asked.  “We could pack over to the
Mazatzals an’ live thar till this blows over.”

“Thank y’u, Uncle John.  Y’u’re kind and good.  But I’ll stay with my
father.  His troubles are mine.”

“Ahuh!... Wal, I might hev reckoned so.... Ellen, how do you stand on
this hyar sheep an’ cattle question?”

“I think what’s fair for one is fair for another.  I don’t like sheep
as much as I like cattle.  But that’s not the point.  The range is
free. Suppose y’u had cattle and I had sheep.  I’d feel as free to run
my sheep anywhere as y’u were to ran your cattle.”

“Right.  But what if you throwed your sheep round my range an’ sheeped
off the grass so my cattle would hev to move or starve?”

“Shore I wouldn’t throw my sheep round y’ur range,” she declared,
stoutly.

“Wal, you’ve answered half of the question.  An’ now supposin’ a lot of
my cattle was stolen by rustlers, but not a single one of your sheep.
What ’d you think then?”

“I’d shore think rustlers chose to steal cattle because there was no
profit in stealin’ sheep.”

“Egzactly.  But wouldn’t you hev a queer idee aboot it?”

“I don’t know.  Why queer?  What ’re y’u drivin’ at, Uncle John?”

“Wal, wouldn’t you git kind of a hunch thet the rustlers was—say a
leetle friendly toward the sheepmen?”

Ellen felt a sudden vibrating shock.  The blood rushed to her temples.
Trembling all over, she rose.

“Uncle John!” she cried.

“Now, girl, you needn’t fire up thet way.  Set down an’ don’t—”

“Dare y’u insinuate my father has—”

“Ellen, I ain’t insinuatin’ nothin’,” interrupted the old man.  “I’m
jest askin’ you to think.  Thet’s all.  You’re ’most grown into a young
woman now.  An’ you’ve got sense.  Thar’s bad times ahead, Ellen. An’ I
hate to see you mix in them.”

“Oh, y’u do make me think,” replied Ellen, with smarting tears in her
eyes.  “Y’u make me unhappy.  Oh, I know my dad is not liked in this
cattle country.  But it’s unjust.  He happened to go in for sheep
raising.  I wish he hadn’t.  It was a mistake.  Dad always was a
cattleman till we came heah.  He made enemies—who—who ruined him. And
everywhere misfortune crossed his trail.... But, oh, Uncle John, my dad
is an honest man.”

“Wal, child, I—I didn’t mean to—to make you cry,” said the old man,
feelingly, and he averted his troubled gaze.  “Never mind what I said.
I’m an old meddler.  I reckon nothin’ I could do or say would ever
change what’s goin’ to happen.  If only you wasn’t a girl!... Thar I
go ag’in.  Ellen, face your future an’ fight your way.  All youngsters
hev to do thet.  An’ it’s the right kind of fight thet makes the right
kind of man or woman.  Only you must be sure to find yourself.  An’ by
thet I mean to find the real, true, honest-to-God best in you an’ stick
to it an’ die fightin’ for it.  You’re a young woman, almost, an’ a
blamed handsome one.  Which means you’ll hev more trouble an’ a harder
fight.  This country ain’t easy on a woman when once slander has marked
her.

“What do I care for the talk down in that Basin?” returned Ellen. “I
know they think I’m a hussy.  I’ve let them think it. I’ve helped them
to.”

“You’re wrong, child,” said Sprague, earnestly.  “Pride an’ temper! You
must never let anyone think bad of you, much less help them to.”

“I hate everybody down there,” cried Ellen, passionately.  “I hate them
so I’d glory in their thinkin’ me bad.... My mother belonged to the
best blood in Texas.  I am her daughter.  I know WHO AND WHAT I AM.
That uplifts me whenever I meet the sneaky, sly suspicions of these
Basin people.  It shows me the difference between them and me. That’s
what I glory in.”

“Ellen, you’re a wild, headstrong child,” rejoined the old man, in
severe tones.  “Word has been passed ag’in’ your good name—your
honor.... An’ hevn’t you given cause fer thet?”

Ellen felt her face blanch and all her blood rush back to her heart in
sickening force.  The shock of his words was like a stab from a cold
blade.  If their meaning and the stem, just light of the old man’s
glance did not kill her pride and vanity they surely killed her
girlishness.  She stood mute, staring at him, with her brown, trembling
hands stealing up toward her bosom, as if to ward off another and a
mortal blow.

“Ellen!” burst out Sprague, hoarsely.  “You mistook me.  Aw, I didn’t
mean—what you think, I swear.... Ellen, I’m old an’ blunt.  I ain’t
used to wimmen.  But I’ve love for you, child, an’ respect, jest the
same as if you was my own.... An’ I KNOW you’re good.... Forgive me....
I meant only hevn’t you been, say, sort of—careless?”

“Care-less?” queried Ellen, bitterly and low.

“An’ powerful thoughtless an’—an’ blind—lettin’ men kiss you an’
fondle you—when you’re really a growed-up woman now?”

“Yes—I have,” whispered Ellen.

“Wal, then, why did you let them?

“I—I don’t know.... I didn’t think.  The men never let me
alone—never—never!  I got tired everlastingly pushin’ them away.  And
sometimes—when they were kind—and I was lonely for something I—I
didn’t mind if one or another fooled round me.  I never thought. It
never looked as y’u have made it look.... Then—those few times ridin’
the trail to Grass Valley—when people saw me—then I guess I
encouraged such attentions.... Oh, I must be—I am a shameless little
hussy!”

“Hush thet kind of talk,” said the old man, as he took her hand.
“Ellen, you’re only young an’ lonely an’ bitter.  No mother—no
friends—no one but a lot of rough men!  It’s a wonder you hev kept
yourself good.  But now your eyes are open, Ellen.  They’re brave an’
beautiful eyes, girl, an’ if you stand by the light in them you will
come through any trouble.  An’ you’ll be happy.  Don’t ever forgit
that.  Life is hard enough, God knows, but it’s unfailin’ true in the
end to the man or woman who finds the best in them an’ stands by it.”

“Uncle John, y’u talk so—so kindly.  Yu make me have hope.  There
seemed really so little for me to live for—hope for.... But I’ll never
be a coward again—nor a thoughtless fool.  I’ll find some good in
me—or make some—and never fail it, come what will.  I’ll remember
your words.  I’ll believe the future holds wonderful things for me....
I’m only eighteen.  Shore all my life won’t be lived heah.  Perhaps
this threatened fight over sheep and cattle will blow over....
Somewhere there must be some nice girl to be a friend—a sister to
me.... And maybe some man who’d believe, in spite of all they say—that
I’m not a hussy.”

“Wal, Ellen, you remind me of what I was wantin’ to tell you when you
just got here.... Yestiddy I heerd you called thet name in a barroom.
An’ thar was a fellar thar who raised hell.  He near killed one man an’
made another plumb eat his words.  An’ he scared thet crowd stiff.”

Old John Sprague shook his grizzled head and laughed, beaming upon
Ellen as if the memory of what he had seen had warmed his heart.

“Was it—y’u?” asked Ellen, tremulously.

“Me?  Aw, I wasn’t nowhere.  Ellen, this fellar was quick as a cat in
his actions an’ his words was like lightnin’.’

“Who? she whispered.

“Wal, no one else but a stranger jest come to these parts—an Isbel,
too.  Jean Isbel.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Ellen, faintly.

“In a barroom full of men—almost all of them in sympathy with the
sheep crowd—most of them on the Jorth side—this Jean Isbel resented
an insult to Ellen Jorth.”

“No!” cried Ellen.  Something terrible was happening to her mind or her
heart.

“Wal, he sure did,” replied the old man, “an’ it’s goin’ to be good fer
you to hear all about it.”




CHAPTER V


Old John Sprague launched into his narrative with evident zest.

“I hung round Greaves’ store most of two days.  An’ I heerd a heap.
Some of it was jest plain ole men’s gab, but I reckon I got the drift
of things concernin’ Grass Valley.  Yestiddy mornin’ I was packin’ my
burros in Greaves’ back yard, takin’ my time carryin’ out supplies from
the store.  An’ as last when I went in I seen a strange fellar was
thar. Strappin’ young man—not so young, either—an’ he had on
buckskin.  Hair black as my burros, dark face, sharp eyes—you’d took
him fer an Injun. He carried a rifle—one of them new forty-fours—an’
also somethin’ wrapped in paper thet he seemed partickler careful
about.  He wore a belt round his middle an’ thar was a bowie-knife in
it, carried like I’ve seen scouts an’ Injun fighters hev on the
frontier in the ‘seventies.  That looked queer to me, an’ I reckon to
the rest of the crowd thar.  No one overlooked the big six-shooter he
packed Texas fashion.  Wal, I didn’t hev no idee this fellar was an
Isbel until I heard Greaves call him thet.

“‘Isbel,’ said Greaves, ‘reckon your money’s counterfeit hyar. I cain’t
sell you anythin’.’

“‘Counterfeit?  Not much,’ spoke up the young fellar, an’ he flipped
some gold twenties on the bar, where they rung like bells.  ‘Why not?
Ain’t this a store?  I want a cinch strap.’

“Greaves looked particular sour thet mornin’.  I’d been watchin’ him
fer two days.  He hedn’t hed much sleep, fer I hed my bed back of the
store, an’ I heerd men come in the night an’ hev long confabs with him.
Whatever was in the wind hedn’t pleased him none.  An’ I calkilated
thet young Isbel wasn’t a sight good fer Greaves’ sore eyes, anyway.
But he paid no more attention to Isbel.  Acted jest as if he hedn’t
heerd Isbel say he wanted a cinch strap.

“I stayed inside the store then.  Thar was a lot of fellars I’d seen,
an’ some I knowed.  Couple of card games goin’, an’ drinkin’, of
course. I soon gathered thet the general atmosphere wasn’t friendly to
Jean Isbel.  He seen thet quick enough, but he didn’t leave.  Between
you an’ me I sort of took a likin’ to him.  An’ I sure watched him as
close as I could, not seemin’ to, you know.  Reckon they all did the
same, only you couldn’t see it.  It got jest about the same as if Isbel
hedn’t been in thar, only you knowed it wasn’t really the same.  Thet
was how I got the hunch the crowd was all sheepmen or their friends.
The day before I’d heerd a lot of talk about this young Isbel, an’ what
he’d come to Grass Valley fer, an’ what a bad hombre he was.  An’ when
I seen him I was bound to admit he looked his reputation.

“Wal, pretty soon in come two more fellars, an’ I knowed both of them.
You know them, too, I’m sorry to say.  Fer I’m comin’ to facts now thet
will shake you.  The first fellar was your father’s Mexican foreman,
Lorenzo, and the other was Simm Bruce.  I reckon Bruce wasn’t drunk,
but he’d sure been lookin’ on red licker.  When he seen Isbel darn me
if he didn’t swell an’ bustle all up like a mad ole turkey gobbler.

“‘Greaves,’ he said, ‘if thet fellar’s Jean Isbel I ain’t hankerin’ fer
the company y’u keep.’  An’ he made no bones of pointin’ right at
Isbel.  Greaves looked up dry an’ sour an’ he bit out spiteful-like:
‘Wal, Simm, we ain’t hed a hell of a lot of choice in this heah matter.
Thet’s Jean Isbel shore enough.  Mebbe you can persuade him thet his
company an’ his custom ain’t wanted round heah!’

“Jean Isbel set on the counter an took it all in, but he didn’t say
nothin’.  The way he looked at Bruce was sure enough fer me to see thet
thar might be a surprise any minnit.  I’ve looked at a lot of men in my
day, an’ can sure feel events comin’.  Bruce got himself a stiff drink
an’ then he straddles over the floor in front of Isbel.

“‘Air you Jean Isbel, son of ole Gass Isbel?’ asked Bruce, sort of
lolling back an’ givin’ a hitch to his belt.

“‘Yes sir, you’ve identified me,’ said Isbel, nice an’ polite.

“‘My name’s Bruce.  I’m rangin’ sheep heahaboots, an’ I hev interest in
Kurnel Lee Jorth’s bizness.’

“‘Hod do, Mister Bruce,’ replied Isbel, very civil ant cool as you
please.  Bruce hed an eye fer the crowd thet was now listenin’ an’
watchin’.  He swaggered closer to Isbel.

“‘We heerd y’u come into the Tonto Basin to run us sheepmen off the
range.  How aboot thet?’

“‘Wal, you heerd wrong,’ said Isbel, quietly.  ‘I came to work fer my
father.  Thet work depends on what happens.’

“Bruce began to git redder of face, an’ he shook a husky hand in front
of Isbel.  ‘I’ll tell y’u this heah, my Nez Perce Isbel—’ an’ when he
sort of choked fer more wind Greaves spoke up, ‘Simm, I shore reckon
thet Nez Perce handle will stick.’  An’ the crowd haw-hawed. Then Bruce
got goin’ ag’in.  ‘I’ll tell y’u this heah, Nez Perce. Thar’s been
enough happen already to run y’u out of Arizona.’

“‘Wal, you don’t say!  What, fer instance?, asked Isbel, quick an’
sarcastic.

“Thet made Bruce bust out puffin’ an’ spittin’: ‘Wha-tt, fer instance?
Huh!  Why, y’u darn half-breed, y’u’ll git run out fer makin’ up to
Ellen Jorth.  Thet won’t go in this heah country.  Not fer any Isbel.’

“‘You’re a liar,’ called Isbel, an’ like a big cat he dropped off the
counter.  I heerd his moccasins pat soft on the floor.  An’ I bet to
myself thet he was as dangerous as he was quick.  But his voice an’ his
looks didn’t change even a leetle.

“‘I’m not a liar,’ yelled Bruce.  ‘I’ll make y’u eat thet.  I can prove
what I say.... Y’u was seen with Ellen Jorth—up on the Rim—day before
yestiddy.  Y’u was watched.  Y’u was with her.  Y’u made up to her.
Y’u grabbed her an’ kissed her!... An’ I’m heah to say, Nez Perce,
thet y’u’re a marked man on this range.’

“‘Who saw me?’ asked Isbel, quiet an’ cold.  I seen then thet he’d
turned white in the face.

“‘Yu cain’t lie out of it,’ hollered Bruce, wavin’ his hands. ‘We got
y’u daid to rights.  Lorenzo saw y’u—follered y’u—watched y’u.’
Bruce pointed at the grinnin’ greaser.  ‘Lorenzo is Kurnel Jorth’s
foreman.  He seen y’u maulin’ of Ellen Jorth.  An’ when he tells the
Kurnel an’ Tad Jorth an’ Jackson Jorth!... Haw!  Haw! Haw!  Why, hell
’d be a cooler place fer yu then this heah Tonto.’

“Greaves an’ his gang hed come round, sure tickled clean to thar
gizzards at this mess.  I noticed, howsomever, thet they was Texans
enough to keep back to one side in case this Isbel started any
action.... Wal, Isbel took a look at Lorenzo.  Then with one swift grab
he jerked the little greaser off his feet an’ pulled him close.
Lorenzo stopped grinnin’.  He began to look a leetle sick.  But it was
plain he hed right on his side.

“‘You say you saw me?’ demanded Isbel.

“‘Si, senor,’ replied Lorenzo.

“What did you see?’

“‘I see senor an’ senorita.  I hide by manzanita.  I see senorita like
grande senor ver mooch.  She like senor keese.  She—’

“Then Isbel hit the little greaser a back-handed crack in the mouth.
Sure it was a crack!  Lorenzo went over the counter backward an’ landed
like a pack load of wood.  An’ he didn’t git up.

“‘Mister Bruce,’ said Isbel, ‘an’ you fellars who heerd thet lyin’
greaser, I did meet Ellen Jorth.  An’ I lost my head.  I—I kissed
her.... But it was an accident.  I meant no insult.  I apologized—I
tried to explain my crazy action.... Thet was all.  The greaser lied.
Ellen Jorth was kind enough to show me the trail.  We talked a little.
Then—I suppose—because she was young an’ pretty an’ sweet—I lost my
head.  She was absolutely innocent.  Thet damned greaser told a
bare-faced lie when he said she liked me.  The fact was she despised
me.  She said so.  An’ when she learned I was Jean Isbel she turned her
back on me an’ walked away.”’

At this point of his narrative the old man halted as if to impress
Ellen not only with what just had been told, but particularly with what
was to follow.  The reciting of this tale had evidently given Sprague
an unconscious pleasure.  He glowed.  He seemed to carry the burden of
a secret that he yearned to divulge.  As for Ellen, she was deadlocked
in breathless suspense.  All her emotions waited for the end. She
begged Sprague to hurry.

“Wal, I wish I could skip the next chapter an’ hev only the last to
tell,” rejoined the old man, and he put a heavy, but solicitous, hand
upon hers.... Simm Bruce haw-hawed loud an’ loud.... ‘Say, Nez Perce,’
he calls out, most insolent-like, ‘we air too good sheepmen heah to hev
the wool pulled over our eyes.  We shore know what y’u meant by Ellen
Jorth.  But y’u wasn’t smart when y’u told her y’u was Jean Isbel!...
Haw-haw!’

“Isbel flashed a strange, surprised look from the red-faced Bruce to
Greaves and to the other men.  I take it he was wonderin’ if he’d heerd
right or if they’d got the same hunch thet ’d come to him. An’ I reckon
he determined to make sure.

“‘Why wasn’t I smart?’ he asked.

“‘Shore y’u wasn’t smart if y’u was aimin’ to be one of Ellen Jorth’s
lovers,’ said Bruce, with a leer.  ‘Fer if y’u hedn’t give y’urself
away y’u could hev been easy enough.’

“Thar was no mistakin’ Bruce’s meanin’ an’ when he got it out some of
the men thar laughed.  Isbel kept lookin’ from one to another of them.
Then facin’ Greaves, he said, deliberately: ‘Greaves, this drunken
Bruce is excuse enough fer a show-down.  I take it that you are
sheepmen, an’ you’re goin’ on Jorth’s side of the fence in the matter
of this sheep rangin’.’

“‘Wal, Nez Perce, I reckon you hit plumb center,’ said Greaves, dryly.
He spread wide his big hands to the other men, as if to say they’d
might as well own the jig was up.

“‘All right.  You’re Jorth’s backers.  Have any of you a word to say in
Ellen Jorth’s defense?  I tell you the Mexican lied.  Believin’ me or
not doesn’t matter.  But this vile-mouthed Bruce hinted against thet
girl’s honor.’

“Ag’in some of the men laughed, but not so noisy, an’ there was a
nervous shufflin’ of feet.  Isbel looked sort of queer.  His neck had a
bulge round his collar.  An’ his eyes was like black coals of fire.
Greaves spread his big hands again, as if to wash them of this part of
the dirty argument.

“‘When it comes to any wimmen I pass—much less play a hand fer a
wildcat like Jorth’s gurl,’ said Greaves, sort of cold an’ thick.
‘Bruce shore ought to know her.  Accordin’ to talk heahaboots an’ what
HE says, Ellen Jorth has been his gurl fer two years.’

“Then Isbel turned his attention to Bruce an’ I fer one begun to shake
in my boots.

“‘Say thet to me!’ he called.

“‘Shore she’s my gurl, an’ thet’s why Im a-goin’ to hev y’u run off
this range.’

“Isbel jumped at Bruce.  ‘You damned drunken cur!  You vile-mouthed
liar!... I may be an Isbel, but by God you cain’t slander thet girl to
my face!... Then he moved so quick I couldn’t see what he did. But I
heerd his fist hit Bruce.  It sounded like an ax ag’in’ a beef. Bruce
fell clear across the room.  An’ by Jinny when he landed Isbel was
thar.  As Bruce staggered up, all bloody-faced, bellowin’ an’ spittin’
out teeth Isbel eyed Greaves’s crowd an’ said: ‘If any of y’u make a
move it ’ll mean gun-play.’  Nobody moved, thet’s sure. In fact, none
of Greaves’s outfit was packin’ guns, at least in sight. When Bruce got
all the way up—he’s a tall fellar—why Isbel took a full swing at him
an’ knocked him back across the room ag’in’ the counter.  Y’u know when
a fellar’s hurt by the way he yells.  Bruce got thet second smash right
on his big red nose.... I never seen any one so quick as Isbel.  He
vaulted over thet counter jest the second Bruce fell back on it, an’
then, with Greaves’s gang in front so he could catch any moves of
theirs, he jest slugged Bruce right an’ left, an’ banged his head on
the counter.  Then as Bruce sunk limp an’ slipped down, lookin’ like a
bloody sack, Isbel let him fall to the floor.  Then he vaulted back
over the counter.  Wipin’ the blood off his hands, he throwed his
kerchief down in Bruce’s face.  Bruce wasn’t dead or bad hurt.  He’d
jest been beaten bad. He was moanin’ an’ slobberin’.  Isbel kicked him,
not hard, but jest sort of disgustful.  Then he faced thet crowd.
‘Greaves, thet’s what I think of your Simm Bruce.  Tell him next time
he sees me to run or pull a gun.’  An’ then Isbel grabbed his rifle an’
package off the counter an’ went out.  He didn’t even look back.  I
seen him nount his horse an’ ride away.... Now, girl, what hev you to
say?”

Ellen could only say good-by and the word was so low as to be almost
inaudible.  She ran to her burro.  She could not see very clearly
through tear-blurred eyes, and her shaking fingers were all thumbs. It
seemed she had to rush away—somewhere, anywhere—not to get away from
old John Sprague, but from herself—this palpitating, bursting self
whose feet stumbled down the trail.  All—all seemed ended for her.
That interminable story!  It had taken so long.  And every minute of it
she had been helplessly torn asunder by feelings she had never known
she possessed.  This Ellen Jorth was an unknown creature.  She sobbed
now as she dragged the burro down the canyon trail.  She sat down only
to rise.  She hurried only to stop.  Driven, pursued, barred, she had
no way to escape the flaying thoughts, no time or will to repudiate
them.  The death of her girlhood, the rending aside of a veil of maiden
mystery only vaguely instinctively guessed, the barren, sordid truth of
her life as seen by her enlightened eyes, the bitter realization of the
vileness of men of her clan in contrast to the manliness and chivalry
of an enemy, the hard facts of unalterable repute as created by slander
and fostered by low minds, all these were forces in a cataclysm that
had suddenly caught her heart and whirled her through changes immense
and agonizing, to bring her face to face with reality, to force upon
her suspicion and doubt of all she had trusted, to warn her of the
dark, impending horror of a tragic bloody feud, and lastly to teach her
the supreme truth at once so glorious and so terrible—that she could
not escape the doom of womanhood.

About noon that day Ellen Jorth arrived at the Knoll, which was the
location of her father’s ranch.  Three canyons met there to form a
larger one.  The knoll was a symmetrical hill situated at the mouth of
the three canyons.  It was covered with brush and cedars, with here and
there lichened rocks showing above the bleached grass.  Below the Knoll
was a wide, grassy flat or meadow through which a willow-bordered
stream cut its rugged boulder-strewn bed.  Water flowed abundantly at
this season, and the deep washes leading down from the slopes attested
to the fact of cloudbursts and heavy storms.  This meadow valley was
dotted with horses and cattle, and meandered away between the timbered
slopes to lose itself in a green curve.  A singular feature of this
canyon was that a heavy growth of spruce trees covered the slope facing
northwest; and the opposite slope, exposed to the sun and therefore
less snowbound in winter, held a sparse growth of yellow pines.  The
ranch house of Colonel Jorth stood round the rough corner of the largest
of the three canyons, and rather well hidden, it did not obtrude its
rude and broken-down log cabins, its squalid surroundings, its black
mud-holes of corrals upon the beautiful and serene meadow valley.

Ellen Jorth approached her home slowly, with dragging, reluctant steps;
and never before in the three unhappy years of her existence there had
the ranch seemed so bare, so uncared for, so repugnant to her.  As she
had seen herself with clarified eyes, so now she saw her home.  The
cabin that Ellen lived in with her father was a single-room structure
with one door and no windows.  It was about twenty feet square.  The
huge, ragged, stone chimney had been built on the outside, with the
wide open fireplace set inside the logs.  Smoke was rising from the
chimney.  As Ellen halted at the door and began unpacking her burro she
heard the loud, lazy laughter of men.  An adjoining log cabin had been
built in two sections, with a wide roofed hall or space between them.
The door in each cabin faced the other, and there was a tall man
standing in one.  Ellen recognized Daggs, a neighbor sheepman, who
evidently spent more time with her father than at his own home,
wherever that was.  Ellen had never seen it.  She heard this man drawl,
“Jorth, heah’s your kid come home.”

Ellen carried her bed inside the cabin, and unrolled it upon a couch
built of boughs in the far corner.  She had forgotten Jean Isbel’s
package, and now it fell out under her sight.  Quickly she covered it.
A Mexican woman, relative of Antonio, and the only servant about the
place, was squatting Indian fashion before the fireplace, stirring a
pot of beans.  She and Ellen did not get along well together, and few
words ever passed between them.  Ellen had a canvas curtain stretched
upon a wire across a small triangular corner, and this afforded her a
little privacy.  Her possessions were limited in number.  The crude
square table she had constructed herself.  Upon it was a little
old-fashioned walnut-framed mirror, a brush and comb, and a dilapidated
ebony cabinet which contained odds and ends the sight of which always
brought a smile of derisive self-pity to her lips.  Under the table
stood an old leather trunk.  It had come with her from Texas, and
contained clothing and belongings of her mother’s.  Above the couch on
pegs hung her scant wardrobe.  A tiny shelf held several worn-out books.

When her father slept indoors, which was seldom except in winter, he
occupied a couch in the opposite corner.  A rude cupboard had been
built against the logs next to the fireplace.  It contained supplies
and utensils.  Toward the center, somewhat closer to the door, stood a
crude table and two benches.  The cabin was dark and smelled of smoke,
of the stale odors of past cooked meals, of the mustiness of dry,
rotting timber.  Streaks of light showed through the roof where the
rough-hewn shingles had split or weathered.  A strip of bacon hung upon
one side of the cupboard, and upon the other a haunch of venison.
Ellen detested the Mexican woman because she was dirty. The inside of
the cabin presented the same unkempt appearance usual to it after Ellen
had been away for a few days.  Whatever Ellen had lost during the
retrogression of the Jorths, she had kept her habits of cleanliness,
and straightway upon her return she set to work.

The Mexican woman sullenly slouched away to her own quarters outside
and Ellen was left to the satisfaction of labor.  Her mind was as busy
as her hands.  As she cleaned and swept and dusted she heard from time
to time the voices of men, the clip-clop of shod horses, the bellow of
cattle.  And a considerable time elapsed before she was disturbed.

A tall shadow darkened the doorway.

“Howdy, little one!” said a lazy, drawling voice.  “So y’u-all got
home?”

Ellen looked up.  A superbly built man leaned against the doorpost.
Like most Texans, he was light haired and light eyed.  His face was
lined and hard.  His long, sandy mustache hid his mouth and drooped
with a curl.  Spurred, booted, belted, packing a heavy gun low down on
his hip, he gave Ellen an entirely new impression.  Indeed, she was
seeing everything strangely.

“Hello, Daggs!” replied Ellen. “Where’s my dad?”

“He’s playin’ cairds with Jackson an’ Colter.  Shore’s playin’ bad,
too, an’ it’s gone to his haid.”

“Gamblin’?” queried Ellen.

“Mah child, when’d Kurnel Jorth ever play for fun?” said Daggs, with a
lazy laugh.  “There’s a stack of gold on the table.  Reckon yo’ uncle
Jackson will win it.  Colter’s shore out of luck.”

Daggs stepped inside.  He was graceful and slow.  His long’ spurs
clinked.  He laid a rather compelling hand on Ellen’s shoulder.

“Heah, mah gal, give us a kiss,” he said.

“Daggs, I’m not your girl,” replied Ellen as she slipped out from under
his hand.

Then Daggs put his arm round her, not with violence or rudeness, but
with an indolent, affectionate assurance, at once bold and
self-contained.  Ellen, however, had to exert herself to get free of
him, and when she had placed the table between them she looked him
square in the eyes.

“Daggs, y’u keep your paws off me,” she said.

“Aw, now, Ellen, I ain’t no bear,” he remonstrated.  “What’s the
matter, kid?”

“I’m not a kid.  And there’s nothin’ the matter.  Y’u’re to keep your
hands to yourself, that’s all.”

He tried to reach her across the table, and his movements were lazy and
slow, like his smile.  His tone was coaxing.

“Mah dear, shore you set on my knee just the other day, now, didn’t
you?”

Ellen felt the blood sting her cheeks.

“I was a child,” she returned.

“Wal, listen to this heah grown-up young woman.  All in a few days!...
Doon’t be in a temper, Ellen.... Come, give us a kiss.”

She deliberately gazed into his eyes.  Like the eyes of an eagle, they
were clear and hard, just now warmed by the dalliance of the moment,
but there was no light, no intelligence in them to prove he understood
her.  The instant separated Ellen immeasurably from him and from all of
his ilk.

“Daggs, I was a child,” she said.  “I was lonely—hungry for
affection—I was innocent.  Then I was careless, too, and thoughtless
when I should have known better.  But I hardly understood y’u men.  I
put such thoughts out of my mind.  I know now—know what y’u mean—what
y’u have made people believe I am.”

“Ahuh!  Shore I get your hunch,” he returned, with a change of tone.
“But I asked you to marry me?”

“Yes y’u did.  The first day y’u got heah to my dad’s house.  And y’u
asked me to marry y’u after y’u found y’u couldn’t have your way with
me. To y’u the one didn’t mean any more than the other.”

“Shore I did more than Simm Bruce an’ Colter,” he retorted. “They never
asked you to marry.”

“No, they didn’t.  And if I could respect them at all I’d do it because
they didn’t ask me.”

“Wal, I’ll be dog-goned!” ejaculated Daggs, thoughtfully, as he stroked
his long mustache.

“I’ll say to them what I’ve said to y’u,” went on Ellen.  “I’ll tell
dad to make y’u let me alone.  I wouldn’t marry one of y’u—y’u loafers
to save my life.  I’ve my suspicions about y’u.  Y’u’re a bad lot.”

Daggs changed subtly.  The whole indolent nonchalance of the man
vanished in an instant.

“Wal, Miss Jorth, I reckon you mean we’re a bad lot of sheepmen?” he
queried, in the cool, easy speech of a Texan.

“No,” flashed Ellen.  “Shore I don’t say sheepmen.  I say y’u’re a BAD
LOT.”

“Oh, the hell you say!”  Daggs spoke as he might have spoken to a man;
then turning swiftly on his heel he left her.  Outside he encountered
Ellen’s father.  She heard Daggs speak: “Lee, your little wildcat is
shore heah.  An’ take mah hunch.  Somebody has been talkin’ to her.”

“Who has?” asked her father, in his husky voice.  Ellen knew at once
that he had been drinking.

“Lord only knows,” replied Daggs.  “But shore it wasn’t any friends of
ours.”

“We cain’t stop people’s tongues,” said Jorth, resignedly

“Wal, I ain’t so shore,” continued Daggs, with his slow, cool laugh.
“Reckon I never yet heard any daid men’s tongues wag.”

Then the musical tinkle of his spurs sounded fainter.  A moment later
Ellen’s father entered the cabin.  His dark, moody face brightened at
sight of her.  Ellen knew she was the only person in the world left for
him to love.  And she was sure of his love.  Her very presence always
made him different.  And through the years, the darker their
misfortunes, the farther he slipped away from better days, the more she
loved him.

“Hello, my Ellen!” he said, and he embraced her.  When he had been
drinking he never kissed her.  “Shore I’m glad you’re home.  This heah
hole is bad enough any time, but when you’re gone it’s black.... I’m
hungry.”

Ellen laid food and drink on the table; and for a little while she did
not look directly at him.  She was concerned about this new searching
power of her eyes.  In relation to him she vaguely dreaded it.

Lee Jorth had once been a singularly handsome man.  He was tall, but
did not have the figure of a horseman.  His dark hair was streaked with
gray, and was white over his ears.  His face was sallow and thin, with
deep lines.  Under his round, prominent, brown eyes, like deadened
furnaces, were blue swollen welts.  He had a bitter mouth and weak
chin, not wholly concealed by gray mustache and pointed beard.  He wore
a long frock coat and a wide-brimmed sombrero, both black in color, and
so old and stained and frayed that along with the fashion of them they
betrayed that they had come from Texas with him.  Jorth always
persisted in wearing a white linen shirt, likewise a relic of his
Southern prosperity, and to-day it was ragged and soiled as usual.

Ellen watched her father eat and waited for him to speak.  It occured
to her strangely that he never asked about the sheep or the new-born
lambs.  She divined with a subtle new woman’s intuition that he cared
nothing for his sheep.

“Ellen, what riled Daggs?” inquired her father, presently.  “He shore
had fire in his eye.”

Long ago Ellen had betrayed an indignity she had suffered at the hands
of a man.  Her father had nearly killed him.  Since then she had taken
care to keep her troubles to herself.  If her father had not been blind
and absorbed in his own brooding he would have seen a thousand things
sufficient to inflame his Southern pride and temper.

“Daggs asked me to marry him again and I said he belonged to a bad
lot,” she replied.

Jorth laughed in scorn.  “Fool!  My God! Ellen, I must have dragged you
low—that every damned ru—er—sheepman—who comes along thinks he can
marry you.”

At the break in his words, the incompleted meaning, Ellen dropped her
eyes.  Little things once never noted by her were now come to have a
fascinating significance.

“Never mind, dad,” she replied.  “They cain’t marry me.”

“Daggs said somebody had been talkin’ to you.  How aboot that?”

“Old John Sprague has just gotten back from Grass Valley,” said Ellen.
“I stopped in to see him.  Shore he told me all the village gossip.”

“Anythin’ to interest me?” he queried, darkly.

“Yes, dad, I’m afraid a good deal,” she said, hesitatingly.  Then in
accordance with a decision Ellen had made she told him of the rumored
war between sheepmen and cattlemen; that old Isbel had Blaisdell,
Gordon, Fredericks, Blue and other well-known ranchers on his side;
that his son Jean Isbel had come from Oregon with a wonderful
reputation as fighter and scout and tracker; that it was no secret how
Colonel Lee Jorth was at the head of the sheepmen; that a bloody war
was sure to come.

“Hah!” exclaimed Jorth, with a stain of red in his sallow cheek.
“Reckon none of that is news to me.  I knew all that.”

Ellen wondered if he had heard of her meeting with Jean Isbel.  If not
he would hear as soon as Simm Bruce and Lorenzo came back.  She decided
to forestall them.

“Dad, I met Jean Isbel.  He came into my camp.  Asked the way to the
Rim. I showed him.  We—we talked a little.  And shore were gettin’
acquainted when—when he told me who he was.  Then I left him—hurried
back to camp.”

“Colter met Isbel down in the woods,” replied Jorth, ponderingly. “Said
he looked like an Indian—a hard an’ slippery customer to reckon with.”

“Shore I guess I can indorse what Colter said,” returned Ellen, dryly.
She could have laughed aloud at her deceit.  Still she had not lied.

“How’d this heah young Isbel strike you?” queried her father, suddenly
glancing up at her.

Ellen felt the slow, sickening, guilty rise of blood in her face. She
was helpless to stop it.  But her father evidently never saw it. He was
looking at her without seeing her.

“He—he struck me as different from men heah,” she stammered.

“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 shud

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