Zane Grey (29 page)

The might of her passion was like the blaze of the sun. Before it all
else retreated, diminished. The suddenness of the truth dimmed her
sight. But she saw clearly enough to crawl into the pine thicket,
through the clutching, dry twigs, over the mats of fragrant needles to
the covert where she had once spied upon Jean Isbel. And here she lay
face down for a while, hands clutching the needles, breast pressed hard
upon the ground, stricken and spent. But vitality was exceeding strong
in her. It passed, that weakness of realization, and she awakened to
the consciousness of love.

But in the beginning it was not consciousness of the man. It was new,
sensorial life, elemental, primitive, a liberation of a million
inherited instincts, quivering and physical, over which Ellen had no
more control than she had over the glory of the sun. If she thought at
all it was of her need to be hidden, like an animal, low down near the
earth, covered by green thicket, lost in the wildness of nature. She
went to nature, unconsciously seeking a mother. And love was a birth
from the depths of her, like a rushing spring of pure water, long
underground, and at last propelled to the surface by a convulsion.

Ellen gradually lost her tense rigidity and relaxed. Her body
softened. She rolled over until her face caught the lacy, golden
shadows cast by sun and bough. Scattered drops of rain pattered around
her. The air was hot, and its odor was that of dry pine and spruce
fragrance penetrated by brimstone from the lightning. The nest where
she lay was warm and sweet. No eye save that of nature saw her in her
abandonment. An ineffable and exquisite smile wreathed her lips,
dreamy, sad, sensuous, the supremity of unconscious happiness. Over
her dark and eloquent eyes, as Ellen gazed upward, spread a luminous
film, a veil. She was looking intensely, yet she did not see. The
wilderness enveloped her with its secretive, elemental sheaths of rock,
of tree, of cloud, of sunlight. Through her thrilling skin poured the
multiple and nameless sensations of the living organism stirred to
supreme sensitiveness. She could not lie still, but all her movements
were gentle, involuntary. The slow reaching out of her hand, to grasp
at nothing visible, was similar to the lazy stretching of her limbs, to
the heave of her breast, to the ripple of muscle.

Ellen knew not what she felt. To live that sublime hour was beyond
thought. Such happiness was like the first dawn of the world to the
sight of man. It had to do with bygone ages. Her heart, her blood,
her flesh, her very bones were filled with instincts and emotions
common to the race before intellect developed, when the savage lived
only with his sensorial perceptions. Of all happiness, joy, bliss,
rapture to which man was heir, that of intense and exquisite
preoccupation of the senses, unhindered and unburdened by thought, was
the greatest. Ellen felt that which life meant with its inscrutable
design. Love was only the realization of her mission on the earth.

The dark storm cloud with its white, ragged ropes of lightning and
down-streaming gray veils of rain, the purple gulf rolling like a
colored sea to the dim mountains, the glorious golden light of the
sun—these had enchanted her eyes with her beauty of the universe. They
had burst the windows of her blindness. When she crawled into the
green-brown covert it was to escape too great perception. She needed
to be encompassed by close, tangible things. And there her body paid
the tribute to the realization of life. Shock, convulsion, pain,
relaxation, and then unutterable and insupportable sensing of her
environment and the heart! In one way she was a wild animal alone in
the woods, forced into the mating that meant reproduction of its kind.
In another she was an infinitely higher being shot through and through
with the most resistless and mysterious transport that life could give
to flesh.

And when that spell slackened its hold there wedged into her mind a
consciousness of the man she loved—Jean Isbel. Then emotion and
thought strove for mastery over her. It was not herself or love that
she loved, but a living man. Suddenly he existed so clearly for her
that she could see him, hear him, almost feel him. Her whole soul, her
very life cried out to him for protection, for salvation, for love, for
fulfillment. No denial, no doubt marred the white blaze of her
realization. From the instant that she had looked up into Jean Isbel's
dark face she had loved him. Only she had not known. She bowed now,
and bent, and humbly quivered under the mastery of something beyond her
ken. Thought clung to the beginnings of her romance—to the three
times she had seen him. Every look, every word, every act of his
returned to her now in the light of the truth. Love at first sight! He
had sworn it, bitterly, eloquently, scornful of her doubts. And now a
blind, sweet, shuddering ecstasy swayed her. How weak and frail seemed
her body—too small, too slight for this monstrous and terrible engine
of fire and lightning and fury and glory—her heart! It must burst or
break. Relentlessly memory pursued Ellen, and her thoughts whirled and
emotion conquered her. At last she quivered up to her knees as if
lashed to action. It seemed that first kiss of Isbel's, cool and
gentle and timid, was on her lips. And her eyes closed and hot tears
welled from under her lids. Her groping hands found only the dead
twigs and the pine boughs of the trees. Had she reached out to clasp
him? Then hard and violent on her mouth and cheek and neck burned
those other kisses of Isbel's, and with the flashing, stinging memory
came the truth that now she would have bartered her soul for them.
Utterly she surrendered to the resistlessness of this love. Her loss
of mother and friends, her wandering from one wild place to another,
her lonely life among bold and rough men, had developed her for violent
love. It overthrew all pride, it engendered humility, it killed hate.
Ellen wiped the tears from her eyes, and as she knelt there she swept
to her breast a fragrant spreading bough of pine needles. "I'll go to
him," she whispered. "I'll tell him of—of my—my love. I'll tell him
to take me away—away to the end of the world—away from heah—before
it's too late!"

It was a solemn, beautiful moment. But the last spoken words lingered
hauntingly. "Too late?" she whispered.

And suddenly it seemed that death itself shuddered in her soul. Too
late! It was too late. She had killed his love. That Jorth blood in
her—that poisonous hate—had chosen the only way to strike this noble
Isbel to the heart. Basely, with an abandonment of womanhood, she had
mockingly perjured her soul with a vile lie. She writhed, she shook
under the whip of this inconceivable fact. Lost! Lost! She wailed
her misery. She might as well be what she had made Jean Isbel think
she was. If she had been shamed before, she was now abased, degraded,
lost in her own sight. And if she would have given her soul for his
kisses, she now would have killed herself to earn back his respect.
Jean Isbel had given her at sight the deference that she had
unconsciously craved, and the love that would have been her salvation.
What a horrible mistake she had made of her life! Not her mother's
blood, but her father's—the Jorth blood—had been her ruin.

Again Ellen fell upon the soft pine-needle mat, face down, and she
groveled and burrowed there, in an agony that could not bear the sense
of light. All she had suffered was as nothing to this. To have
awakened to a splendid and uplifting love for a man whom she had
imagined she hated, who had fought for her name and had killed in
revenge for the dishonor she had avowed—to have lost his love and what
was infinitely more precious to her now in her ignominy—his faith in
her purity—this broke her heart.

When Ellen, utterly spent in body and mind, reached home that day a
melancholy, sultry twilight was falling. Fitful flares of sheet
lightning swept across the dark horizon to the east. The cabins were
deserted. Antonio and the Mexican woman were gone. The circumstances
made Ellen wonder, but she was too tired and too sunken in spirit to
think long about it or to care. She fed and watered her horse and left
him in the corral. Then, supperless and without removing her clothes,
she threw herself upon the bed, and at once sank into heavy slumber.

Sometime during the night she awoke. Coyotes were yelping, and from
that sound she concluded it was near dawn. Her body ached; her mind
seemed dull. Drowsily she was sinking into slumber again when she
heard the rapid clip-clop of trotting horses. Startled, she raised her
head to listen. The men were coming back. Relief and dread seemed to
clear her stupor.

The trotting horses stopped across the lane from her cabin, evidently
at the corral where she had left Spades. She heard him whistle.

From the sound of hoofs she judged the number of horses to be six or
eight. Low voices of men mingled with thuds and cracking of straps and
flopping of saddles on the ground. After that the heavy tread of boots
sounded on the porch of the cabin opposite. A door creaked on its
hinges. Next a slow footstep, accompanied by clinking of spurs,
approached Ellen's door, and a heavy hand banged upon it. She knew
this person could not be her father.

"Hullo, Ellen!"

She recognized the voice as belonging to Colter. Somehow its tone, or
something about it, sent a little shiver clown her spine. It acted
like a revivifying current. Ellen lost her dragging lethargy.

"Hey, Ellen, are y'u there?" added Colter, louder voice.

"Yes. Of course I'm heah," she replied. "What do y'u want?"

"Wal—I'm shore glad y'u're home," he replied. "Antonio's gone with
his squaw. An' I was some worried aboot y'u."

"Who's with y'u, Colter?" queried Ellen, sitting up.

"Rock Wells an' Springer. Tad Jorth was with us, but we had to leave
him over heah in a cabin."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Wal, he's hurt tolerable bad," was the slow reply.

Ellen heard Colter's spurs jangle, as if he had uneasily shifted his
feet.

"Where's dad an' Uncle Jackson?" asked Ellen.

A silence pregnant enough to augment Ellen's dread finally broke to
Colter's voice, somehow different. "Shore they're back on the trail.
An' we're to meet them where we left Tad."

"Are yu goin' away again?"

"I reckon.... An', Ellen, y'u're goin' with us."

"I am not," she retorted.

"Wal, y'u are, if I have to pack y'u," he replied, forcibly. "It's not
safe heah any more. That damned half-breed Isbel with his gang are on
our trail."

That name seemed like a red-hot blade at Ellen's leaden heart. She
wanted to fling a hundred queries on Colter, but she could not utter
one.

"Ellen, we've got to hit the trail an' hide," continued Colter,
anxiously. "Y'u mustn't stay heah alone. Suppose them Isbels would
trap y'u! ... They'd tear your clothes off an' rope y'u to a tree.
Ellen, shore y'u're goin'.... Y'u heah me!"

"Yes—I'll go," she replied, as if forced.

"Wal—that's good," he said, quickly. "An' rustle tolerable lively.
We've got to pack."

The slow jangle of Colter's spurs and his slow steps moved away out of
Ellen's hearing. Throwing off the blankets, she put her feet to the
floor and sat there a moment staring at the blank nothingness of the
cabin interior in the obscure gray of dawn. Cold, gray, dreary,
obscure—like her life, her future! And she was compelled to do what
was hateful to her. As a Jorth she must take to the unfrequented
trails and hide like a rabbit in the thickets. But the interest of the
moment, a premonition of events to be, quickened her into action.

Ellen unbarred the door to let in the light. Day was breaking with an
intense, clear, steely light in the east through which the morning star
still shone white. A ruddy flare betokened the advent of the sun.
Ellen unbraided her tangled hair and brushed and combed it. A queer,
still pang came to her at sight of pine needles tangled in her brown
locks. Then she washed her hands and face. Breakfast was a matter of
considerable work and she was hungry.

The sun rose and changed the gray world of forest. For the first time
in her life Ellen hated the golden brightness, the wonderful blue of
sky, the scream of the eagle and the screech of the jay; and the
squirrels she had always loved to feed were neglected that morning.

Colter came in. Either Ellen had never before looked attentively at
him or else he had changed. Her scrutiny of his lean, hard features
accorded him more Texan attributes than formerly. His gray eyes were
as light, as clear, as fierce as those of an eagle. And the sand gray
of his face, the long, drooping, fair mustache hid the secrets of his
mind, but not its strength. The instant Ellen met his gaze she sensed
a power in him that she instinctively opposed. Colter had not been so
bold nor so rude as Daggs, but he was the same kind of man, perhaps the
more dangerous for his secretiveness, his cool, waiting inscrutableness.

"'Mawnin', Ellen!" he drawled. "Y'u shore look good for sore eyes."

"Don't pay me compliments, Colter," replied Ellen. "An' your eyes are
not sore."

"Wal, I'm shore sore from fightin' an' ridin' an' layin' out," he said,
bluntly.

"Tell me—what's happened," returned Ellen.

"Girl, it's a tolerable long story," replied Colter. "An' we've no
time now. Wait till we get to camp."

"Am I to pack my belongin's or leave them heah?" asked Ellen.

"Reckon y'u'd better leave—them heah."

"But if we did not come back—"

"Wal, I reckon it's not likely we'll come—soon," he said, rather
evasively.

"Colter, I'll not go off into the woods with just the clothes I have on
my back."

"Ellen, we shore got to pack all the grab we can. This shore ain't
goin' to be a visit to neighbors. We're shy pack hosses. But y'u make
up a bundle of belongin's y'u care for, an' the things y'u'll need bad.
We'll throw it on somewhere."