DRIFTING
Black Wing might have been a myth for anything René had heard of him since coming to the basin. He didn’t want to hear anything—overwhelmed as he was by gratitude to the Jores. He could have at any time, for Zion had no reticence where he was concerned. In their frequent chats, he might easily have led the conversation to the stallion. But when the young fellow seemed liable to veer in that quarter, René would divert him with talk of life “out there.”
He knew now how justified was Eden’s fear that Zion might leave the Picture Rocks. He had come to share it, to see how hopeless it was to discourage him. Oh, Zion listened to him. With hunger insatiable, taut, on the low stool by René’s bunk, or prone on the bearskin rug before it, he would listen to René, telling of life outside the basin. True to his promise to Eden, René would strip it of all glamour, emphasizing its harsher aspects, its snares and pitfalls, its complex social order, of which he was—René would smile wanly—a “good example.”
But when he was done, Zion would jerk up, eager to give his own version, a version made up of his unbounded imagination, of what he had heard of that dark side of life that had been the experience of the Jores, a version that made René’s blood run cold. For to Zion, life out there was one swift succession of violent deeds, hairbreadth escapes, crimes that were not crimes to him but feats of cunning, valor, enviable excitement.
“But things ain’t like that,” René protested earnestly one afternoon when the sun and leaves made the cabin a checkerboard of green and gold. “Oh, they happen. But just once in a blue moon. So seldom they cause a really big commotion.”
“A big commotion.” Zion hugged his knees, chuckling gleefully. “Honest, do they?”
Appalled to see that he was merely firing the boy’s enthusiasm, René explained: “Most men are too busy workin’. For every man who holds up a stage or robs a train, a million men is slavin’ day in and day out just for a livin’.”
“They’re crazy.” Thus with a shrug did Zion Jore dismiss the workers of the world. “Livin’s free!”
“Not out there!” cried René. “Out there you gotta pay.”
“I hear that.” Zion nodded, eager to agree. “I hear you gotta pay for everything but the air you breathe.”
“You bet.” René was relieved to think he had made some impression. “Money’s what makes the world go ’round.”
“I hear,” pressed the young fellow in buckskin, his expressive face bewildered, as if he could not believe this, “I hear they lock the money up in banks and places so folks can’t get at it.”
“That’s right, Zion.”
“No,” slowly Zion replied, “it ain’t right. Not when it’s to live on. Suppose Uncle Abel, say, or Shang, locked everything to eat away from us?” His wild laugh told eloquently what he would do then.
René looked helplessly at him. How explain property rights to one who had lived as Zion Jore had lived, wild as any mustang?
“Pard, tell me,” the young fellow demanded in his hot, fierce way, “what’s to stop a man from bustin’ in and takin’ what he needs?”
René cried, with all the strong force of dread this tameless spirit roused in him: “The law! It would run him down, catch him, lock him up.”
“Like Dad,” Zion cut in soberly. “But suppose”—his dark face clearing—“suppose he had a horse so fast … the fastest horse in all the world, I reckon.” In his eyes blazed the sun of some mysterious worship. “Suppose he could shoot like I can?”
A shudder swept René, remembering how Zion Jore could shoot. His problem seemed nothing to the one the Jores would face if ever this son of the house left the Picture Rocks. It seemed to René that even the treacherous part he was pledged to play here might be condoned if only he could prevent that, and he could prevent that only as long as he was here. But if he followed Race’s instructions, followed his own inclination to do, now, what seemed a greater service to the Jores, he might not be here. For he couldn’t tell them without admitting that he knew he was coming to the basin, and being already suspicious, the Jores would think his collapse at the crags had been a trick to get in. But they must be warned. He would find some way. Time passed, and he did not.
He was able to be up and about, feeling “fine,” and looking, perhaps, better than he was. For the constant sun had covered his pallor with a deceptive coat of tan, and rest had eased his cough. He sat at table with the clan, tolerated by the Jore men, openly hated by Shang Haman—a table over which the gentle, sad-eyed Revel presided with a ceremony that brought to mind the high estate from which she was said to have fallen. Now he was strong enough to take short walks beneath the cottonwoods or to the corrals in company with Capitán always, and with Zion, when the young fellow was not off on his solitary ramblings, working with stock, or on sentry duty at the crags. Still, René could think of no way to warn the Jores without revealing that he had another motive in coming to the basin.
Had Yance or Abel shown the slightest confidence in him, given him the least opening, he would have warned them, regardless of consequences. But they did not. Although courteous always, they kept up between themselves and their guest a wall of reserve against which René felt powerless.
Times there were, although few and far between, when he could put aside this gnawing insistence, and lose himself in the tranquility of his new life, could believe that Race’s imagination, fired by his craze for Black Wing, had put its own sinister construction upon what had been an innocent conversation between Chartres and Dolan; that, anyhow, there was the well-known slip between cup and lip; even that the whole thing might have fallen through before this.
There were times when he forgot that this was an outlaw’s nest. For the harmony that prevailed here, despite Shang Haman, would have shamed many a home not shadowed by the disgrace of a world’s ostracism; shamed the home of his own upbringing, which a niggardly, surly stepfather had made a purgatory. The big house seemed the furthest thing from a cradle of crime with its quaint handmade furnishings, its picturesque litter of wild heads and horns and skins, its shelves of books with yellowed leaves and faded bindings—more books than René’s eyes had embraced in all his cowboy life.
“Friends,” Revel had explained, seeing his surprise, “old friends, I brought from home.”
They were friends she had made her children acquainted with, so that René was constantly amazed by Eden’s grasp on things outside her experience, her knowledge of things beyond the range of his. But friends Zion had small love for, except such kindred spirits as Ali Baba and Long John Silver, whose turbulent careers had helped to form his idea of life out there and were about as true to it as the world’s idea of the Picture Rocks.
But riding, walking, paddling in the old dugout canoe with Eden—the shadow of Shang Haman inevitably falling over them—René never forgot. The girl’s innate honesty, her absolute frankness and trust, brought home the shameful role he was playing here. And he felt like a traitor—hearing the story of old Jerico, a hero to his granddaughter because he had been so loyal, and she thought loyalty the greatest human attribute. He felt like a coyote—standing with Eden under the lone pine on a windswept bluff beside Dave’s grave, with its rude cross, a silent monument to the Jores’ blood feud with Sheriff Dolan and to Zion’s sworn revenge on Shang.
“Unless,” she said hopefully, “we can rid him of that notion.”
His heart singing, for all its guilty pain at the way she allied herself with him, René asked: “Is it a notion, Eden?”
She looked down at the cross and mound, thinking of Dave, who had been scarcely less dear to her than Zion, whose passionate heart, also, had been set on leaving the Picture Rocks, and who had gone.
“It has to be,” she said desperately. “It’s too horrible, otherwise. If Shang killed Dave, then Zion isn’t safe. Zion’s not safe while he thinks it. Shang might do him some harm. That’s why I don’t dare make an enemy of him.”
Feeling like a Judas in poor return for all her confidence, he told her of his existence on the racetracks, stretching out his two years there to embrace all his life, and she was so glad he’d told her.
“That explains it,” she exclaimed joyously, “the way you ride! Shang’s been telling the rest you’re no tenderfoot. I’ll put him in his place next time.”
Oh, she was loyal to him.
* * * * *
But out on the lake today, a rare June day, three weeks after his coming, he forgot utterly and was happy, drifting with Eden under the painted cliff. Love, long repressed, making itself imperiously felt in thrilling silences and prosaic discussion of the painted rocks.
“How did anyone ever get up there to paint them?” René wondered, his eyes on the figures, because he dared not look at her, prettier than she had ever been, nestling in the old canoe, her smooth white arms bare to the shoulder, her small, shapely hands holding the idle paddle. “It couldn’t have been done from above. They’re too far down, and the top hangs over. And they’re so high up, it couldn’t have been done from the water.”
From that store of knowledge that always amazed him, she explained that the lake had been higher then. “This whole basin was a lake once, René. See those seams?” she asked, pointing up at the eroded lines that ran across the face of the bluff. “They’re old shores. Mother says the rocks were painted by a race that lived here when the lake was at that high-water mark just below the pictures. Long, long ago that was … but just a flash of time in the ages water and wind have been slashing and sculpturing these old rims. Think of it.” Never had her face seemed to René as sad as then. “Doesn’t it make the Jores’ little day here unimportant?”
And his. Generations before he came, these pictured rocks had been here, and would be here, fadeless, generations after he was dust. Of what moment was any act of his? Just a shadow flitting across the old cliff’s face.
“Shang hates them,” Eden mused.
“Hates them?” René was shocked that even Shang could fail to love the old picture rocks.
“He says they scowl at him.”
“At first they seemed to scowl at me,” owned René. “But now they kinda smile.”
“Then you’re a Jore!” cried the girl, her eyes like stars. “They only smile at Jores.”
A Jore! With what a torturing, self-revealing pang did he stare at her. A Jore! And he was endangering the whole clan by holding back that warning, endangering everyone she held dear. Love had made him blind. But now he saw.
In horror of what he saw, he bent toward her, seized the paddle, and sent the canoe skimming along.
“Stop, René!” she protested, amazed, anxious. “It makes you breathe too fast. It will bring your cough back.”
He smiled in a way she never forgot: “I’ve drifted long enough.”
For he was resolved to seek out Abel Jore and tell him what Race had overheard that day in Trail’s End.
But when, nearing shore, he saw Shang Haman’s shadow on the water, saw Shang, dapper, devilish, actual, watching them from the trees with that in his eyes which brought back Zion’s cry—“I’ve got to kill him … he pesters Eden!”—he couldn’t deliberately do something that would put him beyond the power to help her and Zion. And so he put it off again.
Bitterly, while life lasted, René would regret it; would always think that, if he had gone to Abel Jore there and then, that which happened might never have been. He never had another chance. For that night, in the most unfavorable night, it all came out.