UNLOOSED
The wind, the thunder, and lightning rolled away into the night, but the rain kept up until dawn, a warm, steamy dawn. Mists rose from the basin as from a mighty cauldron. Out of the mists at sunrise came Eden. She was off her horse and standing beside him before he saw her. Then he had to look twice to make sure. For her short fawn-colored skirt and blouse blended right in with the dun crags and sunbrowned grass. But her face was like a patch of snow against the rocks and her eyes, shadowed from an all-night vigil, startlingly purple.
“They got through?” she asked in a drab little voice.
“You bet.” René grinned. “At least, I didn’t hear anything to the contrary. And the camp’s goin’ on as usual.”
She took a step to the brink of the cliff and looked down through the crags of rocks. Guards were busy about the tents, nursing a smoky campfire, hunting dry fuel, and spreading out things that had been left out last night and got soaked by the rain.
She turned back to René: “I’ll watch, now. Go down and get some sleep.”
He said unsteadily: “Reckon that I had as much sleep as you, Eden.”
She gave no sign of hearing and probably didn’t, noticing that his sombrero was limp and his buckskin sodden. “And get out of those damp clothes. You’ll be sick again.”
She cared. Transformed by the thought, he told her he wasn’t sleepy a bit. He could stay up a year. Besides, this was no job for a girl. He couldn’t bear to leave her.
“Don’t be silly.” She reached for his rifle. “There’s no telling how long you’ll have to watch. You must keep up your strength.”
He turned away, suddenly weary.
Down at the big house, he breakfasted alone at the long table. Revel came and went like a ghost. She had always been silent, but not like this—as if she’d never been anything else. She had got hold of herself, a hold that worried René. He wished that she’d let go, wished that she would cry, anything but this stoniness, as if the heart had been torn from her breast, as the heart had been torn from the big house, so empty and still now—nothing but a shell, for all its appearance of cozy cheer.
“Come on up to the crags,” he begged her, after three hours of sleep, as he was starting back to Eden. “Its lonesome for you down here. Come on up and watch for them.”
She didn’t then, but in time she did, seeing that he was worried about her. She would walk up and stay with him and Eden, her black eyes bent to the world she had abandoned, but which had robbed her of husband and son. There, she would sit by the hour, her thin hands monotonously plaiting her black dress with thoughts they could only guess.
But for the most part, René watched alone. Day after day, vigilant as ever Abel had been, he watched to see that no one came in. Day after day, relentlessly, Dolan’s men made sure, as they thought, that no one went out. René would smile to himself, picturing Dolan’s chagrin if he had known the Jores were gone. He looked for Dolan among the guards, and although the distance he encompassed was too great to distinguish faces, he was sure he would recognize the tall form of the sheriff. But he never saw it. Nor could he see Shang. He would grin, imagining Shang’s state of mind if he should learn that the Jores were free to settle their score with him. As for Race and Chartres, he never looked for them. They wouldn’t be here, now that Black Wing was gone.
It was, for René, a long and weary grind, but when Dolan’s men tired of the waiting game, others replaced them. The trail was seldom bare of riders, coming or going. Those who stayed had many amusements. René would watch them pitching horseshoes or squatting about a blanket, playing cards, shooting at a target—the crags, often as not—or racing their horses from the tents to the mouth of the pass, a pastime that kept his finger quivering on the trigger of his cocked gun, lest it be a ruse to break in.
For he never forgot that, when the Jores came with Zion and Black Wing, the basin must be sanctuary. Whether they came by day on the run, or at night, stealthily, as they had slipped out, it must be to safety. By day, he watched for them. By night, he listened. They should be back.
“They’d never have gone,” cried Eden, one twilight, “if they’d known they’d be away this long.”
René worried, too. But, curiously, he seemed to thrive on the strain. For up there, drenched in the hot sunshine, breathing the untainted wind, always in the open, always resting, he made miraculous gains. It was as if he drew strength from the very ground he lay upon. Seeing him there, his slim figure, sinewy and hard-muscled, the sparkle of health in his fine dark eyes, his young face bronzed, it was hard to believe that this was the pale, thin youth who had been dying by inches on the Eastern racetracks. René could hardly believe it himself. He felt so good, he could scarcely contain himself. All this new life that sang in his veins rebelled at inaction. He wanted to be doing something real, something that would command all his powers, such as Yance and Abel were doing out there, risking everything, hunting for Zion. And something seemed to be calling him, as it had Zion. It seemed he must drop everything and respond.
Then, this sunset, three weeks after he took up his watch, he came back to the crags to see Eden flying to meet him, in an apprehension that could mean but two things—Dolan was trying to break in or the Jores were coming.
But she cried, as he swung down hard at her side: “The camp’s leaving!”
“What?” René couldn’t credit it.
“They took the tents down and have packed everything.”
He rushed past her and looked down at the pass. Sure enough, Dolan’s crew had pulled up stakes and were riding off. “Oh, what’s happened?” the girl appealed wildly to him. “Something must have happened to my uncles or Zion, else they wouldn’t be going.”
René feared it. But he didn’t let Eden see it. “Dolan’s give up,” he assured her. “That’s it. Dolan seen it wasn’t any use, and he give up. No, we’re all right. They’ll bring Zion back, and everything will be like it was.”
He succeeded in making her believe what he didn’t believe himself. When she had left, the very absence of tents at Sentry Crags, the silence, the loneliness, seemed a menace. That night he watched from the barricade, lest this be a ruse to throw him off guard. But nothing happened.
Dawn found him on the rims again, straining his eyes for sight of the guards returning. He saw no one. But, an hour after sunup, a rider lifted above the sage and turned into the Picture Rocks trail. In suspense, René watched him coming nearer, praying it was a Jore. But it was not. It was Race Coulter.
For weeks René Rand had watched the Picture Rocks, steeled to take life if he must, to hold the Jore refuge. In all that time, no one had tried to enter. Now the one man on earth who would call it treason, if he were refused anything, was coming.
As Race climbed the last steep rise to the pass, René ran to Stonewall, tied back in the brush. For this issue with Race must be met face to face. Mounting, he turned back to scan all approaches to the basin. Certain that no other human being was within miles, he put spurs to his horse, plunging down the steep cliff at almost as mad a pace as Zion had taken that day he came, dodging the same obstacles, leaping the same fissures, outriding the avalanching shale to the floor of the pass.
Here, he dismounted and ran up to the barricade of rocks, just as Race rounded the trail, his roan shying violently as it sighted René. Race started, too, in more than surprise. Long and hard he stared at the young fellow standing behind the wall, hands resting on it, and steady in them, a businesslike Winchester.
“Kid!” he gasped. “Kid … is it you or your ghost?”
René answered tensely: “It’s me, Race.”
The man drew a long breath. “Yeah,” he admitted with a jerky laugh. “I reckon it is. But it’s hard to believe. You here … fit as seventeen fiddles, when I thought you was dead. Shang swore he’d let daylight through you. And knowin’ the shape you was in, I reckoned you’d turned up your toes. Figgered I’d lost my investment, and would have to go this alone. But I see Shang was lyin’.”
“No,” said René. “Not about that.”
“Then,” Race laughed, all his aplomb back, “hot lead was the medicine you needed all right. You look great!” He couldn’t get over it, his small, selfish eyes appraising the young fellow’s physical fitness, exulting in it, as he had in his weakness, because, he explained: “This just doubles my chances to get that stallion.”
His face flamed to that lusty gleam that always came over it at mention of Black Wing, but more marked than ever, absolutely unrestrained, wholly fanatical. “I got no chance out there,” he confided to René. “No use tryin’ to stick to the tail of a comet. So I come up here to wait. Sooner or later that young stallion will make a break for the basin, now the guards is gone. And I aim to be that Johnny-on-the-spot when that happens. So throw down them rocks and let me in.”
René’s hands tensed on the gun. “You can’t come in.”
“Can’t?” Still Race didn’t tumble. “Why can’t I? What’s to stop me? Not the Jores. I know that.”
Did Race know the Jores were gone? Sick with a dread he dare not analyze, René said firmly: “I’m stoppin’ you, Race.”
“You?” cried Race with ludicrous dismay. “But you’re workin’ for me!”
“Not on this. I’m holdin’ this pass for the Jores. I got orders to let nobody in. And that means you, Race.”
Understanding at last, fully alive to the potency of that gun, when backed by the driven intensity he saw in René’s eyes, Race’s face went livid with rage. “I see.” His lips drew back in a sneer. “Horatio at the bridge, huh? So that’s the stripe you are? I pick you up back there, out of the gutter … worse, just waitin’ for the hearse … and I bring you West, make a man of you, and you go over to the Jores. You go over to them outlaws, when you owe me …”
“I ain’t forgotten what I owe you,” René stated. “But I owe the Jores as much and more. And I can pay a little on what I owe them by holdin’ this pass.”
“And I can whistle, I suppose.” Race was furious. “Oh, I’ve been deaf, dumb, and blind. You’ve been workin’ for the Jores all along. You coulda turned Black Wing over to me that mornin’ I was talkin’ to you in camp. But I didn’t tumble. I even figured, when you helped Zion Jore get away with him, that you’d done it to get him back in the basin … away from Chartres. But I see now … you was gettin’ him away from me. Then, when he got cut off, you sneaked back to watch things, while the Jores went after him.”
Pale through all his tan, trembling for all his strength, the boy cried: “How do you know that, Race?”
“Oh, that ain’t half.” Never had the rims returned a sound more grim than Race’s laugh. “What’s more, they ain’t comin’ back!”
“You mean …?” Numbly, René stared at him.
“Just that! The Jores ain’t comin’ back … no time!”
There was a heartbroken cry behind. René swung. There in the trail were Eden and Revel. Eden, with eyes dazed and dreadful, coming up to cling to the barrier, and Revel as stony as ever, standing beside her daughter, quietly telling Race Coulter: “They’ll come.”
The young man saw Race fighting back his terror of her—the terror she had instilled in him that morning long ago, when she made that prediction about Black Wing.
“You don’t savvy.” Race licked his dry lips nervously. “They can’t come. Not unless they bust through steel, reinforced special for them, past a special guard. Pat Dolan captured ’em yesterday in an old line cabin on the Hondo Ranch. He’s got ’em both locked safe in jail in Big Sandy.”
Sudden darkness seemed to fall over the pass. The wind seemed to wail inconsolable loss. First Joel, now it was Yance and Abel. Every male Jore but one, every Jore but the one of whom Eden was asking. “Zion,” she whispered, “have you heard of him?”
Race stared into the blue eyes lifted to his. Then he said, slowly repeating: “Have I heard of him?” His swarthy face hardened, and he cried with a force that buried the words deep in each breast: “I reckon, girl, everyone on this green earth has heard of Zion Jore.”
As well then, as when Race was done, René knew what was coming. He would have given anything to keep it from Eden.
But she said in a piteous voice that brought tears to his eyes: “We haven’t heard a word since he left us. What have you heard?”
Race threw up his hands in despair of an adequate answer. “Anything,” he told her. “Anything that’s wild and terrible! Things to raise your hair. Reckless things to make the most reckless feel like a piker. Anything you want to hear. Blood-and-thunder tales. Stories of black art. For there’s some as says he ain’t human, but something infernal that changes its form into this and that. That’s how they account for the way he does his disappearin’ act. But I say it ain’t him … it’s his horse that’s half-human. I tell you, that stallion …”
“No! No!” protested the tortured girl. “Tell us about Zion.”
Race frowned. Any subject but Black Wing bored him. “It ain’t pretty!” The prelude showed he wasn’t totally devoid of pity. “He’s killed two men besides Hank Farley. And left his mark on I don’t know how many more. But one pretty deep on one of the Chartres cowboys right after they took up his trail out here. They didn’t follow him far. Who can follow a shootin’ star? And that golden horse …”
“Go on!” pleaded Eden. “Oh, go on about Zion!”
“He got away. Next we heard, he was over in the Navajo country. He’d walked into a restaurant and asked for a meal. When he got it under his belt, he started to walk out. The town marshal happened to be eatin’ there, and the proprietor called on him to collect. He did … whatever he had comin’ to him when he faced it. Saint Pete at the Golden Gate. Zion Jore rode off with half the town on his trail. But that yellow tempest he’s straddlin’ …”
He went on irritably, as again the girl wrenched from him the subject that obsessed him: “Well, then, he broke out again in Big Sandy. Held up Jake Wheeler’s supply store in broad day, and helped himself to grub and cash. The streets was full of people. But he walked out, cool as a cucumber, and ties his loot on that gold … that horse. Then he crosses the street to where some raggedy Mex kids is eyin’ goods in a bakery window. He says … ‘You look hungry.’ They said they was. He says … ‘You needn’t be … livin’s free!’ And he gives them the money he’d took from the store. Wheeler took it away from the kids after Zion had gone, but …”
“Oh! What?”
“Zion heard of it somehow, and that night he come back and robbed him again! Wheeler was on watch and tried to stop him with a shotgun. It was the last thing he ever done. Zion made a clean getaway.”
“But now,” cried Eden desperately, “where is he?”
Race shrugged. “Where is the wind? He’s here, there, and everywhere. He’ll be seen today in a prospector’s cabin in the Rabbit Foot country, and tomorrow there’ll be plenty to swear he’s showed up in a cow camp on the Verde. He’s everywhere … raisin’ red, white, and blue blazes. Every place but where they look for him. Dolan got a tip Zion had holed up in that line cabin. He collected Shang and Chartres and an army of deputies, and hid in the loft to wait for him. But Zion smelled ’em. And Yance and Abel walked into the trap. Dolan is still knocked dumb by his luck.”
Turning to Revel, immobile as marble through this awful recital, Race told her: “The last part of what you predicted has come to pass. Hell has sure followed that horse.”
She never flinched.
But Eden went to pieces then, breaking down and sobbing. “Oh, where will it end? He doesn’t realize what he’s doing. He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s not … any of the terrible things they’re saying. He’s just a child, playing a game. But they’ll … Oh, God, help him!”
Blindly, René tore at the rocks that formed the barrier.
“What are you doin’?” Race Coulter shouted.
“I’m goin’ after Zion.”
“But you’re guardin’ the pass.”
“No need to … after the news you brought. Yance and Abel won’t need it. It doesn’t matter much who comes to the Picture Rocks … till I get Zion back. But nobody’ll come. Dolan will draw the line at women.” Grasping Stonewall’s trailing reins, he led him to the opening.
But Race swung his own horse, blocking the way and blustering: “Are you loco, too? Don’t you know Dolan will clap you in jail, if you go out there? What good would you be to anyone then? Wait here, till Zion Jore comes, if you do aim to pay me.”
René blazed up. “Quit dunnin’ me, will you? There’s things more important than Black Wing. Get out of my way. I’m goin’ after Zion!”
He pushed Race’s horse aside and was leading the bay through, when Revel stopped him and silently held him, her hands on his shoulders, looking at him with those deep, tragic eyes, seeing, he always believed, the horrors that lay before him; seeing him, in that far desert camp with Zion at his red trail’s end and hundreds of hostile miles between them and home; seeing him, at that water hole, with Zion, mad in delirium, striking out at him; seeing him win to the very portals of the Picture Rocks, with Black Wing’s helpless burden, only to find that …
He always believed Revel saw all that was to be, and wanted to make it easier, and that was why she made this great sacrifice. Going up to Race, awing him by the strange force of her nearness, she said: “You must go with him.”
Hoarse in fear and defiance, Race rasped: “Not by a …”
“Wait! You say this young man owes you a debt.”
“You bet! And I aim to collect.”
Stunning them all, Revel Jore said: “I’ll pay it. I’ll pay his debt, Race Coulter. I’ll give you Black Wing. But”—she made this very simple condition—“only if you go with him.”
Hot in Race’s eyes burned that greedy flame. “You’ll give me Black Wing?” he gasped, as if it was too good to be true. And it was. He said harshly: “Black Wing belongs to Luke Chartres.”
“No,” said the woman, her stony calm breaking. “Black Wing is mine. You’ll have a clear title to him. Luke Chartres won’t press his claim, when you tell him the horse came to you from my hands.”
Her words carried conviction. Race was knocked just as dumb by his luck as Dolan had been. But René’s wild protests snapped him out of it in short order.
“Not Black Wing!” René most earnestly begged her. “You know exactly what he means. You know Joel’s dream.”
“I only know,” said the outlaw’s weary wife, “that I must do this. And it is done.”
“Then,” violently Race yanked his roan around, “let’s get goin’. I don’t want my property rode down … ruined … crippled up. I tell you they’re usin’ that horse for a target.”
But René was detained again. Somehow, Eden was in his arms. It seemed to him that now her tears washed away the barrier that, so long, had been between them, for the blue eyes flashed the old trust. “Oh, I know,” she whispered, as fast he drew her to his breast. “I’ve known all along. I must have been out of my mind. Don’t go, René. Stay with me. I can’t lose you, too.”
This memory would light the blackest hour for him. He smiled happily: “You can’t lose me, Eden. I’ll come back, and I’ll bring Zion.”