Zane Grey (6 page)

"Did you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?" he asked, after a
silence.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"A whole campful," she replied, with a laugh, "but admirers is a better
name for them."

"Then there's no one fellow?"

"Hardly—yet."

"How would you like being kept here in this lonesome place for—well,
say for ever?"

"I wouldn't like that," replied Joan. "I'd like this—camping out like
this now—if my folks only knew I am alive and well and safe. I love
lonely, dreamy places. I've dreamed of being in just such a one as this.
It seems so far away here—so shut in by the walls and the blackness.
So silent and sweet! I love the stars. They speak to me. And the wind
in the spruces. Hear it.... Very low, mournful! That whispers to
me—to-morrow I'd like it here if I had no worry. I've never grown
up yet. I explore and climb trees and hunt for little birds and
rabbits—young things just born, all fuzzy and sweet, frightened, piping
or squealing for their mothers. But I won't touch one for worlds. I
simply can't hurt anything. I can't spur my horse or beat him. Oh, I
HATE pain!"

"You're a strange girl to live out here on this border," he said.

"I'm no different from other girls. You don't know girls."

"I knew one pretty well. She put a rope round my neck," he replied,
grimly.

"A rope!"

"Yes, I mean a halter, a hangman's noose. But I balked her!"

"Oh!... A good girl?"

"Bad! Bad to the core of her black heart—bad as I am!" he exclaimed,
with fierce, low passion.

Joan trembled. The man, in an instant, seemed transformed, somber as
death. She could not look at him, but she must keep on talking.

"Bad? You don't seem bad to me—only violent, perhaps, or wild.... Tell
me about yourself."

She had stirred him. His neglected pipe fell from his hand. In the gloom
of the camp-fire he must have seen faces or ghosts of his past.

"Why not?" he queried, strangely. "Why not do what's been impossible for
years—open my lips? It'll not matter—to a girl who can never tell!...
Have I forgotten? God!—I have not! Listen, so that you'll KNOW I'm bad.
My name's not Kells. I was born in the East, and went to school there
till I ran away. I was young, ambitious, wild. I stole. I ran away—came
West in 'fifty-one to the gold-fields in California. There I became a
prospector, miner, gambler, robber—and road-agent. I had evil in me, as
all men have, and those wild years brought it out. I had no chance. Evil
and gold and blood—they are one and the same thing. I committed every
crime till no place, bad as it might be, was safe for me. Driven and
hunted and shot and starved—almost hanged!... And now I'm—Kells! of
that outcast crew you named 'the Border Legion!' Every black crime but
one—the blackest—and that haunting me, itching my hands to-night."

"Oh, you speak so—so dreadfully!" cried Joan. "What can I say? I'm
sorry for you. I don't believe it all. What—what black crime haunts
you? Oh! what could be possible tonight—here in this lonely canon—with
only me?"

Dark and terrible the man arose.

"Girl," he said, hoarsely. "To-night—to-night—I'll.... What have you
done to me? One more day—and I'll be mad to do right by you—instead of
WRONG.... Do you understand that?"

Joan leaned forward in the camp-fire light with outstretched hands
and quivering lips, as overcome by his halting confession of one last
remnant of honor as she was by the dark hint of his passion.

"No—no—I don't understand—nor believe!" she cried. "But you frighten
me—so! I am all—all alone with you here. You said I'd be safe.
Don't—don't—"

Her voice broke then and she sank back exhausted in her seat. Probably
Kells had heard only the first words of her appeal, for he took to
striding back and forth in the circle of the camp-fire light. The
scabbard with the big gun swung against his leg. It grew to be a dark
and monstrous thing in Joan's sight. A marvelous intuition born of that
hour warned her of Kells's subjection to the beast in him, even while,
with all the manhood left to him, he still battled against it. Her
girlish sweetness and innocence had availed nothing, except mock him
with the ghost of dead memories. He could not be won or foiled. She must
get her hands on that gun—kill him—or—! The alternative was death for
herself. And she leaned there, slowly gathering all the unconquerable
and unquenchable forces of a woman's nature, waiting, to make one
desperate, supreme, and final effort.

Kells strode there, a black, silent shadow, plodding with bent head, as
if all about and above him were demons and furies.

Joan's perceptions of him, of the night, of the inanimate and
imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and
abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and
wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward.
Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their lives did not breed
cowardice or baseness. Joan knew the burning in her breast—that thing
which inflamed and swept through her like a wind of fire—was hate. Yet
her heart held a grain of pity for him. She measured his forbearance,
his struggle, against the monstrous cruelty and passion engendered by
a wild life among wild men at a wild time. And, considering his
opportunities of the long hours and lonely miles, she was grateful, and
did not in the least underestimate what it cost him, how different from
Bill or Halloway he had been. But all this was nothing, and her thinking
of it useless, unless he conquered himself. She only waited, holding on
to that steel-like control of her nerves, motionless and silent.

She leaned back against her saddle, a blanket covering her, with
wide-open eyes, and despite the presence of that stalking figure and the
fact of her mind being locked round one terrible and inevitable thought,
she saw the changing beautiful glow of the fire-logs and the cold,
pitiless stars and the mustering shadows under the walls. She heard,
too, the low rising sigh of the wind in the balsam and the silvery
tinkle of the brook, and sounds only imagined or nameless. Yet a stern
and insupportable silence weighed her down. This dark canon seemed
at the ends of the earth. She felt encompassed by illimitable and
stupendous upflung mountains, insulated in a vast, dark, silent tomb.

Kells suddenly came to her, treading noiselessly, and he leaned over
her. His visage was a dark blur, but the posture of him was that of a
wolf about to spring. Lower he leaned—slowly—and yet lower. Joan
saw the heavy gun swing away from his leg; she saw it black and clear
against the blaze; a cold, blue light glinted from its handle. And then
Kells was near enough for her to see his face and his eyes that were but
shadows of flames. She gazed up at him steadily, open-eyed, with no fear
or shrinking. His breathing was quick and loud. He looked down at her
for an endless moment, then, straightening his bent form, he resumed his
walk to and fro.

After that for Joan time might have consisted of moments or hours, each
of which was marked by Kells looming over her. He appeared to approach
her from all sides; he round her wide-eyed, sleepless; his shadowy
glance gloated over her lithe, slender shape; and then he strode away
into the gloom. Sometimes she could no longer hear his steps and then
she was quiveringly alert, listening, fearful that he might creep upon
her like a panther. At times he kept the camp-fire blazing brightly; at
others he let it die down. And these dark intervals were frightful
for her. The night seemed treacherous, in league with her foe. It was
endless. She prayed for dawn—yet with a blank hopelessness for what
the day might bring. Could she hold out through more interminable hours?
Would she not break from sheer strain? There were moments when she
wavered and shook like a leaf in the wind, when the beating of her heart
was audible, when a child could have seen her distress. There were
other moments when all was ugly, unreal, impossible like things in a
nightmare. But when Kells was near or approached to look at her, like
a cat returned to watch a captive mouse, she was again strong, waiting,
with ever a strange and cold sense of the nearness of that swinging gun.
Late in the night she missed him, for how long she had no idea. She had
less trust in his absence than his presence. The nearer he came to her
the stronger she grew and the clearer of purpose. At last the black void
of canon lost its blackness and turned to gray. Dawn was at hand. The
horrible endless night, in which she had aged from girl to woman, had
passed. Joan had never closed her eyes a single instant.

When day broke she got up. The long hours in which she had rested
motionlessly had left her muscles cramped and dead. She began to walk
off the feeling. Kells had just stirred from his blanket under the
balsam-tree. His face was dark, haggard, lined. She saw him go down to
the brook and plunge his hands into the water and bathe his face with a
kind of fury. Then he went up to the smoldering fire. There was a gloom,
a somberness, a hardness about him that had not been noticeable the day
before.

Joan found the water cold as ice, soothing to the burn beneath her skin.
She walked away then, aware that Kells did not appear to care, and went
up to where the brook brawled from under the cliff. This was a hundred
paces from camp, though in plain sight. Joan looked round for her
horse, but he was not to be seen. She decided to slip away the first
opportunity that offered, and on foot or horseback, any way, to get out
of Kells's clutches if she had to wander, lost in the mountains, till
she starved. Possibly the day might be endurable, but another night
would drive her crazy. She sat on a ledge, planning and brooding, till
she was startled by a call from Kells. Then slowly she retraced her
steps.

"Don't you want to eat?" he asked.

"I'm not hungry," she replied.

"Well, eat anyhow—if it chokes you," he ordered.

Joan seated herself while he placed food and drink before her. She did
not look at him and did not feel his gaze upon her. Far asunder as they
had been yesterday the distance between them to-day was incalculably
greater. She ate as much as she could swallow and pushed the rest
away. Leaving the camp-fire, she began walking again, here and there,
aimlessly, scarcely seeing what she looked at. There was a shadow over
her, an impending portent of catastrophe, a moment standing dark and
sharp out of the age-long hour. She leaned against the balsam and then
she rested in the stone seat, and then she had to walk again. It might
have been long, that time; she never knew how long or short. There came
a strange flagging, sinking of her spirit, accompanied by vibrating,
restless, uncontrollable muscular activity. Her nerves were on the verge
of collapse.

It was then that a call from Kells, clear and ringing, thrilled all the
weakness from her in a flash, and left her limp and cold. She saw him
coming. His face looked amiable again, bright against what seemed a
vague and veiled background. Like a mountaineer he strode. And she
looked into his strange, gray glance to see unmasked the ruthless power,
the leaping devil, the ungovernable passion she had sensed in him.

He grasped her arm and with a single pull swung her to him. "YOU'VE got
to pay that ransom!"

He handled her as if he thought she resisted, but she was unresisting.
She hung her head to hide her eyes. Then he placed an arm round her
shoulders and half led, half dragged her toward the cabin.

Joan saw with startling distinctness the bits of balsam and pine at
her feet and pale pink daisies in the grass, and then the dry withered
boughs. She was in the cabin.

"Girl!... I'm hungry—for you!" he breathed, hoarsely. And turning her
toward him, he embraced her, as if his nature was savage and he had to
use a savage force.

If Joan struggled at all, it was only slightly, when she writhed and
slipped, like a snake, to get her arm under his as it clasped her
neck. Then she let herself go. He crushed her to him. He bent her
backward—tilted her face with hard and eager hand. Like a madman, with
hot working lips, he kissed her. She felt blinded—scorched. But her
purpose was as swift and sure and wonderful as his passion was wild. The
first reach of her groping hand found his gun-belt. Swift as light her
hand slipped down. Her fingers touched the cold gun—grasped with thrill
on thrill—slipped farther down, strong and sure to raise the hammer.
Then with a leaping, strung intensity that matched his own she drew the
gun. She raised it while her eyes were shut. She lay passive under his
kisses—the devouring kisses of one whose manhood had been denied the
sweetness, the glory, the fire, the life of woman's lips. It was a
moment in which she met his primitive fury of possession with a woman's
primitive fury of profanation. She pressed the gun against his side and
pulled the trigger.

A thundering, muffled, hollow boom! The odor of burned powder stung
her nostrils. Kells's hold on her tightened convulsively, loosened
with strange, lessening power. She swayed back free of him, still with
tight-shut eyes. A horrible cry escaped him—a cry of mortal agony. It
wrenched her. And she looked to see him staggering amazed, stricken, at
bay, like a wolf caught in cruel steel jaws. His hands came away from
both sides, dripping with blood. They shook till the crimson drops
spattered on the wall, on the boughs. Then he seemed to realize and he
clutched at her with these bloody hands.

"God Almighty!" he panted. "You shot me!... You—you girl!... You
she-cat... You knew—all the time... You she-cat!... Give me—that gun!"

"Kells, get back! I'll kill you!" she cried. The big gun, outstretched
between them, began to waver.

Kells did not see the gun. In his madness he tried to move, to reach
her, but he could not; he was sinking. His legs sagged under him, let
him down to his knees, and but for the wall he would have fallen. Then a
change transformed him. The black, turgid, convulsed face grew white and
ghastly, with beads of clammy sweat and lines of torture. His strange
eyes showed swiftly passing thought—wonder, fear, scorn—even
admiration.