THROUGH THE VALLEY
Sampson looked strangely at the great bloody blot on my breast and his
look made me conscious of a dark hurrying of my mind. Morton came
stamping up the steps with blunt queries, with anxious mien. When he saw
the front of me he halted, threw wide his arms.
"There come the girls!" suddenly exclaimed Sampson. "Morton, help me
drag Wright inside. They mustn't see him."
I was facing down the porch toward the court and corrals. Miss Sampson
and Sally had come in sight, were swiftly approaching, evidently
alarmed. Steele, no doubt, had remained out at the camp. I was watching
them, wondering what they would do and say presently, and then Sampson
and Johnson came to carry me indoors. They laid me on the couch in the
parlor where the girls used to be so often.
"Russ, you're pretty hard hit," said Sampson, bending over me, with his
hands at my breast. The room was bright with sunshine, yet the light
seemed to be fading.
"Reckon I am," I replied.
"I'm sorry. If only you could have told me sooner! Wright, damn him!
Always I've split over him!"
"But the last time, Sampson."
"Yes, and I came near driving you to kill me, too. Russ, you talked me
out of it. For Diane's sake! She'll be in here in a minute. This'll be
harder than facing a gun."
"Hard now. But it'll--turn out--O.K."
"Russ, will you do me a favor?" he asked, and he seemed shamefaced.
"Sure."
"Let Diane and Sally think Wright shot you. He's dead. It can't matter.
And you're hard hit. The girls are fond of you. If--if you go
under--Russ, the old side of my life is coming back. It's _been_ coming.
It'll be here just about when she enters this room. And by God, I'd
change places with you if I could."
"Glad you--said that, Sampson," I replied. "And sure--Wright plugged me.
It's our secret. I've a reason, too, not--that--it--matters--much--now."
The light was fading. I could not talk very well. I felt dumb, strange,
locked in ice, with dull little prickings of my flesh, with dim rushing
sounds in my ears. But my mind was clear. Evidently there was little to
be done. Morton came in, looked at me, and went out. I heard the quick,
light steps of the girls on the porch, and murmuring voices.
"Where'm I hit?" I whispered.
"Three places. Arm, shoulder, and a bad one in the breast. It got your
lung, I'm afraid. But if you don't go quick, you've a chance."
"Sure I've a chance."
"Russ, I'll tell the girls, do what I can for you, then settle with
Morton and clear out."
Just then Diane and Sally entered the room. I heard two low cries, so
different in tone, and I saw two dim white faces. Sally flew to my side
and dropped to her knees. Both hands went to my face, then to my breast.
She lifted them, shaking. They were red. White and mute she gazed from
them to me. But some woman's intuition kept her from fainting.
"Papa!" cried Diane, wringing her hands.
"Don't give way," he replied. "Both you girls will need your nerve. Russ
is badly hurt. There's little hope for him."
Sally moaned and dropped her face against me, clasping me convulsively.
I tried to reach a hand out to touch her, but I could not move. I felt
her hair against my face. Diane uttered a low heart-rending cry, which
both Sampson and I understood.
"Listen, let me tell it quick," he said huskily. "There's been a fight.
Russ killed Snecker and Wright. They resisted arrest. It--it was
Wright--it was Wright's gun that put Russ down. Russ let me off. In
fact, Diane, he saved me. I'm to divide my property--return so far as
possible what I've stolen--leave Texas at once and forever. You'll find
me back in old Louisiana--if--if you ever want to come home."
As she stood there, realizing her deliverance, with the dark and tragic
glory of her eyes passing from her father to me, my own sight shadowed,
and I thought if I were dying then, it was not in vain.
"Send--for--Steele," I whispered.
Silently, swiftly, breathlessly they worked over me. I was exquisitely
sensitive to touch, to sound, but I could not see anything. By and by
all was quiet, and I slipped into a black void. Familiar heavy swift
footsteps, the thump of heels of a powerful and striding man, jarred
into the blackness that held me, seemed to split it to let me out; and I
opened my eyes in a sunlit room to see Sally's face all lined and
haggard, to see Miss Sampson fly to the door, and the stalwart Ranger
bow his lofty head to enter. However far life had ebbed from me, then it
came rushing back, keen-sighted, memorable, with agonizing pain in every
nerve. I saw him start, I heard him cry, but I could not speak. He bent
over me and I tried to smile. He stood silent, his hand on me, while
Diane Sampson told swiftly, brokenly, what had happened.
How she told it! I tried to whisper a protest. To any one on earth
except Steele I might have wished to appear a hero. Still, at that
moment I had more dread of him than any other feeling. She finished the
story with her head on his shoulder, with tears that certainly were in
part for me. Once in my life, then, I saw him stunned. But when he
recovered it was not Diane that he thought of first, nor of the end of
Sampson's power. He turned to me.
"Little hope?" he cried out, with the deep ring in his voice. "No!
There's every hope. No bullet hole like that could ever kill this
Ranger. Russ!"
I could not answer him. But this time I did achieve a smile. There was
no shadow, no pain in his face such as had haunted me in Sally's and
Diane's. He could fight death the same as he could fight evil. He
vitalized the girls. Diane began to hope; Sally lost her woe. He changed
the atmosphere of that room. Something filled it, something like
himself, big, virile, strong. The very look of him made me suddenly want
to live; and all at once it seemed I felt alive. And that was like
taking the deadened ends of nerves to cut them raw and quicken them with
fiery current.
From stupor I had leaped to pain, and that tossed me into fever. There
were spaces darkened, mercifully shutting me in; there were others of
light, where I burned and burned in my heated blood. Sally, like the
wraith she had become in my mind, passed in and out; Diane watched and
helped in those hours when sight was clear. But always the Ranger was
with me. Sometimes I seemed to feel his spirit grappling with mine,
drawing me back from the verge. Sometimes, in strange dreams, I saw him
there between me and a dark, cold, sinister shape.
The fever passed, and with the first nourishing drink given me I seemed
to find my tongue, to gain something.
"Hello, old man," I whispered to Steele.
"Oh, Lord, Russ, to think you would double-cross me the way you did!"
That was his first speech to me after I had appeared to face round from
the grave. His good-humored reproach told me more than any other thing
how far from his mind was thought of death for me. Then he talked a
little to me, cheerfully, with that directness and force characteristic
of him always, showing me that the danger was past, and that I would now
be rapidly on the mend. I discovered that I cared little whether I was
on the mend or not. When I had passed the state of somber unrealities
and then the hours of pain and then that first inspiring flush of
renewed desire to live, an entirely different mood came over me. But I
kept it to myself. I never even asked why, for three days, Sally never
entered the room where I lay. I associated this fact, however, with what
I had imagined her shrinking from me, her intent and pale face, her
singular manner when occasion made it necessary or unavoidable for her
to be near me.
No difficulty was there in associating my change of mood with her
absence. I brooded. Steele's keen insight betrayed me to him, but all
his power and his spirit availed nothing to cheer me. I pretended to be
cheerful; I drank and ate anything given me; I was patient and quiet.
But I ceased to mend.
Then, one day she came back, and Steele, who was watching me as she
entered, quietly got up and without a word took Diane out of the room
and left me alone with Sally.
"Russ, I've been sick myself--in bed for three days," she said. "I'm
better now. I hope you are. You look so pale. Do you still think, brood
about that fight?"
"Yes, I can't forget. I'm afraid it cost me more than life."
Sally was somber, bloomy, thoughtful. "You weren't driven to kill
George?" she asked.
"How do you mean?"
"By that awful instinct, that hankering to kill, you once told me these
gunmen had."
"No, I can swear it wasn't that. I didn't want to kill him. But he
forced me. As I had to go after these two men it was a foregone
conclusion about Wright. It was premeditated. I have no excuse."
"Hush--Tell me, if you confronted them, drew on them, then you had a
chance to kill my uncle?"
"Yes. I could have done it easily."
"Why, then, didn't you?"
"It was for Diane's sake. I'm afraid I didn't think of you. I had put
you out of my mind."
"Well, if a man can be noble at the same time he's terrible, you've
been, Russ--I don't know how I feel. I'm sick and I can't think. I see,
though, what you saved Diane and Steele. Why, she's touching happiness
again, fearfully, yet really. Think of that! God only knows what you did
for Steele. If I judged it by his suffering as you lay there about to
die it would be beyond words to tell. But, Russ, you're pale and shaky
now. Hush! No more talk!"
With all my eyes and mind and heart and soul I watched to see if she
shrank from me. She was passive, yet tender as she smoothed my pillow
and moved my head. A dark abstraction hung over her, and it was so
strange, so foreign to her nature. No sensitiveness on earth could have
equaled mine at that moment. And I saw and felt and knew that she did
not shrink from me. Thought and feeling escaped me for a while. I dozed.
The old shadows floated to and fro.
When I awoke Steele and Diane had just come in. As he bent over me I
looked up into his keen gray eyes and there was no mask on my own as I
looked up to him.
"Son, the thing that was needed was a change of nurses," he said gently.
"I intend to make up some sleep now and leave you in better care."
From that hour I improved. I slept, I lay quietly awake, I partook of
nourishing food. I listened and watched, and all the time I gained. But
I spoke very little, and though I tried to brighten when Steele was in
the room I made only indifferent success of it. Days passed. Sally was
almost always with me, yet seldom alone. She was grave where once she
had been gay. How I watched her face, praying for that shade to lift!
How I listened for a note of the old music in her voice! Sally Langdon
had sustained a shock to her soul almost as dangerous as had been the
blow at my life. Still I hoped. I had seen other women's deadened and
darkened spirits rebound and glow once more. It began to dawn upon me,
however, that more than time was imperative if she were ever to become
her old self again.
Studying her closer, with less thought of myself and her reaction to my
presence, I discovered that she trembled at shadows, seemed like a
frightened deer with a step always on its trail, was afraid of the dark.
Then I wondered why I had not long before divined one cause of her
strangeness. The house where I had killed one of her kin would ever be
haunted for her. She had said she was a Southerner and that blood was
thick. When I had thought out the matter a little further, I
deliberately sat up in bed, scaring the wits out of all my kind nurses.
"Steele, I'll never get well in this house. I want to go home. When can
you take me?"
They remonstrated with me and pleaded and scolded, all to little avail.
Then they were persuaded to take me seriously, to plan, providing I
improved, to start in a few days. We were to ride out of Pecos County
together, back along the stage trail to civilization. The look in
Sally's eyes decided my measure of improvement. I could have started
that very day and have borne up under any pain or distress. Strange to
see, too, how Steele and Diane responded to the stimulus of my idea, to
the promise of what lay beyond the wild and barren hills!
He told me that day about the headlong flight of every lawless character
out of Linrock, the very hour that Snecker and Wright and Sampson were
known to have fallen. Steele expressed deep feeling, almost
mortification, that the credit of that final coup had gone to him,
instead of me. His denial and explanation had been only a few soundless
words in the face of a grateful and clamorous populace that tried to
reward him, to make him mayor of Linrock. Sampson had made restitution
in every case where he had personally gained at the loss of farmer or
rancher; and the accumulation of years went far toward returning to
Linrock what it had lost in a material way. He had been a poor man when
he boarded the stage for Sanderson, on his way out of Texas forever.
Not long afterward I heard Steele talking to Miss Sampson, in a deep and
agitated voice. "You must rise above this. When I come upon you alone I
see the shadow, the pain in your face. How wonderfully this thing has
turned out when it might have ruined you! I expected it to ruin you.
Who, but that wild boy in there could have saved us all? Diane, you have
had cause for sorrow. But your father is alive and will live it down.
Perhaps, back there in Louisiana, the dishonor will never be known.
Pecos County is far from your old home. And even in San Antonio and
Austin, a man's evil repute means little.
"Then the line between a rustler and a rancher is hard to draw in these
wild border days. Rustling is stealing cattle, and I once heard a
well-known rancher say that all rich cattlemen had done a little
stealing. Your father drifted out here, and like a good many others, he
succeeded. It's perhaps just as well not to split hairs, to judge him by
the law and morality of a civilized country. Some way or other he
drifted in with bad men. Maybe a deal that was honest somehow tied his
hands and started him in wrong.
"This matter of land, water, a few stray head of stock had to be decided
out of court. I'm sure in his case he never realized where he was
drifting. Then one thing led to another, until he was face to face with
dealing that took on crooked form. To protect himself he bound men to
him. And so the gang developed. Many powerful gangs have developed that
way out here. He could not control them. He became involved with them.
"And eventually their dealings became deliberately and boldly dishonest.
That meant the inevitable spilling of blood sooner or later, and so he
grew into the leader because he was the strongest. Whatever he is to be
judged for I think he could have been infinitely worse."
When he ceased speaking I had the same impulse that must have governed
Steele--somehow to show Sampson not so black as he was painted, to give
him the benefit of a doubt, to arraign him justly in the eyes of Rangers
who knew what wild border life was.
"Steele, bring Diane in!" I called. "I've something to tell her." They
came quickly, concerned probably at my tone. "I've been hoping for a
chance to tell you something, Miss Sampson. That day I came here your
father was quarreling with Wright. I had heard them do that before. He
hated Wright. The reason came out just before we had the fight. It was
my plan to surprise them. I did. I told them you went out to meet
Steele--that you two were in love with each other. Wright grew wild. He
swore no one would ever have you. Then Sampson said he'd rather have you
Steele's wife than Wright's.
"I'll not forget that scene. There was a great deal back of it, long
before you ever came out to Linrock. Your father said that he had backed
Wright, that the deal had ruined him, made him a rustler. He said he
quit; he was done. Now, this is all clear to me, and I want to explain,
Miss Sampson. It was Wright who ruined your father. It was Wright who
was the rustler. It was Wright who made the gang necessary. But Wright
had not the brains or the power to lead men. Because blood is thick,
your father became the leader of that gang. At heart he was never a
criminal.
"The reason I respected him was because he showed himself a man at the
last. He faced me to be shot, and I couldn't do it. As Steele said,
you've reason for sorrow. But you must get over it. You mustn't brood. I
do not see that you'll be disgraced or dishonored. Of course, that's not
the point. The vital thing is whether or not a woman of your
high-mindedness had real and lasting cause for shame. Steele says no. I
say no."
Then, as Miss Sampson dropped down beside me, her eyes shining and wet,
Sally entered the room in time to see her cousin bend to kiss me
gratefully with sisterly fervor. Yet it was a woman's kiss, given for
its own sake. Sally could not comprehend; it was too sudden, too
unheard-of, that Diane Sampson should kiss me, the man she did not love.
Sally's white, sad face changed, and in the flaming wave of scarlet that
dyed neck and cheek and brow I read with mighty pound of heart that,
despite the dark stain between us, she loved me still.