[Illustration: That round-up showed a loss of one hundred head
of stock. Belllounds received the amazing news with a roar.]
THE
MYSTERIOUS RIDER
A NOVEL
BY
ZANE GREY
AUTHOR OF
THE MAN OF THE FOREST,
THE U.P. TRAIL,
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE,
THE DESERT OF WHEAT, ETC.
1921
ILLUSTRATIONS
That round-up showed a loss of one hundred head
of stock. Belllounds received the amazing
news with a roar .............................. _Frontispiece_
"I know why you're going. It's to see that club-footed
cowboy Moore!... Don't let me
catch you with him" ........................... _Facing p._ 98
"I'm beginnin' to feel that I couldn't let her marry
that Buster Jack," soliloquized Wade, as he
rode along the grassy trail ......................... " 164
"Jack Belllounds!" she cried. "You put the
sheriff on that trail!" ............................. " 280
THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER
CHAPTER I
A September sun, losing some of its heat if not its brilliance, was
dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze
began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and
billowy, rolled down from the higher country. They were smooth,
sweeping, with long velvety slopes and isolated patches of aspens that
blazed in autumn gold. Splotches of red vine colored the soft gray of
sage. Old White Slides, a mountain scarred by avalanche, towered with
bleak rocky peak above the valley, sheltering it from the north.
A girl rode along the slope, with gaze on the sweep and range and color
of the mountain fastness that was her home. She followed an old trail
which led to a bluff overlooking an arm of the valley. Once it had been
a familiar lookout for her, but she had not visited the place of late.
It was associated with serious hours of her life. Here seven years
before, when she was twelve, she had made a hard choice to please her
guardian--the old rancher whom she loved and called father, who had
indeed been a father to her. That choice had been to go to school in
Denver. Four years she had lived away from her beloved gray hills and
black mountains. Only once since her return had she climbed to this
height, and that occasion, too, was memorable as an unhappy hour. It
had been three years ago. To-day girlish ordeals and griefs seemed back
in the past: she was a woman at nineteen and face to face with the first
great problem in her life.
The trail came up back of the bluff, through a clump of aspens with
white trunks and yellow fluttering leaves, and led across a level bench
of luxuriant grass and wild flowers to the rocky edge.
She dismounted and threw the bridle. Her mustang, used to being petted,
rubbed his sleek, dark head against her and evidently expected like
demonstration in return, but as none was forthcoming he bent his nose to
the grass and began grazing. The girl's eyes were intent upon some
waving, slender, white-and-blue flowers. They smiled up wanly, like pale
stars, out of the long grass that had a tinge of gold.
"Columbines," she mused, wistfully, as she plucked several of the
flowers and held them up to gaze wonderingly at them, as if to see in
them some revelation of the mystery that shrouded her birth and her
name. Then she stood with dreamy gaze upon the distant ranges.
"Columbine!... So they named me--those miners who found me--a baby--lost
in the woods--asleep among the columbines." She spoke aloud, as if the
sound of her voice might convince her.
So much of the mystery of her had been revealed that day by the man she
had always called father. Vaguely she had always been conscious of some
mystery, something strange about her childhood, some relation never
explained.
"No name but Columbine," she whispered, sadly, and now she understood a
strange longing of her heart.
Scarcely an hour back, as she ran down the Wide porch of White Slides
ranch-house, she had encountered the man who had taken care of her all
her life. He had looked upon her as kindly and fatherly as of old, yet
with a difference. She seemed to see him as old Bill Belllounds, pioneer
and rancher, of huge frame and broad face, hard and scarred and
grizzled, with big eyes of blue fire.
"Collie," the old man had said, "I reckon hyar's news. A letter from
Jack.... He's comin' home."
Belllounds had waved the letter. His huge hand trembled as he reached to
put it on her shoulder. The hardness of him seemed strangely softened.
Jack was his son. Buster Jack, the range had always called him, with
other terms, less kind, that never got to the ears of his father. Jack
had been sent away three years ago, just before Columbine's return from
school. Therefore she had not seen him for over seven years. But she
remembered him well--a big, rangy boy, handsome and wild, who had made
her childhood almost unendurable.
"Yes--my son--Jack--he's comin' home," said Belllounds, with a break in
his voice. "An', Collie--now I must tell you somethin'."
"Yes, dad," she had replied, with strong clasp of the heavy hand on her
shoulder.
"Thet's just it, lass. I ain't your dad. I've tried to be a dad to you
an' I've loved you as my own. But you're not flesh an' blood of mine.
An' now I must tell you."
The brief story followed. Seventeen years ago miners working a claim of
Belllounds's in the mountains above Middle Park had found a child asleep
in the columbines along the trail. Near that point Indians, probably
Arapahoes coming across the mountains to attack the Utes, had captured
or killed the occupants of a prairie-schooner. There was no other clue.
The miners took the child to their camp, fed and cared for it, and,
after the manner of their kind, named it Columbine. Then they brought it
to Belllounds.
"Collie," said the old rancher, "it needn't never have been told, an'
wouldn't but fer one reason. I'm gettin' old. I reckon I'd never split
my property between you an' Jack. So I mean you an' him to marry. You
always steadied Jack. With a wife like you'll be--wal, mebbe Jack'll--"
"Dad!" burst out Columbine. "Marry Jack!... Why I--I don't even remember
him!"
"Haw! Haw!" laughed Belllounds. "Wal, you dog-gone soon will. Jack's in
Kremmlin', an' he'll be hyar to-night or to-morrow."
"But--I--I don't l-love him," faltered Columbine.
The old man lost his mirth; the strong-lined face resumed its hard cast;
the big eyes smoldered. Her appealing objection had wounded him. She was
reminded of how sensitive the old man had always been to any reflection
cast upon his son.
"Wal, thet's onlucky;" he replied, gruffly. "Mebbe you'll change. I
reckon no girl could help a boy much, onless she cared for him. Anyway,
you an' Jack will marry."
He had stalked away and Columbine had ridden her mustang far up the
valley slope where she could be alone. Standing on the verge of the
bluff, she suddenly became aware that the quiet and solitude of her
lonely resting-place had been disrupted. Cattle were bawling below her
and along the slope of old White Slides and on the grassy uplands above.
She had forgotten that the cattle were being driven down into the
lowlands for the fall round-up. A great red-and-white-spotted herd was
milling in the park just beneath her. Calves and yearlings were making
the dust fly along the mountain slope; wild old steers were crashing in
the sage, holding level, unwilling to be driven down; cows were running
and lowing for their lost ones. Melodious and clear rose the clarion
calls of the cowboys. The cattle knew those calls and only the wild
steers kept up-grade.
Columbine also knew each call and to which cowboy it belonged. They sang
and yelled and swore, but it was all music to her. Here and there along
the slope, where the aspen groves clustered, a horse would flash across
an open space; the dust would fly, and a cowboy would peal out a lusty
yell that rang along the slope and echoed under the bluff and lingered
long after the daring rider had vanished in the steep thickets.
"I wonder which is Wils," murmured Columbine, as she watched and
listened, vaguely conscious of a little difference, a strange check in
her remembrance of this particular cowboy. She felt the change, yet did
not understand. One after one she recognized the riders on the slopes
below, but Wilson Moore was not among them. He must be above her, then,
and she turned to gaze across the grassy bluff, up the long, yellow
slope, to where the gleaming aspens half hid a red bluff of
mountain, towering aloft. Then from far to her left, high up a
scrubby ridge of the slope, rang down a voice that thrilled her:
"_Go--aloong--you-ooooo_." Red cattle dashed pell-mell down the slope,
raising the dust, tearing the brush, rolling rocks, and letting out
hoarse bawls.
"_Whoop-ee_!" High-pitched and pealing came a clearer yell.
Columbine saw a white mustang flash out on top of the ridge, silhouetted
against the blue, with mane and tail flying. His gait on that edge of
steep slope proved his rider to be a reckless cowboy for whom no heights
or depths had terrors. She would have recognized him from the way he
rode, if she had not known the slim, erect figure. The cowboy saw her
instantly. He pulled the mustang, about to plunge down the slope, and
lifted him, rearing and wheeling. Then Columbine waved her hand. The
cowboy spurred his horse along the crest of the ridge, disappeared
behind the grove of aspens, and came in sight again around to the right,
where on the grassy bench he slowed to a walk in descent to the bluff.
The girl watched him come, conscious of an unfamiliar sense of
uncertainty in this meeting, and of the fact that she was seeing him
differently from any other time in the years he had been a playmate, a
friend, almost like a brother. He had ridden for Belllounds for years,
and was a cowboy because he loved cattle well and horses better, and
above all a life in the open. Unlike most cowboys, he had been to
school; he had a family in Denver that objected to his wild range life,
and often importuned him to come home; he seemed aloof sometimes and not
readily understood.
While many thoughts whirled through Columbine's mind she watched the
cowboy ride slowly down to her, and she became more concerned with a
sudden restraint. How was Wilson going to take the news of this forced
change about to come in her life? That thought leaped up. It gave her a
strange pang. But she and he were only good friends. As to that, she
reflected, of late they had not been the friends and comrades they
formerly were. In the thrilling uncertainty of this meeting she had
forgotten his distant manner and the absence of little attentions she
had missed.
By this time the cowboy had reached the level, and with the lazy grace
of his kind slipped out of the saddle. He was tall, slim, round-limbed,
with the small hips of a rider, and square, though not broad shoulders.
He stood straight like an Indian. His eyes were hazel, his features
regular, his face bronzed. All men of the open had still, lean, strong
faces, but added to this in him was a steadiness of expression, a
restraint that seemed to hide sadness.
"Howdy, Columbine!" he said. "What are you doing up here? You might get
run over."
"Hello, Wils!" she replied, slowly. "Oh, I guess I can keep out of the
way."
"Some bad steers in that bunch. If any of them run over here Pronto will
leave you to walk home. That mustang hates cattle. And he's only half
broke, you know."
"I forgot you were driving to-day," she replied, and looked away from
him. There was a moment's pause--long, it seemed to her.
"What'd you come for?" he asked, curiously.
"I wanted to gather columbines. See." She held out the nodding flowers
toward him. "Take one.... Do you like them?"
"Yes. I like columbine," he replied, taking one of them. His keen hazel
eyes, softened, darkened. "Colorado's flower."
"Columbine!... It is my name."
"Well, could you have a better? It sure suits you."
"Why?" she asked, and she looked at him again.
"You're slender--graceful. You sort of hold your head high and proud.
Your skin is white. Your eyes are blue. Not bluebell blue, but columbine
blue--and they turn purple when you're angry."
"Compliments! Wilson, this is new kind of talk for you," she said.
"You're different to-day."
"Yes, I am." She looked across the valley toward the westering sun, and
the slight flush faded from her cheeks. "I have no right to hold my head
proud. No one knows who I am--where I came from."
"As if that made any difference!" he exclaimed.
"Belllounds is not my dad. I have no dad. I was a waif. They found me in
the woods--a baby--lost among the flowers. Columbine Belllounds I've
always been. But that is not my name. No one can tell what my name
really is."
"I knew your story years ago, Columbine," he replied, earnestly.
"Everybody knows. Old Bill ought to have told you long before this. But
he loves you. So does--everybody. You must not let this knowledge sadden
you.... I'm sorry you've never known a mother or a sister. Why, I could
tell you of many orphans who--whose stories were different."
"You don't understand. I've been happy. I've not longed for any--any one
except a mother. It's only--"
"What don't I understand?"
"I've not told you all."
"No? Well, go on," he said, slowly.
Meaning of the hesitation and the restraint that had obstructed her
thought now flashed over Columbine. It lay in what Wilson Moore might
think of her prospective marriage to Jack Belllounds. Still she could
not guess why that should make her feel strangely uncertain of the
ground she stood on or how it could cause a constraint she had to fight
herself to hide. Moreover, to her annoyance, she found that she was
evading his direct request for the news she had withheld.
"Jack Belllounds is coming home to-night or to-morrow," she said. Then,
waiting for her companion to reply, she kept an unseeing gaze upon the
scanty pines fringing Old White Slides. But no reply appeared to be
forthcoming from Moore. His silence compelled her to turn to him. The
cowboy's face had subtly altered; it was darker with a tinge of red
under the bronze; and his lower lip was released from his teeth, even
as she looked. He had his eyes intent upon the lasso he was coiling.
Suddenly he faced her and the dark fire of his eyes gave her a shock.
I've been expecting that shorthorn back for months." he said, bluntly.
"You--never--liked Jack?" queried Columbine, slowly. That was not what
she wanted to say, but the thought spoke itself.
"I should smile I never did."
"Ever since you and he fought--long ago--all over--"
His sharp gesture made the coiled lasso loosen.
"Ever since I licked him good--don't forget that," interrupted Wilson.
The red had faded from the bronze.
"Yes, you licked him," mused Columbine. "I remember that. And Jack's
hated you ever since."
"There's been no love lost."
"But, Wils, you never before talked this way--spoke out so--against
Jack," she protested.
"Well, I'm not the kind to talk behind a fellow's back. But I'm not
mealy-mouthed, either, and--and--"
He did not complete the sentence and his meaning was enigmatic.
Altogether Moore seemed not like himself. The fact disturbed Columbine.
Always she had confided in him. Here was a most complex situation--she
burned to tell him, yet somehow feared to--she felt an incomprehensible
satisfaction in his bitter reference to Jack--she seemed to realize that
she valued Wilson's friendship more than she had known, and now for some
strange reason it was slipping from her.
"We--we were such good friends--pards," said Columbine, hurriedly and
irrelevantly.
"Who?" He stared at her.
"Why, you--and me."
"Oh!" His tone softened, but there was still disapproval in his glance.
"What of that?"
"Something has happened to make me think I've missed you--lately--that's
all."
"Ahuh!" His tone held finality and bitterness, but he would not commit
himself. Columbine sensed a pride in him that seemed the cause of his
aloofness.
"Wilson, why have you been different lately?" she asked, plaintively.
"What's the good to tell you now?" he queried, in reply.
That gave her a blank sense of actual loss. She had lived in dreams and
he in realities. Right now she could not dispel her dream--see and
understand all that he seemed to. She felt like a child, then, growing
old swiftly. The strange past longing for a mother surged up in her like
a strong tide. Some one to lean on, some one who loved her, some one to
help her in this hour when fatality knocked at the door of her
youth--how she needed that!
"It might be bad for me--to tell me, but tell me, anyhow," she said,
finally, answering as some one older than she had been an hour ago--to
something feminine that leaped up. She did not understand this impulse,
but it was in her.
"No!" declared Moore, with dark red staining his face. He slapped the
lasso against his saddle, and tied it with clumsy hands. He did not look
at her. His tone expressed anger and amaze.
"Dad says I must marry Jack," she said, with a sudden return to her
natural simplicity.
"I heard him tell that months ago," snapped Moore.
"You did! Was that--why?" she whispered.
"It was," he answered, ringingly.
"But that was no reason for you to be--be--to stay away from me," she
declared, with rising spirit.
He laughed shortly.
"Wils, didn't you like me any more after dad said that?" she queried.
"Columbine, a girl nineteen years and about to--to get married--ought
not be a fool," he replied, with sarcasm.
"I'm not a fool," she rejoined, hotly.
"You ask fool questions."
"Well, you _didn't_ like me afterward or you'd never have mistreated
me."
"If you say I mistreated you--you say what's untrue," he replied, just
as hotly.
They had never been so near a quarrel before. Columbine experienced a
sensation new to her--a commingling of fear, heat, and pang, it seemed,
all in one throb. Wilson was hurting her. A quiver ran all over her,
along her veins, swelling and tingling.
"You mean I lie?" she flashed.
"Yes, I do--if--"
But before he could conclude she slapped his face. It grew pale then,
while she began to tremble.
"Oh--I didn't intend that. Forgive me," she faltered.
He rubbed his cheek. The hurt had not been great, so far as the blow was
concerned. But his eyes were dark with pain and anger.
"Oh, don't distress yourself," he burst out. "You slapped me
before--once, years ago--for kissing you. I--I apologize for saying you
lied. You're only out of your head. So am I."
That poured oil upon the troubled waters. The cowboy appeared to be
hesitating between sudden flight and the risk of staying longer.
"Maybe that's it," replied Columbine, with a half-laugh. She was not
far from tears and fury with herself. "Let us make up--be
friends again."
Moore squared around aggressively. He seemed to fortify himself against
something in her. She felt that. But his face grew harder and older than
she had ever seen it.
"Columbine, do you know where Jack Belllounds has been for these three
years?" he asked, deliberately, entirely ignoring her overtures of
friendship.
"No. Somebody said Denver. Some one else said Kansas City. I never asked
dad, because I knew Jack had been sent away. I've supposed he was
working--making a man of himself."
"Well, I hope to Heaven--for your sake--what you suppose comes true,"
returned Moore, with exceeding bitterness.
"Do _you_ know where he has been?" asked Columbine. Some strange feeling
prompted that. There was a mystery here. Wilson's agitation seemed
strange and deep.
"Yes, I do." The cowboy bit that out through closing teeth, as if
locking them against an almost overmastering temptation.
Columbine lost her curiosity. She was woman enough to realize that there
might well be facts which would only make her situation harder.
"Wilson," she began, hurriedly, "I owe all I am to dad. He has cared for
me--sent me to school. He has been so good to me. I've loved him always.
It would be a shabby return for all his protection and love if--if I
refused--"
"Old Bill is the best man ever," interrupted Moore, as if to repudiate
any hint of disloyalty to his employer. "Everybody in Middle Park and
all over owes Bill something. He's sure good. There never was anything
wrong with him except his crazy blindness about his son. Buster
Jack--the--the--"
Columbine put a hand over Moore's lips.
"The man I must marry," she said, solemnly.
"You must--you will?" he demanded.
"Of course. What else could I do? I never thought of refusing."
"Columbine!" Wilson's cry was so poignant, his gesture so violent, his
dark eyes so piercing that Columbine sustained a shock that held her
trembling and mute. "How can you love Jack Belllounds? You were twelve
years old when you saw him last. How can you love him?"
"I don't" replied Columbine.
"Then how could you marry him?"
"I owe dad obedience. It's his hope that I can steady Jack."
"_Steady Jack!_" exclaimed Moore, passionately. "Why, you girl--you
white-faced flower! _You_ with your innocence and sweetness steady that
damned pup! My Heavens! He was a gambler and a drunkard. He--"
"Hush!" implored Columbine.
"He cheated at cards," declared the cowboy, with a scorn that placed
that vice as utterly base.
"But Jack was only a wild boy," replied Columbine, trying with brave
words to champion the son of the man she loved as her father. "He has
been sent away to work. He'll have outgrown that wildness. He'll come
home a man."
"Bah!" cried Moore, harshly.
Columbine felt a sinking within her. Where was her strength? She, who
could walk and ride so many miles, to become sick with an inward
quaking! It was childish. She struggled to hide her weakness from him.
"It's not like you to be this way," she said. "You used to be generous.
Am I to blame? Did I choose my life?"
Moore looked quickly away from her, and, standing with a hand on his
horse, he was silent for a moment. The squaring of his shoulders bore
testimony to his thought. Presently he swung up into the saddle. The
mustang snorted and champed the bit and tossed his head, ready to bolt.
"Forget my temper," begged the cowboy, looking down upon Columbine. "I
take it all back. I'm sorry. Don't let a word of mine worry you. I was
only jealous."
"Jealous!" exclaimed Columbine, wonderingly.
"Yes. That makes a fellow see red and green. Bad medicine! You never
felt it."
"What were you jealous of?" asked Columbine.
The cowboy had himself in hand now and he regarded her with a grim
amusement.
"Well, Columbine, it's like a story," he replied. "I'm the fellow
disowned by his family--a wanderer of the wilds--no good--and no
prospects.... Now our friend Jack, he's handsome and rich. He has a
doting old dad. Cattle, horses--ranches! He wins the girl. See!"
Spurring his mustang, the cowboy rode away. At the edge of the slope he
turned in the saddle. "I've got to drive in this bunch of cattle. It's
late. You hurry home." Then he was gone. The stones cracked and rolled
down under the side of the bluff.
Columbine stood where he had left her: dubious, yet with the blood still
hot in her cheeks.
"Jealous?... He wins the girl?" she murmured in repetition to herself.
"What ever could he have meant? He didn't mean--he didn't--"
The simple, logical interpretation of Wilson's words opened Columbine's
mind to a disturbing possibility of which she had never dreamed. That
he might love her! If he did, why had he not said so? Jealous, maybe,
but he did not love her! The next throb of thought was like a knock at a
door of her heart--a door never yet opened, inside which seemed a
mystery of feeling, of hope, despair, unknown longing, and clamorous
voices. The woman just born in her, instinctive and self-preservative,
shut that door before she had more than a glimpse inside. But then she
felt her heart swell with its nameless burdens.
Pronto was grazing near at hand. She caught him and mounted. It struck
her then that her hands were numb with cold. The wind had ceased
fluttering the aspens, but the yellow leaves were falling, rustling. Out
on the brow of the slope she faced home and the west.
A glorious Colorado sunset had just reached the wonderful height of its
color and transformation. The sage slopes below her seemed rosy velvet;
the golden aspens on the farther reaches were on fire at the tips; the
foothills rolled clear and mellow and rich in the light; the gulf of
distance on to the great black range was veiled in mountain purple; and
the dim peaks beyond the range stood up, sunset-flushed and grand. The
narrow belt of blue sky between crags and clouds was like a river full
of fleecy sails and wisps of silver. Above towered a pall of dark cloud,
full of the shades of approaching night.
"Oh, beautiful!" breathed the girl, with all her worship of nature. That
wild world of sunset grandeur and loneliness and beauty was hers. Over
there, under a peak of the black range, was the place where she had been
found, a baby, lost in the forest. She belonged to that, and so it
belonged to her. Strength came to her from the glory of light on
the hills.
Pronto shot up his ears and checked his trot.
"What is it, boy?" called Columbine. The trail was getting dark.
Shadows were creeping up the slope as she rode down to meet them. The
mustang had keen sight and scent. She reined him to a halt.
All was silent. The valley had begun to shade on the far side and the
rose and gold seemed fading from the nearer. Below, on the level floor
of the valley, lay the rambling old ranch-house, with the cabins
nestling around, and the corrals leading out to the soft hay-fields,
misty and gray in the twilight. A single light gleamed. It was like
a beacon.
The air was cold with a nip of frost. From far on the other side of the
ridge she had descended came the bawls of the last straggling cattle of
the round-up. But surely Pronto had not shot up his ears for them. As if
in answer a wild sound pealed down the slope, making the mustang jump.
Columbine had heard it before.
"Pronto, it's only a wolf," she soothed him.
The peal was loud, rather harsh at first, then softened to a mourn,
wild, lonely, haunting. A pack of coyotes barked in angry answer, a
sharp, staccato, yelping chorus, the more piercing notes biting on the
cold night air. These mountain mourns and yelps were music to Columbine.
She rode on down the trail in the gathering darkness, less afraid of the
night and its wild denizens than of what awaited her at White
Slides Ranch.