BLACK WING
Zion’s vengeful gaze was scouring the bushy slopes. “I’m huntin’ Shang!” he blazed. “I’m goin’ to kill him … dead! He’s up here … some place! He tagged Eden!”
Then René knew that in their last meeting, as on the first one, the shadow of Shang Haman had been over them. Shang had seen their farewell. His heart stopped, overcome by a terrible fear for Eden, and he cried hoarsely: “What’s Shang done?”
“He’s talked ’em down on you!” Zion flamed.
In his relief René could have laughed. “It’s all right, Zion.” He tried to soothe him. “Eden told me. They’re just goin’ to send me back.”
“Back?” It had anything but a soothing effect. “Back … where you was dyin’ at?”
“It’s all right.” René held that gaze by his very earnestness. “You see, I got a start here. I can get well anywhere. I had to go sometime, you know. As well be now.”
One instant Zion pondered this. “Yes,” he mused then, “of course, you’d be goin’. Nobody’d stay in this basin ’less they had to.” Undergoing one of his startling transformations, his dangerous mood was replaced by one of wild enthusiasm. “As well be now!” His voice trembled with eagerness. “And I’ll go, too! I’ll go out there with you!”
Terrified by this decision, the last thing he could allow to happen after his promise to Eden, René insisted: “I can’t take you, Zion!”
Shocked, hurt by this refusal, Zion looked at him. “Why not?” he asked then, his lips quivering.
“Because,” desperately René offered every reason he could think of except the real one—that Zion wouldn’t fit in, “you couldn’t stand it, raised like you’ve been. You saw what it done to me. It might do worse to you. You ain’t felt walls till you feel a city. Walls like a house … that close. Even when you’re outside. Pressin’ on you. Smotherin’ the very breath.”
“I won’t stay in them places.” Zion was again all eagerness.
“You might have to!” cried René out of his bitter experience.
“I’ll ride away from them so fast,” Zion said, and laughed, “you can’t see me for dust.” And he slipped his rifle in its scabbard in readiness for travel.
“There’s other things.” René racked his brain for them. “The law that keeps you shut up here. There’ll be a thousand Pat Dolans out there. Every place you go, there’ll be one … watchin’ you, anxious to see you slip, so they can say they caught a Jore.”
“Will they know?” Zion’s eyes sparkled. “Honest, will they know me out there?”
“Zion, you don’t savvy the danger.”
Talking of danger to a Jore. “Pard”—Zion underwent another baffling change—“I want to show you something. Get your horse and come along.”
René shook his head. “I can’t. I got to go back. They’ll think I’m hidin’ out. They’re just waitin’ to send me now.”
“Let ’em wait,” Zion entreated. “It won’t hurt. They ain’t told you yet. They don’t know Eden did. Please, pard. I want to show you something. I’ll bet you’ll say I can go then.”
Impelled by the young fellow’s excitement, ready to do anything he asked but take him out of the basin, René went with him, wondering what Zion had to show him, his wonder growing as Zion kept on beyond the north horn of the lake. Then, turning west, they began a steady climb of the sun-flushed slopes, taking them farther into the basin than he had ever been. And ever the strange fire in Zion’s soul blazed higher, so that his lithe figure strained forward in the saddle, even while he held it back to a moderate pace, remembering that René couldn’t ride as he could yet.
Up they climbed, and still up, toward the fluted edge of the great cup, coming out finally on a high mesa where, it seemed, they could go no farther. Sharply across their path reared that great rock barrier, the wall that ringed the basin, the wall that Zion was always riding into, when he wanted to run—like the wind that swoops down and rushes on and never stops or turns around. Now he had ridden into it again.
Pulling up beside him, René was amazed to see all his fire gone and his wild face overcast by some strange doubt—doubt that flickered in his eyes, fixed on René with strange intensity, and trembled in his voice as he asked in pitiful uncertainty: “We’re pards, ain’t we?”
With assurance René rejoined: “We sure are, Zion.”
Instantly, Zion kindled again. “It’s all right, then. Pards don’t keep things.” And before René could speculate on what he meant, he flung an arm out at the cliff, excitedly confiding: “There’s the secret pass.”
Stunned by the unexpectedness of this, René could only stare at the rock wall, seemingly unbroken anywhere, unscalable, rocketing hundreds of feet into the air, where it split up into pinnacles.
“You ain’t lookin’ right,” Zion shouted with boyish laughter. “Look down. Here! Between these rocks. Can’t you see daylight?”
Then René’s eyes fell on the mound of shattered rock at the foot of the cliff—remains of pinnacle that, wearying in the ages of standing up there, had fallen and been dashed to bits. And he saw an opening in it. It looked like a tunnel, worn through the wall of the ancient crater by the action of water in the ages when this basin had been a lake, and running completely through the rim, for he could see, if not daylight, at least a faint gloom, as of light that has survived a long, dark, and tortuous journey.
Long he stared at it, trying to grasp the astounding fact that, thus, with no preparation, no conscious effort, he was seeing the pass for which the whole state sought. This was the pass the Jores were said to use on their lawless excursions. This was the pass Luke Chartres had spent a year of his valuable time to find. And Sheriff Dolan had …
“Why’s it left like this?” he asked jerkily of Zion in alarm. “Right now a posse may be headed toward it. I warned your uncles. Why ain’t they guardin’ it?”
“It’s guarded, you bet,” said Zion, and laughed at René’s bewilderment. “We guard it from Sentry Crags. We can see the country outside this pass from there. If anyone drifts this way, we send a man over.”
So they watched both passes at the same time. “But at night,” cried René, thinking of Pat Dolan, wild to raid the basin, driven by the sharp goad of ambition, and with so little to stop him. “You can’t watch it after dark.”
“No need to,” smiled Zion, canny in all pertaining to the Picture Rocks. “The outside openin’ is high on a shelf, covered with rocks like this. Horses can’t get within a mile of it no time. And men has to climb to it hand over hand, hundreds of feet. It’s risky in daylight. They couldn’t do it at night, even Jores.” He plucked eagerly at René’s sleeve. “Let’s crawl through. I’ll show you.”
But René didn’t want to know any more of the Jores’ secrets. Already he knew too much, when he was leaving the Picture Rocks and going out where Race was.
“If this is what you wanted to show me,” he said wearily, “let’s go back.”
“This?” The blue eyes flashed scorn. “This ain’t nothin’. This just happened to be on the way. Wait till you see!”
In ten times his first excitement, he wheeled his horse and was off again, so wrought up that, for long stretches, he forgot to wait for René, and remembering, would dash back all contrition, insisting that René rest. Then, unable to endure the delay, he would race on again, leading the way along the great hogback that bisected the basin. Coming at last to its highest point, a timberless knoll where René, halting to rest his steaming horse and his own fagged self, forgot fatigue, forgot Zion, who was whirling back to wait for him, forgot that the Jores were waiting—everything—in the panorama spread before him.
On his left the hogback dropped off into a jumble of forested mountain and canyon, wild as on the day of creation. On his right, by more gradual stages, it rolled down to the level floor of the basin, where the lake flashed in the noon glare and the cabins nestled in the green trees on its shore, and, awesomely, over him and all around, the age-scarred, iron-stained rim—of the very world, it seemed. It stretched without a break, save that thin split at Sentry Crags and the washout at its foot that had been so long a secret, but with many a break on its top, rags of crags, like tombstones to the world that was.
“Come on!” cried Zion with fierce impatience, tearing off at a gallop down where the wildest jumble was.
Trees rose above them. Grass brushed their stirrups. René wondered at another change in Zion. He was even more tense, but alert and cautious, his restless eyes questing, now studying the ground, now searching the crests, now scouring the canyon pockets. Suddenly, jerking up at the foot of a low, green ridge, he implored silence with a finger on his lips. Then, slipping from his horse, he motioned René to do likewise. And with a soundless movement René found impossible to emulate, he crawled up the brushy ridge to the summit, where he dropped flat, parted the grass, and looked down.
René, creeping up to drop breathless beside Zion, did the same. He saw below them a little valley of unearthly beauty, luxurious with grass and wildflowers, and a spring that bubbled up to overflow its ferny banks and flash away in a mad little stream. Nothing more. Nothing to account for the way Zion was trembling against him.
“Hush,” said the young fellow. “They’re comin’.”
Coming? Who? René looked the question. Tingling through all his being at Zion’s thrilled whisper: “Wild ones.”
Then his heart leaped as over the green slope beyond, down to the spring, streamed a band of wild horses, the finest he had ever seen. Then it ceased to beat as his rapt gaze fell on the one in the rear, a glorious stallion—creamy skin glistening in the sun, mane and tail like spun gold, swirling about him, like nothing he’d ever seen, like a horse you’d dream about.
“Black Wing,” whispered Zion.