The Lone Star Ranger

Z >> Zane Grey >> The Lone Star Ranger

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"I'll be able to ride and take care of myself in a day or two,"
went on Duane. "Then I'll go--I'd like to talk to you about
Jennie."

"She's welcome to a home here with us."

"Thank you, Andrews. You're a kind man. But I want Jennie to
get farther away from the Rio Grande. She'd never be safe here.
Besides, she may be able to find relatives. She has some,
though she doesn't know where they are."

"All right, Duane. Whatever you think best. I reckon now you'd
better take her to some town. Go north an' strike for
Shelbyville or Crockett. Them's both good towns. I'll tell
Jennie the names of men who'll help her. You needn't ride into
town at all."

"Which place is nearer, and how far is it?"

"Shelbyville. I reckon about two days' ride. Poor stock
country, so you ain't liable to meet rustlers. All the same,
better hit the trail at night an' go careful."

At sunset two days later Duane and Jennie mounted their horses
and said good-by to the rancher and his wife. Andrews would not
listen to Duane's thanks.

"I tell you I'm beholden to you yet," he declared.

"Well, what can I do for you?" asked Duane. "I may come along
here again some day."

"Get down an' come in, then, or you're no friend of mine. I
reckon there ain't nothin' I can think of--I just happen to
remember--" Here he led Duane out of earshot of the women and
went on in a whisper. "Buck, I used to be well-to-do. Got
skinned by a man named Brown--Rodney Brown. He lives in
Huntsville, an' he's my enemy. I never was much on fightin', or
I'd fixed him. Brown ruined me--stole all I had. He's a hoss
an' cattle thief, an' he has pull enough at home to protect
him. I reckon I needn't say any more."

"Is this Brown a man who shot an outlaw named Stevens?" queried
Duane, curiously.

"Shore, he's the same. I heard thet story. Brown swears he
plugged Stevens through the middle. But the outlaw rode off,
an' nobody ever knew for shore."

"Luke Stevens died of that shot. I buried him," said Duane.

Andrews made no further comment, and the two men returned to
the women.

"The main road for about three miles, then where it forks take
the left-hand road and keep on straight. That what you said,
Andrews?"

"Shore. An' good luck to you both!"

Duane and Jennie trotted away into the gathering twilight. At
the moment an insistent thought bothered Duane. Both Luke
Stevens and the rancher Andrews had hinted to Duane to kill a
man named Brown. Duane wished with all his heart that they had
not mentioned it, let alone taken for granted the execution of
the deed. What a bloody place Texas was! Men who robbed and men
who were robbed both wanted murder. It was in the spirit of the
country. Duane certainly meant to avoid ever meeting this
Rodney Brown. And that very determination showed Duane how
dangerous he really was--to men and to himself. Sometimes he
had a feeling of how little stood between his sane and better
self and a self utterly wild and terrible. He reasoned that
only intelligence could save him--only a thoughtful
understanding of his danger and a hold upon some ideal.

Then he fell into low conversation with Jennie, holding out
hopeful views of her future, and presently darkness set in. The
sky was overcast with heavy clouds; there was no air moving;
the heat and oppression threatened storm. By and by Duane could
not see a rod in front of him, though his horse had no
difficulty in keeping to the road. Duane was bothered by the
blackness of the night. Traveling fast was impossible, and any
moment he might miss the road that led off to the left. So he
was compelled to give all his attention to peering into the
thick shadows ahead. As good luck would have it, he came to
higher ground where there was less mesquite, and therefore not
such impenetrable darkness; and at this point he came to where
the road split.

Once headed in the right direction, he felt easier in mind. To
his annoyance, however, a fine, misty rain set in. Jennie was
not well dressed for wet weather; and, for that matter, neither
was he. His coat, which in that dry warm climate he seldom
needed, was tied behind his saddle, and he put it on Jennie.

They traveled on. The rain fell steadily; if anything, growing
thicker. Duane grew uncomfortably wet and chilly. Jennie,
however, fared somewhat better by reason of the heavy coat. The
night passed quickly despite the discomfort, and soon a gray,
dismal, rainy dawn greeted the travelers.

Jennie insisted that he find some shelter where a fire could be
built to dry his clothes. He was not in a fit condition to risk
catching cold. In fact, Duane's teeth were chattering. To find
a shelter in that barren waste seemed a futile task. Quite
unexpectedly, however, they happened upon a deserted adobe
cabin situated a little off the road. Not only did it prove to
have a dry interior, but also there was firewood. Water was
available in pools everywhere; however, there was no grass for
the horses.

A good fire and hot food and drink changed the aspect of their
condition as far as comfort went. And Jennie lay down to sleep.
For Duane, however, there must be vigilance. This cabin was no
hiding-place. The rain fell harder all the time, and the wind
changed to the north. "It's a norther, all right," muttered
Duane. "Two or three days." And he felt that his extraordinary
luck had not held out. Still one point favored him, and it was
that travelers were not likely to come along during the storm.
Jennie slept while Duane watched. The saving of this girl meant
more to him than any task he had ever assumed. First it had
been partly from a human feeling to succor an unfortunate
woman, and partly a motive to establish clearly to himself that
he was no outlaw. Lately, however, had come a different sense,
a strange one, with something personal and warm and protective
in it.

As he looked down upon her, a slight, slender girl with
bedraggled dress and disheveled hair, her face, pale and quiet,
a little stern in sleep, and her long, dark lashes lying on her
cheek, he seemed to see her fragility, her prettiness, her
femininity as never before. But for him she might at that very
moment have been a broken, ruined girl lying back in that cabin
of the Blands'. The fact gave him a feeling of his importance
in this shifting of her destiny. She was unharmed, still young;
she would forget and be happy; she would live to be a good wife
and mother. Somehow the thought swelled his heart. His act,
death-dealing as it had been, was a noble one, and helped him
to hold on to his drifting hopes. Hardly once since Jennie had
entered into his thought had those ghosts returned to torment
him.

To-morrow she would be gone among good, kind people with a
possibility of finding her relatives. He thanked God for ,that;
nevertheless, he felt a pang.

She slept more than half the day. Duane kept guard, always
alert, whether he was sitting, standing, or walking. The rain
pattered steadily on the roof and sometimes came in gusty
flurries through the door. The horses were outside in a shed
that afforded poor shelter, and they stamped restlessly. Duane
kept them saddled and bridled.

About the middle of the afternoon Jennie awoke. They cooked a
meal and afterward sat beside the little fire. She had never
been, in his observation of her, anything but a tragic figure,
an unhappy girl, the farthest removed from serenity and poise.
That characteristic capacity for agitation struck him as
stronger in her this day. He attributed it, however, to the
long strain, the suspense nearing an end. Yet sometimes when
her eyes were on him she did not seem to be thinking of her
freedom, of her future.

"This time to-morrow you'll be in Shelbyville," he said.

"Where will you be?" she asked, quickly.

"Me? Oh, I'll be making tracks for some lonesome place,' he
replied.

The girl shuddered.

"I've been brought up in Texas. I remember what a hard lot the
men of my family had. But poor as they were, they had a roof
over their heads, a hearth with a fire, a warm bed--somebody to
love them. And you, Duane--oh, my God! What must your life be?
You must ride and hide and watch eternally. No decent food, no
pillow, no friendly word, no clean clothes, no woman's hand!
Horses, guns, trails, rocks, holes--these must be the important
things in your life. You must go on riding, hiding, killing
until you meet--"

She ended with a sob and dropped her head on her knees. Duane
was amazed, deeply touched.

"My girl, thank you for that thought of me," he said, with a
tremor in his voice. "You don't know how much that means to
me."

She raised her face, and it was tear-stained, eloquent,
beautiful.

"I've heard tell--the best of men go to the bad out there. You
won't. Promise me you won't. I never--knew any man--like you.
I--I--we may never see each other again--after to-day. I'll
never forget you. I'll pray for you, and I'll never give up
trying to--to do something. Don't despair. It's never too late.
It was my hope that kept me alive--out there at Bland's--before
you came. I was only a poor weak girl. But if I could hope--so
can you. Stay away from men. Be a lone wolf. Fight for your
life. Stick out your exile--and maybe--some day--"

Then she lost her voice. Duane clasped her hand and with
feeling as deep as hers promised to remember her words. In her
despair for him she had spoken wisdom--pointed out the only
course.

Duane's vigilance, momentarily broken by emotion, had no sooner
reasserted itself than he discovered the bay horse, the one
Jennie rode, had broken his halter and gone off. The soft wet
earth had deadened the sound of his hoofs. His tracks were
plain in the mud. There were clumps of mesquite in sight, among
which the horse might have strayed. It turned out, however,
that he had not done so.

Duane did not want to leave Jennie alone in the cabin so near
the road. So he put her up on his horse and bade her follow.
The rain had ceased for the time being, though evidently the
storm was not yet over. The tracks led up a wash to a wide flat
where mesquite, prickly pear, and thorn-bush grew so thickly
that Jennie could not ride into it. Duane was thoroughly
concerned. He must have her horse. Time was flying. It would
soon be night. He could not expect her to scramble quickly
through that brake on foot. Therefore he decided to risk
leaving her at the edge of the thicket and go in alone.

As he went in a sound startled him. Was it the breaking of a
branch he had stepped on or thrust aside? He heard the
impatient pound of his horse's hoofs. Then all was quiet. Still
he listened, not wholly satisfied. He was never satisfied in
regard to safety; he knew too well that there never could be
safety for him in this country.

The bay horse had threaded the aisles of the thicket. Duane
wondered what had drawn him there. Certainly it had not been
grass, for there was none. Presently he heard the horse
tramping along, and then he ran. The mud was deep, and the
sharp thorns made going difficult. He came up with the horse,
and at the same moment crossed a multitude of fresh
horse-tracks.

He bent lower to examine them, and was alarmed to find that
they had been made very recently, even since it had ceased
raining. They were tracks of well-shod horses. Duane
straightened up with a cautious glance all around. His instant
decision was to hurry back to Jennie. But he had come a goodly
way through the thicket, and it was impossible to rush back.
Once or twice he imagined he heard crashings in the brush, but
did not halt to make sure. Certain he was now that some kind of
danger threatened.

Suddenly there came an unmistakable thump of horses' hoofs off
somewhere to the fore. Then a scream rent the air. It ended
abruptly. Duane leaped forward, tore his way through the thorny
brake. He heard Jennie cry again--an appealing call quickly
hushed. It seemed more to his right, and he plunged that way.
He burst into a glade where a smoldering fire and ground
covered with footprints and tracks showed that campers had
lately been. Rushing across this, he broke his passage out to
the open. But he was too late. His horse had disappeared.
Jennie was gone. There were no riders in sight. There was no
sound. There was a heavy trail of horses going north. Jennie
had been carried off--probably by outlaws. Duane realized that
pursuit was out of the question--that Jennie was lost.

CHAPTER X

A hundred miles from the haunts most familiar with Duane's
deeds, far up where the Nueces ran a trickling clear stream
between yellow cliffs, stood a small deserted shack of covered
mesquite poles. It had been made long ago, but was well
preserved. A door faced the overgrown trail, and another faced
down into a gorge of dense thickets. On the border fugitives
from law and men who hid in fear of some one they had wronged
never lived in houses with only one door.

It was a wild spot, lonely, not fit for human habitation except
for the outcast. He, perhaps, might have found it hard to leave
for most of the other wild nooks in that barren country. Down
in the gorge there was never-failing sweet water, grass all the
year round, cool, shady retreats, deer, rabbits, turkeys,
fruit, and miles and miles of narrow-twisting, deep canon full
of broken rocks and impenetrable thickets. The scream of the
panther was heard there, the squall of the wildcat, the cough
of the jaguar. Innumerable bees buzzed in the spring blossoms,
and, it seemed, scattered honey to the winds. All day there was
continuous song of birds, that of the mocking-bird loud and
sweet and mocking above the rest.

On clear days--and rare indeed were cloudy days--with the
subsiding of the wind at sunset a hush seemed to fall around
the little hut. Far-distant dim-blue mountains stood
gold-rimmed gradually to fade with the shading of light.

At this quiet hour a man climbed up out of the gorge and sat in
the westward door of the hut. This lonely watcher of the west
and listener to the silence was Duane. And this hut was the one
where, three years before, Jennie had nursed him back to life.

The killing of a man named Sellers, and the combination of
circumstances that had made the tragedy a memorable regret, had
marked, if not a change, at least a cessation in Duane's
activities. He had trailed Sellers to kill him for the supposed
abducting of Jennie. He had trailed him long after he had
learned Sellers traveled alone. Duane wanted absolute assurance
of Jennie's death. Vague rumors, a few words here and there,
unauthenticated stories, were all Duane had gathered in years
to substantiate his belief--that Jennie died shortly after the
beginning of her second captivity. But Duane did not know
surely. Sellers might have told him. Duane expected, if not to
force it from him at the end, to read it in his eyes. But the
bullet went too unerringly; it locked his lips and fixed his
eyes.

After that meeting Duane lay long at the ranchhouse of a
friend, and when he recovered from the wound Sellers had given
him he started with two horses and a pack for the lonely gorge
on the Nueces. There he had been hidden for months, a prey to
remorse, a dreamer, a victim of phantoms.

It took work for him to find subsistence in that rocky
fastness. And work, action, helped to pass the hours. But he
could not work all the time, even if he had found it to do.
Then in his idle moments and at night his task was to live with
the hell in his mind.

The sunset and the twilight hour made all the rest bearable.
The little hut on the rim of the gorge seemed to hold Jennie's
presence. It was not as if he felt her spirit. If it had been
he would have been sure of her death. He hoped Jennie had not
survived her second misfortune; and that intense hope had
burned into belief, if not surety. Upon his return to that
locality, on the occasion of his first visit to the hut, he had
found things just as they had left them, and a poor, faded
piece of ribbon Jennie had used to tie around her bright hair.
No wandering outlaw or traveler had happened upon the lonely
spot, which further endeared it to Duane.

A strange feature of this memory of Jennie was the freshness of
it--the failure of years, toil, strife, death-dealing to dim
it--to deaden the thought of what might have been. He had a
marvelous gift of visualization. He could shut his eyes and see
Jennie before him just as clearly as if she had stood there in
the flesh. For hours he did that, dreaming, dreaming of life he
had never tasted and now never would taste. He saw Jennie's
slender, graceful figure, the old brown ragged dress in which
he had seen her first at Bland's, her little feet in Mexican
sandals, her fine hands coarsened by work, her round arms and
swelling throat, and her pale, sad, beautiful face with its
staring dark eyes. He remembered every look she had given him,
every word she had spoken to him, every time she had touched
him. He thought of her beauty and sweetness, of the few things
which had come to mean to him that she must have loved him; and
he trained himself to think of these in preference to her life
at Bland's, the escape with him, and then her recapture,
because such memories led to bitter, fruitless pain. He had to
fight suffering because it was eating out his heart.

Sitting there, eyes wide open, he dreamed of the old homestead
and his white-haired mother. He saw the old home life,
sweetened and filled by dear new faces and added joys, go on
before his eyes with him a part of it.

Then in the inevitable reaction, in the reflux of bitter
reality, he would send out a voiceless cry no less poignant
because it was silent: "Poor fool! No, I shall never see mother
again--never go home--never have a home. I am Duane, the Lone
Wolf! Oh, God! I wish it were over! These dreams torture me!
What have I to do with a mother, a home, a wife? No
bright-haired boy, no dark-eyed girl will ever love me. I am an
outlaw, an outcast, dead to the good and decent world. I am
alone--alone. Better be a callous brute or better dead! I shall
go mad thinking! Man, what is left to you? A hiding-place like
a wolf's--lonely silent days, lonely nights with phantoms! Or
the trail and the road with their bloody tracks, and then the
hard ride, the sleepless, hungry ride to some hole in rocks or
brakes. What hellish thing drives me? Why can't I end it all?
What is left? Only that damned unquenchable spirit of the
gun-fighter to live--to hang on to miserable life--to have no
fear of death, yet to cling like a leach--to die as
gun-fighters seldom die, with boots off! Bain, you were first,
and you're long avenged. I'd change with you. And Sellers, you
were last, and you're avenged. And you others--you're avenged.
Lie quiet in your graves and give me peace!"

But they did not lie quiet in their graves and give him peace.

A group of specters trooped out of the shadows of dusk and,
gathering round him, escorted him to his bed.

When Duane had been riding the trails passion-bent to escape
pursuers, or passion-bent in his search, the constant action
and toil and exhaustion made him sleep. But when in hiding, as
time passed, gradually he required less rest and sleep, and his
mind became more active. Little by little his phantoms gained
hold on him, and at length, but for the saving power of his
dreams, they would have claimed him utterly.

How many times he had said to himself: "I am an intelligent
man. I'm not crazy. I'm in full possession of my faculties. All
this is fancy--imagination--conscience. I've no work, no duty,
no ideal, no hope--and my mind is obsessed, thronged with
images. And these images naturally are of the men with whom I
have dealt. I can't forget them. They come back to me, hour
after hour; and when my tortured mind grows weak, then maybe
I'm not just right till the mood wears out and lets me sleep."

So he reasoned as he lay down in his comfortable camp. The
night was star-bright above the canon-walls, darkly shadowing
down between them. The insects hummed and chirped and thrummed
a continuous thick song, low and monotonous. Slow-running water
splashed softly over stones in the stream-bed. From far down
the canon came the mournful hoot of an owl. The moment he lay
down, thereby giving up action for the day, all these things
weighed upon him like a great heavy mantle of loneliness. In
truth, they did not constitute loneliness.

And he could no more have dispelled thought than he could have
reached out to touch a cold, bright star.

He wondered how many outcasts like him lay under this
star-studded, velvety sky across the fifteen hundred miles of
wild country between El Paso and the mouth of the river. A vast
wild territory--a refuge for outlaws! Somewhere he had heard or
read that the Texas Rangers kept a book with names and records
of outlaws--three thousand known outlaws. Yet these could
scarcely be half of that unfortunate horde which had been
recruited from all over the states. Duane had traveled from
camp to camp, den to den, hiding-place to hiding-place, and he
knew these men. Most of them were hopeless criminals; some were
avengers; a few were wronged wanderers; and among them
occasionally was a man, human in his way, honest as he could
be, not yet lost to good.

But all of them were akin in one sense--their outlawry; and
that starry night they lay with their dark faces up, some in
packs like wolves, others alone like the gray wolf who knew no
mate. It did not make much difference in Duane's thought of
them that the majority were steeped in crime and brutality,
more often than not stupid from rum, incapable of a fine
feeling, just lost wild dogs.

Duane doubted that there was a man among them who did not
realize his moral wreck and ruin. He had met poor, half witted
wretches who knew it. He believed he could enter into their
minds and feel the truth of all their lives--the hardened
outlaw, coarse, ignorant, bestial, who murdered as Bill Black
had murdered, who stole for the sake of stealing, who craved
money to gamble and drink, defiantly ready for death, and, like
that terrible outlaw, Helm, who cried out on the scaffold, "Let
her rip!"

The wild youngsters seeking notoriety and reckless adventure;
the cowboys with a notch on their guns, with boastful pride in
the knowledge that they were marked by rangers; the crooked men
from the North, defaulters, forgers, murderers, all pale-faced,
flat-chested men not fit for that wilderness and not surviving;
the dishonest cattlemen, hand and glove with outlaws, driven
from their homes; the old grizzled, bow-legged genuine
rustlers--all these Duane had come in contact with, had watched
and known, and as he felt with them he seemed to see that as
their lives were bad, sooner or later to end dismally or
tragically, so they must pay some kind of earthly penalty--if
not of conscience, then of fear; if not of fear, then of that
most terrible of all things to restless, active men--pain, the
pang of flesh and bone.

Duane knew, for he had seen them pay. Best of all, moreover, he
knew the internal life of the gun-fighter of that select but by
no means small class of which he was representative. The world
that judged him and his kind judged him as a machine, a
killing-machine, with only mind enough to hunt, to meet, to
slay another man. It had taken three endless years for Duane to
understand his own father. Duane knew beyond all doubt that the
gun-fighters like Bland, like Alloway, like Sellers, men who
were evil and had no remorse, no spiritual accusing Nemesis,
had something far more torturing to mind, more haunting, more
murderous of rest and sleep and peace; and that something was
abnormal fear of death. Duane knew this, for he had shot these
men; he had seen the quick, dark shadow in eyes, the
presentiment that the will could not control, and then the
horrible certainty. These men must have been in agony at every
meeting with a possible or certain foe--more agony than the hot
rend of a bullet. They were haunted, too, haunted by this fear,
by every victim calling from the grave that nothing was so
inevitable as death, which lurked behind every corner, hid in
every shadow, lay deep in the dark tube of every gun. These men
could not have a friend; they could not love or trust a woman.
They knew their one chance of holding on to life lay in their
own distrust, watchfulness, dexterity, and that hope, by the
very nature of their lives, could not be lasting. They had
doomed themselves. What, then, could possibly have dwelt in the
depths of their minds as they went to their beds on a starry
night like this, with mystery in silence and shadow, with time
passing surely, and the dark future and its secret approaching
every hour--what, then, but hell?

The hell in Duane's mind was not fear of man or fear of death.
He would have been glad to lay down the burden of life,
providing death came naturally. Many times he had prayed for
it. But that overdeveloped, superhuman spirit of defense in him
precluded suicide or the inviting of an enemy's bullet.
Sometimes he had a vague, scarcely analyzed idea that this
spirit was what had made the Southwest habitable for the white
man.

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