Two weeks of lonely solitude in the forest had worked incalculable
change in Ellen Jorth.
Late in June her father and her two uncles had packed and ridden off
with Daggs, Colter, and six other men, all heavily armed, some somber
with drink, others hard and grim with a foretaste of fight. Ellen had
not been given any orders. Her father had forgotten to bid her good-by
or had avoided it. Their dark mission was stamped on their faces.
They had gone and, keen as had been Ellen’s pang, nevertheless, their
departure was a relief. She had heard them bluster and brag so often
that she had her doubts of any great Jorth-Isbel war. Barking dogs did
not bite. Somebody, perhaps on each side, would be badly wounded,
possibly killed, and then the feud would go on as before, mostly talk.
Many of her former impressions had faded. Development had been so
rapid and continuous in her that she could look back to a day-by-day
transformation. At night she had hated the sight of herself and when
the dawn came she would rise, singing.
Jorth had left Ellen at home with the Mexican woman and Antonio. Ellen
saw them only at meal times, and often not then, for she frequently
visited old John Sprague or came home late to do her own cooking.
It was but a short distance up to Sprague’s cabin, and since she had
stopped riding the black horse, Spades, she walked. Spades was
accustomed to having grain, and in the mornings he would come down to
the ranch and whistle. Ellen had vowed she would never feed the horse
and bade Antonio do it. But one morning Antonio was absent. She fed
Spades herself. When she laid a hand on him and when he rubbed his
nose against her shoulder she was not quite so sure she hated him. “Why
should I?” she queried. “A horse cain’t help it if he belongs
to—to—” Ellen was not sure of anything except that more and more it
grew good to be alone.
A whole day in the lonely forest passed swiftly, yet it left a feeling
of long time. She lived by her thoughts. Always the morning was
bright, sunny, sweet and fragrant and colorful, and her mood was
pensive, wistful, dreamy. And always, just as surely as the hours
passed, thought intruded upon her happiness, and thought brought
memory, and memory brought shame, and shame brought fight. Sunset
after sunset she had dragged herself back to the ranch, sullen and sick
and beaten. Yet she never ceased to struggle.
The July storms came, and the forest floor that had been so sear and
brown and dry and dusty changed as if by magic. The green grass shot
up, the flowers bloomed, and along the canyon beds of lacy ferns swayed
in the wind and bent their graceful tips over the amber-colored water.
Ellen haunted these cool dells, these pine-shaded, mossy-rocked ravines
where the brooks tinkled and the deer came down to drink. She wandered
alone. But there grew to be company in the aspens and the music of the
little waterfalls. If she could have lived in that solitude always,
never returning to the ranch home that reminded her of her name, she
could have forgotten and have been happy.
She loved the storms. It was a dry country and she had learned through
years to welcome the creamy clouds that rolled from the southwest.
They came sailing and clustering and darkening at last to form a great,
purple, angry mass that appeared to lodge against the mountain rim and
burst into dazzling streaks of lightning and gray palls of rain.
Lightning seldom struck near the ranch, but up on the Rim there was
never a storm that did not splinter and crash some of the noble pines.
During the storm season sheep herders and woodsmen generally did not
camp under the pines. Fear of lightning was inborn in the natives, but
for Ellen the dazzling white streaks or the tremendous splitting,
crackling shock, or the thunderous boom and rumble along the
battlements of the Rim had no terrors. A storm eased her breast. Deep
in her heart was a hidden gathering storm. And somehow, to be out when
the elements were warring, when the earth trembled and the heavens
seemed to burst asunder, afforded her strange relief.
The summer days became weeks, and farther and farther they carried
Ellen on the wings of solitude and loneliness until she seemed to look
back years at the self she had hated. And always, when the dark memory
impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be
fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her
battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought
back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would
shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly
fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The
clean and healing forest, with its whispering wind and imperious
solitude, had come between Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep
ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming
between her two selves, the one that she had been forced to be and the
other that she did not know—the thinker, the dreamer, the romancer,
the one who lived in fancy the life she loved.
The summer morning dawned that brought Ellen strange tidings. They
must have been created in her sleep, and now were realized in the
glorious burst of golden sun, in the sweep of creamy clouds across the
blue, in the solemn music of the wind in the pines, in the wild screech
of the blue jays and the noble bugle of a stag. These heralded the day
as no ordinary day. Something was going to happen to her. She divined
it. She felt it. And she trembled. Nothing beautiful, hopeful,
wonderful could ever happen to Ellen Jorth. She had been born to
disaster, to suffer, to be forgotten, and die alone. Yet all nature
about her seemed a magnificent rebuke to her morbidness. The same
spirit that came out there with the thick, amber light was in her. She
lived, and something in her was stronger than mind.
Ellen went to the door of her cabin, where she flung out her arms,
driven to embrace this nameless purport of the morning. And a
well-known voice broke in upon her rapture.
“Wal, lass, I like to see you happy an’ I hate myself fer comin’.
Because I’ve been to Grass Valley fer two days an’ I’ve got news.”
Old John Sprague stood there, with a smile that did not hide a troubled
look.
“Oh! Uncle John! You startled me,” exclaimed Ellen, shocked back to
reality. And slowly she added: “Grass Valley! News?”
She put out an appealing hand, which Sprague quickly took in his own,
as if to reassure her.
“Yes, an’ not bad so far as you Jorths are concerned,” he replied. “The
first Jorth-Isbel fight has come off.... Reckon you remember makin’ me
promise to tell you if I heerd anythin’. Wal, I didn’t wait fer you to
come up.”
“So Ellen heard her voice calmly saying. What was this lying calm when
there seemed to be a stone hammer at her heart? The first fight—not
so bad for the Jorths! Then it had been bad for the Isbels. A sudden,
cold stillness fell upon her senses.
“Let’s sit down—outdoors,” Sprague was saying. “Nice an’ sunny
this—mornin’. I declare—I’m out of breath. Not used to walkin’.
An’ besides, I left Grass Valley, in the night—an’ I’m tired. But
excoose me from hangin’ round thet village last night! There was
shore—”
“Who—who was killed?” interrupted Ellen, her voice breaking low and
deep.
“Guy Isbel an’ Bill Jacobs on the Isbel side, an’ Daggs, Craig, an’
Greaves on your father’s side,” stated Sprague, with something of awed
haste.
“Ah!” breathed Ellen, and she relaxed to sink back against the cabin
wall.
Sprague seated himself on the log beside her, turning to face her, and
he seemed burdened with grave and important matters.
“I heerd a good many conflictin’ stories,” he said, earnestly. “The
village folks is all skeered an’ there’s no believin’ their gossip. But
I got what happened straight from Jake Evarts. The fight come off day
before yestiddy. Your father’s gang rode down to Isbel’s ranch. Daggs
was seen to be wantin’ some of the Isbel hosses, so Evarts says. An’
Guy Isbel an’ Jacobs ran out in the pasture. Daggs an’ some others
shot them down.”
“Killed them—that way?” put in Ellen, sharply.
“So Evarts says. He was on the ridge an’ swears he seen it all. They
killed Guy an’ Jacobs in cold blood. No chance fer their lives—not
even to fight!... Wall, hen they surrounded the Isbel cabin. The
fight last all thet day an’ all night an’ the next day. Evarts says
Guy an’ Jacobs laid out thar all this time. An’ a herd of hogs broke
in the pasture an’ was eatin’ the dead bodies ...”
“My God!” burst out Ellen. “Uncle John, y’u shore cain’t mean my
father wouldn’t stop fightin’ long enough to drive the hogs off an’
bury those daid men?”
“Evarts says they stopped fightin’, all right, but it was to watch the
hogs,” declared Sprague. “An’ then, what d’ ye think? The wimminfolks
come out—the red-headed one, Guy’s wife, an’ Jacobs’s wife—they
drove the hogs away an’ buried their husbands right there in the
pasture. Evarts says he seen the graves.”
“It is the women who can teach these bloody Texans a lesson,” declared
Ellen, forcibly.
“Wal, Daggs was drunk, an’ he got up from behind where the gang was
hidin’, an’ dared the Isbels to come out. They shot him to pieces. An’
thet night some one of the Isbels shot Craig, who was alone on
guard.... An’ last—this here’s what I come to tell you—Jean Isbel
slipped up in the dark on Greaves an’ knifed him.”
“Why did y’u want to tell me that particularly?” asked Ellen, slowly.
“Because I reckon the facts in the case are queer—an’ because, Ellen,
your name was mentioned,” announced Sprague, positively.
“My name—mentioned?” echoed Ellen. Her horror and disgust gave way to
a quickening process of thought, a mounting astonishment. “By whom?”
“Jean Isbel,” replied Sprague, as if the name and the fact were
momentous.
Ellen sat still as a stone, her hands between her knees. Slowly she
felt the blood recede from her face, prickling her kin down below her
neck. That name locked her thought.
“Ellen, it’s a mighty queer story—too queer to be a lie,” went on
Sprague. “Now you listen! Evarts got this from Ted Meeker. An’ Ted
Meeker heerd it from Greaves, who didn’t die till the next day after
Jean Isbel knifed him. An’ your dad shot Ted fer tellin’ what he
heerd.... No, Greaves wasn’t killed outright. He was cut somethin’
turrible—in two places. They wrapped him all up an’ next day packed
him in a wagon back to Grass Valley. Evarts says Ted Meeker was
friendly with Greaves an’ went to see him as he was layin’ in his room
next to the store. Wal, accordin’ to Meeker’s story, Greaves came to
an’ talked. He said he was sittin’ there in the dark, shootin’
occasionally at Isbel’s cabin, when he heerd a rustle behind him in the
grass. He knowed some one was crawlin’ on him. But before he could
get his gun around he was jumped by what he thought was a grizzly bear.
But it was a man. He shut off Greaves’s wind an’ dragged him back in
the ditch. An’ he said: ‘Greaves, it’s the half-breed. An’ he’s goin’
to cut you—FIRST FOR ELLEN JORTH! an’ then for Gaston Isbel!’...
Greaves said Jean ripped him with a bowie knife.... An’ thet was all
Greaves remembered. He died soon after tellin’ this story. He must
hev fought awful hard. Thet second cut Isbel gave him went clear
through him.... Some of the gang was thar when Greaves talked, an’
naturally they wondered why Jean Isbel had said ‘first for Ellen
Jorth.’... Somebody remembered thet Greaves had cast a slur on your
good name, Ellen. An’ then they had Jean Isbel’s reason fer sayin’
thet to Greaves. It caused a lot of talk. An’ when Simm Bruce busted
in some of the gang haw-hawed him an’ said as how he’d get the third
cut from Jean Isbel’s bowie. Bruce was half drunk an’ he began to cuss
an’ rave about Jean Isbel bein’ in love with his girl.... As bad luck
would have it, a couple of more fellars come in an’ asked Meeker
questions. He jest got to thet part, ‘Greaves, it’s the half-breed,
an’ he’s goin’ to cut you—FIRST FOR ELLEN JORTH,’ when in walked your
father!... Then it all had to come out—what Jean Isbel had said an’
done—an’ why. How Greaves had backed Simm Bruce in slurrin’ you!”
Sprague paused to look hard at Ellen.
“Oh! Then—what did dad do?” whispered Ellen.
“He said, ‘By God! half-breed or not, there’s one Isbel who’s a man!’
An’ he killed Bruce on the spot an’ gave Meeker a nasty wound. Somebody
grabbed him before he could shoot Meeker again. They threw Meeker out
an’ he crawled to a neighbor’s house, where he was when Evarts seen
him.”
Ellen felt Sprague’s rough but kindly hand shaking her. “An’ now what
do you think of Jean Isbel?” he queried.
A great, unsurmountable wall seemed to obstruct Ellen’s thought. It
seemed gray in color. It moved toward her. It was inside her brain.
“I tell you, Ellen Jorth,” declared the old man, “thet Jean Isbel loves
you—loves you turribly—an’ he believes you’re good.”
“Oh no—he doesn’t!” faltered Ellen.
“Wal, he jest does.”
“Oh, Uncle John, he cain’t believe that!” she cried.
“Of course he can. He does. You are good—good as gold, Ellen, an’ he
knows it.... What a queer deal it all is! Poor devil! To love you
thet turribly an’ hev to fight your people! Ellen, your dad had it
correct. Isbel or not, he’s a man.... An’ I say what a shame you two
are divided by hate. Hate thet you hed nothin’ to do with.” Sprague
patted her head and rose to go. “Mebbe thet fight will end the
trouble. I reckon it will. Don’t cross bridges till you come to them,
Ellen.... I must hurry back now. I didn’t take time to unpack my
burros. Come up soon.... An’, say, Ellen, don’t think hard any more of
thet Jean Isbel.”
Sprague strode away, and Ellen neither heard nor saw him go. She sat
perfectly motionless, yet had a strange sensation of being lifted by
invisible and mighty power. It was like movement felt in a dream. She
was being impelled upward when her body seemed immovable as stone. When
her blood beat down this deadlock of an her physical being and rushed
on and on through her veins it gave her an irresistible impulse to fly,
to sail through space, to ran and run and ran.
And on the moment the black horse, Spades, coming from the meadow,
whinnied at sight of her. Ellen leaped up and ran swiftly, but her
feet seemed to be stumbling. She hugged the horse and buried her hot
face in his mane and clung to him. Then just as violently she rushed
for her saddle and bridle and carried the heavy weight as easily as if
it had been an empty sack. Throwing them upon him, she buckled and
strapped with strong, eager hands. It never occurred to her that she
was not dressed to ride. Up she flung herself. And the horse, sensing
her spirit, plunged into strong, free gait down the canyon trail.
The ride, the action, the thrill, the sensations of violence were not
all she needed. Solitude, the empty aisles of the forest, the far
miles of lonely wilderness—were these the added all? Spades took a
swinging, rhythmic lope up the winding trail. The wind fanned her hot
face. The sting of whipping aspen branches was pleasant. A deep
rumble of thunder shook the sultry air. Up beyond the green slope of
the canyon massed the creamy clouds, shading darker and darker. Spades
loped on the levels, leaped the washes, trotted over the rocky ground,
and took to a walk up the long slope. Ellen dropped the reins over the
pommel. Her hands could not stay set on anything. They pressed her
breast and flew out to caress the white aspens and to tear at the maple
leaves, and gather the lavender juniper berries, and came back again to
her heart. Her heart that was going to burst or break! As it had
swelled, so now it labored. It could not keep pace with her needs. All
that was physical, all that was living in her had to be unleashed.
Spades gained the level forest. How the great, brown-green pines
seemed to bend their lofty branches over her, protectively,
understandingly. Patches of azure-blue sky flashed between the trees.
The great white clouds sailed along with her, and shafts of golden
sunlight, flecked with gleams of falling pine needles, shone down
through the canopy overhead. Away in front of her, up the slow heave
of forest land, boomed the heavy thunderbolts along the battlements of
the Rim.
Was she riding to escape from herself? For no gait suited her until
Spades was running hard and fast through the glades. Then the pressure
of dry wind, the thick odor of pine, the flashes of brown and green and
gold and blue, the soft, rhythmic thuds of hoofs, the feel of the
powerful horse under her, the whip of spruce branches on her muscles
contracting and expanding in hard action—all these sensations seemed
to quell for the time the mounting cataclysm in her heart.
The oak swales, the maple thickets, the aspen groves, the pine-shaded
aisles, and the miles of silver spruce all sped by her, as if she had
ridden the wind; and through the forest ahead shone the vast open of
the Basin, gloomed by purple and silver cloud, shadowed by gray storm,
and in the west brightened by golden sky.
Straight to the Rim she had ridden, and to the point where she had
watched Jean Isbel that unforgetable day. She rode to the promontory
behind the pine thicket and beheld a scene which stayed her restless
hands upon her heaving breast.
The world of sky and cloud and earthly abyss seemed one of
storm-sundered grandeur. The air was sultry and still, and smelled of
the peculiar burnt-wood odor caused by lightning striking trees. A few
heavy drops of rain were pattering down from the thin, gray edge of
clouds overhead. To the east hung the storm—a black cloud lodged
against the Rim, from which long, misty veils of rain streamed down
into the gulf. The roar of rain sounded like the steady roar of the
rapids of a river. Then a blue-white, piercingly bright, ragged streak
of lightning shot down out of the black cloud. It struck with a
splitting report that shocked the very wall of rock under Ellen. Then
the heavens seemed to burst open with thundering crash and close with
mighty thundering boom. Long roar and longer rumble rolled away to the
eastward. The rain poured down in roaring cataracts.
The south held a panorama of purple-shrouded range and canyon, canyon
and range, on across the rolling leagues to the dim, lofty peaks, all
canopied over with angry, dusky, low-drifting clouds, horizon-wide,
smoky, and sulphurous. And as Ellen watched, hands pressed to her
breast, feeling incalculable relief in sight of this tempest and gulf
that resembled her soul, the sun burst out from behind the long bank of
purple cloud in the west and flooded the world there with golden
lightning.
“It is for me!” cried Ellen. “My mind—my heart—my very soul.... Oh, I
know! I know now!... I love him—love him—love him!”
She cried it out to the elements. “Oh, I love Jean Isbel—an’ my heart
will burst or break!”
The might of her passion was like the blaze of the sun. Before it all
else retreated, diminished. The suddenness of the truth dimmed her
sight. But she saw clearly enough to crawl into the pine thicket,
through the clutching, dry twigs, over the mats of fragrant needles to
the covert where she had once spied upon Jean Isbel. And here she lay
face down for a while, hands clutching the needles, breast pressed hard
upon the ground, stricken and spent. But vitality was exceeding strong
in her. It passed, that weakness of realization, and she awakened to
the consciousness of love.
But in the beginning it was not consciousness of the man. It was new,
sensorial life, elemental, primitive, a liberation of a million
inherited instincts, quivering and physical, over which Ellen had no
more control than she had over the glory of the sun. If she thought at
all it was of her need to be hidden, like an animal, low down near the
earth, covered by green thicket, lost in the wildness of nature. She
went to nature, unconsciously seeking a mother. And love was a birth
from the depths of her, like a rushing spring of pure water, long
underground, and at last propelled to the surface by a convulsion.
Ellen gradually lost her tense rigidity and relaxed. Her body
softened. She rolled over until her face caught the lacy, golden
shadows cast by sun and bough. Scattered drops of rain pattered around
her. The air was hot, and its odor was that of dry pine and spruce
fragrance penetrated by brimstone from the lightning. The nest where
she lay was warm and sweet. No eye save that of nature saw her in her
abandonment. An ineffable and exquisite smile wreathed her lips,
dreamy, sad, sensuous, the supremity of unconscious happiness. Over
her dark and eloquent eyes, as Ellen gazed upward, spread a luminous
film, a veil. She was looking intensely, yet she did not see. The
wilderness enveloped her with its secretive, elemental sheaths of rock,
of tree, of cloud, of sunlight. Through her thrilling skin poured the
multiple and nameless sensations of the living organism stirred to
supreme sensitiveness. She could not lie still, but all her movements
were gentle, involuntary. The slow reaching out of her hand, to grasp
at nothing visible, was similar to the lazy stretching of her limbs, to
the heave of her breast, to the ripple of muscle.
Ellen knew not what she felt. To live that sublime hour was beyond
thought. Such happiness was like the first dawn of the world to the
sight of man. It had to do with bygone ages. Her heart, her blood,
her flesh, her very bones were filled with instincts and emotions
common to the race before intellect developed, when the savage lived
only with his sensorial perceptions. Of all happiness, joy, bliss,
rapture to which man was heir, that of intense and exquisite
preoccupation of the senses, unhindered and unburdened by thought, was
the greatest. Ellen felt that which life meant with its inscrutable
design. Love was only the realization of her mission on the earth.
The dark storm cloud with its white, ragged ropes of lightning and
down-streaming gray veils of rain, the purple gulf rolling like a
colored sea to the dim mountains, the glorious golden light of the
sun—these had enchanted her eyes with her beauty of the universe. They
had burst the windows of her blindness. When she crawled into the
green-brown covert it was to escape too great perception. She needed
to be encompassed by close, tangible things. And there her body paid
the tribute to the realization of life. Shock, convulsion, pain,
relaxation, and then unutterable and insupportable sensing of her
environment and the heart! In one way she was a wild animal alone in
the woods, forced into the mating that meant reproduction of its kind.
In another she was an infinitely higher being shot through and through
with the most resistless and mysterious transport that life could give
to flesh.
And when that spell slackened its hold there wedged into her mind a
consciousness of the man she loved—Jean Isbel. Then emotion and
thought strove for mastery over her. It was not herself or love that
she loved, but a living man. Suddenly he existed so clearly for her
that she could see him, hear him, almost feel him. Her whole soul, her
very life cried out to him for protection, for salvation, for love, for
fulfillment. No denial, no doubt marred the white blaze of her
realization. From the instant that she had looked up into Jean Isbel’s
dark face she had loved him. Only she had not known. She bowed now,
and bent, and humbly quivered under the mastery of something beyond her
ken. Thought clung to the beginnings of her romance—to the three
times she had seen him. Every look, every word, every act of his
returned to her now in the light of the truth. Love at first sight! He
had sworn it, bitterly, eloquently, scornful of her doubts. And now a
blind, sweet, shuddering ecstasy swayed her. How weak and frail seemed
her body—too small, too slight for this monstrous and terrible engine
of fire and lightning and fury and glory—her heart! It must burst or
break. Relentlessly memory pursued Ellen, and her thoughts whirled and
emotion conquered her. At last she quivered up to her knees as if
lashed to action. It seemed that first kiss of Isbel’s, cool and
gentle and timid, was on her lips. And her eyes closed and hot tears
welled from under her lids. Her groping hands found only the dead
twigs and the pine boughs of the trees. Had she reached out to clasp
him? Then hard and violent on her mouth and cheek and neck burned
those other kisses of Isbel’s, and with the flashing, stinging memory
came the truth that now she would have bartered her soul for them.
Utterly she surrendered to the resistlessness of this love. Her loss
of mother and friends, her wandering from one wild place to another,
her lonely life among bold and rough men, had developed her for violent
love. It overthrew all pride, it engendered humility, it killed hate.
Ellen wiped the tears from her eyes, and as she knelt there she swept
to her breast a fragrant spreading bough of pine needles. “I’ll go to
him,” she whispered. “I’ll tell him of—of my—my love. I’ll tell him
to take me away—away to the end of the world—away from heah—before
it’s too late!”
It was a solemn, beautiful moment. But the last spoken words lingered
hauntingly. “Too late?” she whispered.
And suddenly it seemed that death itself shuddered in her soul. Too
late! It was too late. She had killed his love. That Jorth blood in
her—that poisonous hate—had chosen the only way to strike this noble
Isbel to the heart. Basely, with an abandonment of womanhood, she had
mockingly perjured her soul with a vile lie. She writhed, she shook
under the whip of this inconceivable fact. Lost! Lost! She wailed
her misery. She might as well be what she had made Jean Isbel think
she was. If she had been shamed before, she was now abased, degraded,
lost in her own sight. And if she would have given her soul for his
kisses, she now would have killed herself to earn back his respect.
Jean Isbel had given her at sight the deference that she had
unconsciously craved, and the love that would have been her salvation.
What a horrible mistake she had made of her life! Not her mother’s
blood, but her father’s—the Jorth blood—had been her ruin.
Again Ellen fell upon the soft pine-needle mat, face down, and she
groveled and burrowed there, in an agony that could not bear the sense
of light. All she had suffered was as nothing to this. To have
awakened to a splendid and uplifting love for a man whom she had
imagined she hated, who had fought for her name and had killed in
revenge for the dishonor she had avowed—to have lost his love and what
was infinitely more precious to her now in her ignominy—his faith in
her purity—this broke her heart.