To The Last Man

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Jean advanced a few more paces, rifle up, ready to fire the instant
Queen lifted a gun. The man's immobility brought the cold sweat to
Jean's brow. He stopped to bend the full intense power of his gaze
upon this inert figure. Suddenly over Jean flashed its meaning.
Queen was dead. He had backed up against the pine, ready to face
his foe, and he had died there. Not a shadow of a doubt entered Jean's
mind as he started forward again. He knew. After all, Queen's blood
would not be on his hands. Gordon and Fredericks in their death throes
had given the rustler mortal wounds. Jean kept on, marveling the while.
How ghastly thin and hard! Those four days of flight had been hell
for Queen.

Jean reached him--looked down with staring eyes. The guns were tied
to his hands. Jean started violently as the whole direction of his
mind shifted. A lightning glance showed that Queen had been propped
against the tree--another showed boot tracks in the dust.

"By Heaven, they've fooled me!" hissed Jean, and quickly as he leaped
behind the pine he was not quick enough to escape the cunning rustlers
who had waylaid him thus. He felt the shock, the bite and burn of lead
before he heard a rifle crack. A bullet had ripped through his left
forearm. From behind the tree he saw a puff of white smoke along the
face of the bluff--the very spot his keen and gloomy vigilance had
descried as one of menace. Then several puffs of white smoke and
ringing reports betrayed the ambush of the tricksters. Bullets barked
the pine and whistled by. Jean saw a man dart from behind a rock and,
leaning over, run for another. Jean's swift shot stopped him midway.
He fell, got up, and floundered behind a bush scarcely large enough to
conceal him. Into that bush Jean shot again and again. He had no pain
in his wounded arm, but the sense of the shock clung in his consciousness,
and this, with the tremendous surprise of the deceit, and sudden release
of long-dammed overmastering passion, caused him to empty the magazine of
his Winchester in a terrible haste to kill the man he had hit.

These were all the loads he had for his rifle. Blood passion had made
him blunder. Jean cursed himself, and his hand moved to his belt. His
six-shooter was gone. The sheath had been loose. He had tied the gun
fast. But the strings had been torn apart. The rustlers were shooting
again. Bullets thudded into the pine and whistled by. Bending
carefully, Jean reached one of Queen's guns and jerked it from his hand.
The weapon was empty. Both of his guns were empty. Jean peeped out
again to get the line in which the bullets were coming and, marking a
course from his position to the cover of the forest, he ran with all
his might. He gained the shelter. Shrill yells behind warned him that
he had been seen, that his reason for flight had been guessed. Looking
back, he saw two or three men scrambling down the bluff. Then the loud
neigh of a frightened horse pealed out.

Jean discarded his useless rifle, and headed down the ridge slope,
keeping to the thickest line of pines and sheering around the clumps
of spruce. As he ran, his mind whirled with grim thoughts of escape,
of his necessity to find the camp where Gordon and Fredericks were
buried, there to procure another rifle and ammunition. He felt the
wet blood dripping down his arm, yet no pain. The forest was too open
for good cover. He dared not run uphill. His only course was ahead,
and that soon ended in an abrupt declivity too precipitous to descend.
As be halted, panting for breath, he heard the ring of hoofs on stone,
then the thudding beat of running horses on soft ground. The rustlers
had sighted the direction he had taken. Jean did not waste time to
look. Indeed, there was no need, for as he bounded along the cliff to
the right a rifle cracked and a bullet whizzed over his head. It lent
wings to his feet. Like a deer he sped along, leaping cracks and logs
and rocks, his ears filled by the rush of wind, until his quick eye
caught sight of thick-growing spruce foliage close to the precipice.
He sprang down into the green mass. His weight precipitated him through
the upper branches. But lower down his spread arms broke his fall,
then retarded it until he caught. A long, swaying limb let him down
and down, where he grasped another and a stiffer one that held his weight.
Hand over hand he worked toward the trunk of this spruce and, gaining it,
he found other branches close together down which he hastened, hold by
hold and step by step, until all above him was black, dense foliage,
and beneath him the brown, shady slope. Sure of being unseen from above,
he glided noiselessly down under the trees, slowly regaining freedom
from that constriction of his breast.

Passing on to a gray-lichened cliff, overhanging and gloomy, he paused
there to rest and to listen. A faint crack of hoof on stone came to
him from above, apparently farther on to the right. Eventually his
pursuers would discover that he had taken to the canyon. But for the
moment he felt safe. The wound in his forearm drew his attention.
The bullet had gone clear through without breaking either bone.
His shirt sleeve was soaked with blood. Jean rolled it back and
tightly wrapped his scarf around the wound, yet still the dark-red
blood oozed out and dripped down into his hand. He became aware of
a dull, throbbing pain.

Not much time did Jean waste in arriving at what was best to do.
For the time being he had escaped, and whatever had been his peril,
it was past. In dense, rugged country like this he could not be
caught by rustlers. But he had only a knife left for a weapon,
and there was very little meat in the pocket of his coat. Salt and
matches he possessed. Therefore the imperative need was for him to
find the last camp, where he could get rifle and ammunition, bake bread,
and rest up before taking again the trail of the rustlers. He had reason
to believe that this canyon was the one where the fight on the Rim,
and later, on a bench of woodland below, had taken place.

Thereupon he arose and glided down under the spruces toward the level,
grassy open he could see between the trees. And as he proceeded,
with the slow step and wary eye of an Indian, his mind was busy.

Queen had in his flight unerringly worked in the direction of this
canyon until he became lost in the fog; and upon regaining his bearings
he had made a wonderful and heroic effort to surmount the manzanita
slope and the Rim and find the rendezvous of his comrades. But he had
failed up there on the ridge. In thinking it over Jean arrived at a
conclusion that Queen, finding be could go no farther, had waited,
guns in hands, for his pursuer. And he had died in this position.
Then by strange coincidence his comrades had happened to come across
him and, recognizing the situation, they had taken the shells from his
guns and propped him up with the idea of luring Jean on. They had
arranged a cunning trick and ambush, which had all but snuffed out
the last of the Isbels. Colter probably had been at the bottom of
this crafty plan. Since the fight at the Isbel ranch, now seemingly
far back in the past, this man Colter had loomed up more and more as
a stronger and more dangerous antagonist then either Jorth or Daggs.
Before that he had been little known to any of the Isbel faction.
And it was Colter now who controlled the remnant of the gang and who
had Ellen Jorth in his possession.

The canyon wall above Jean, on the right, grew more rugged and loftier,
and the one on the left began to show wooded slopes and brakes, and at
last a wide expanse with a winding, willow border on the west and a long,
low, pine-dotted bench on the east. It took several moments of study
for Jean to recognize the rugged bluff above this bench. On up that
canyon several miles was the site where Queen had surprised Jean and
his comrades at their campfire. Somewhere in this vicinity was the
hiding place of the rustlers.

Thereupon Jean proceeded with the utmost stealth, absolutely certain
that he would miss no sound, movement, sign, or anything unnatural to
the wild peace of the canyon. And his first sense to register something
was his keen smell. Sheep! He was amazed to smell sheep. There must
be a flock not far away. Then from where he glided along under the
trees he saw down to open places in the willow brake and noticed sheep
tracks in the dark, muddy bank of the brook. Next he heard faint tinkle
of bells, and at length, when he could see farther into the open
enlargement of the canyon, his surprised gaze fell upon an immense gray,
woolly patch that blotted out acres and acres of grass. Thousands of
sheep were grazing there. Jean knew there were several flocks of
Jorth's sheep on the mountain in the care of herders, but he had
never thought of them being so far west, more than twenty miles from
Chevelon Canyon. His roving eyes could not descry any herders or dogs.
But he knew there must be dogs close to that immense flock. And,
whatever his cunning, he could not hope to elude the scent and sight
of shepherd dogs. It would be best to go back the way he bad come,
wait for darkness, then cross the canyon and climb out, and work around
to his objective point. Turning at once, he started to glide back.
But almost immediately he was brought stock-still and thrilling by
the sound of hoofs.

Horses were coming in the direction he wished to take. They were close.
His swift conclusion was that the men who had pursued him up on the Rim
had worked down into the canyon. One circling glance showed him that
he had no sure covert near at hand. It would not do to risk their
passing him there. The border of woodland was narrow and not dense
enough for close inspection. He was forced to turn back up the canyon,
in the hope of soon finding a hiding place or a break in the wall where
be could climb up.

Hugging the base of the wall, he slipped on, passing the point where
he had espied the sheep, and gliding on until he was stopped by a bend
in the dense line of willows. It sheered to the west there and ran
close to the high wall. Jean kept on until he was stooping under a
curling border of willow thicket, with branches slim and yellow and
masses of green foliage that brushed against the wall. Suddenly he
encountered an abrupt corner of rock. He rounded it, to discover that
it ran at right angles with the one he had just passed. Peering up
through the willows, he ascertained that there was a narrow crack in
the main wall of the canyon. It had been concealed by willows low down
and leaning spruces above. A wild, hidden retreat! Along the base of
the wall there were tracks of small animals. The place was odorous,
like all dense thickets, but it was not dry. Water ran through there
somewhere. Jean drew easier breath. All sounds except the rustling of
birds or mice in the willows had ceased. The brake was pervaded by a
dreamy emptiness. Jean decided to steal on a little farther, then wait
till he felt he might safely dare go back.

The golden-green gloom suddenly brightened. Light showed ahead, and
parting the willows, he looked out into a narrow, winding canyon,
with an open, grassy, willow-streaked lane in the center and on
each side a thin strip of woodland.

His surprise was short lived. A crashing of horses back of him in the
willows gave him a shock. He ran out along the base of the wall, back
of the trees. Like the strip of woodland in the main canyon, this one
was scant and had but little underbrush. There were young spruces
growing with thick branches clear to the grass, and under these he
could have concealed himself. But, with a certainty of sheep dogs
in the vicinity, he would not think of hiding except as a last resource.
These horsemen, whoever they were, were as likely to be sheep herders
as not. Jean slackened his pace to look back. He could not see any
moving objects, but he still heard horses, though not so close now.
Ahead of him this narrow gorge opened out like the neck of a bottle.
He would run on to the head of it and find a place to climb to the top.

Hurried and anxious as Jean was, he yet received an impression of
singular, wild nature of this side gorge. It was a hidden, pine-fringed
crack in the rock-ribbed and canyon-cut tableland. Above him the sky
seemed a winding stream of blue. The walls were red and bulged out in
spruce-greened shelves. From wall to wall was scarcely a distance of a
hundred feet. Jumbles of rock obstructed his close holding to the wall.
He had to walk at the edge of the timber. As he progressed, the gorge
widened into wilder, ruggeder aspect. Through the trees ahead he saw
where the wall circled to meet the cliff on the left, forming an oval
depression, the nature of which he could not ascertain. But it appeared
to be a small opening surrounded by dense thickets and the overhanging
walls. Anxiety augmented to alarm. He might not be able to find a
place to scale those rough cliffs. Breathing hard, Jean halted again.
The situation was growing critical again. His physical condition was
worse. Loss of sleep and rest, lack of food, the long pursuit of Queen,
the wound in his arm, and the desperate run for his life--these had
weakened him to the extent that if he undertook any strenuous effort
he would fail. His cunning weighed all chances.

The shade of wall and foliage above, and another jumble of ruined cliff,
hindered his survey of the ground ahead, and he almost stumbled upon a
cabin, hidden on three sides, with a small, bare clearing in front.
It was an old, ramshackle structure like others he had run across in
the canons. Cautiously he approached and peeped around the corner.
At first swift glance it had all the appearance of long disuse. But
Jean had no time for another look. A clip-clop of trotting horses on
hard ground brought the same pell-mell rush of sensations that had
driven him to wild flight scarcely an hour past. His body jerked with
its instinctive impulse, then quivered with his restraint. To turn
back would be risky, to run ahead would be fatal, to hide was his one
hope. No covert behind! And the clip-clop of hoofs sounded closer.
One moment longer Jean held mastery over his instincts of
self-preservation. To keep from running was almost impossible.
It was the sheer primitive animal sense to escape. He drove it back
and glided along the front of the cabin.

Here he saw that the cabin adjoined another. Reaching the door, he
was about to peep in when the thud of hoofs and voices close at hand
transfixed him with a grim certainty that he had not an instant to lose.
Through the thin, black-streaked line of trees he saw moving red objects.
Horses! He must run. Passing the door, his keen nose caught a musty,
woody odor and the tail of his eye saw bare dirt floor. This cabin
was unused. He halted-gave a quick look back. And the first thing
his eye fell upon was a ladder, right inside the door, against the wall.
He looked up. It led to a loft that, dark and gloomy, stretched halfway
across the cabin. An irresistible impulse drove Jean. Slipping inside,
he climbed up the ladder to the loft. It was like night up there. But
he crawled on the rough-hewn rafters and, turning with his head toward
the opening, he stretched out and lay still.

What seemed an interminable moment ended with a trample of hoofs outside
the cabin. It ceased. Jean's vibrating ears caught the jingle of spurs
and a thud of boots striking the ground.

"Wal, sweetheart, heah we are home again," drawled a slow, cool,
mocking Texas voice.

"Home! I wonder, Colter--did y'u ever have a home--a mother--a sister
--much less a sweetheart?" was the reply, bitter and caustic.

Jean's palpitating, hot body suddenly stretched still and cold with
intensity of shock. His very bones seemed to quiver and stiffen into ice.
During the instant of realization his heart stopped. And a slow,
contracting pressure enveloped his breast and moved up to constrict
his throat. That woman's voice belonged to Ellen Jorth. The sound
of it had lingered in his dreams. He had stumbled upon the rendezvous
of the Jorth faction. Hard indeed had been the fates meted out to those
of the Isbels and Jorths who had passed to their deaths. But, no ordeal,
not even Queen's, could compare with this desperate one Jean must endure.
He had loved Ellen Jorth, strangely, wonderfully, and he had scorned
repute to believe her good. He had spared her father and her uncle.
He had weakened or lost the cause of the Isbels. He loved her now,
desperately, deathlessly, knowing from her own lips that she was
worthless--loved her the more because he had felt her terrible shame.
And to him--the last of the Isbels--had come the cruelest of dooms
--to be caught like a crippled rat in a trap; to be compelled to lie
helpless, wounded, without a gun; to listen, and perhaps to see Ellen
Jorth enact the very truth of her mocking insinuation. His will,
his promise, his creed, his blood must hold him to the stem decree
that he should be the last man of the Jorth-Isbel war. But could he
lie there to hear--to see--when he had a knife and an arm?

CHAPTER XIV

Then followed the leathery flop of saddles to the soft turf and the
stamp, of loosened horses.

Jean heard a noise at the cabin door, a rustle, and then a knock of
something hard against wood. Silently he moved his head to look down
through a crack between the rafters. He saw the glint of a rifle
leaning against the sill. Then the doorstep was darkened. Ellen Jorth
sat down with a long, tired sigh. She took off her sombrero and the
light shone on the rippling, dark-brown hair, hanging in a tangled braid.
The curved nape of her neck showed a warm tint of golden tan. She wore
a gray blouse, soiled and torn, that clung to her lissome shoulders.

"Colter, what are y'u goin' to do?" she asked, suddenly. Her voice
carried something Jean did not remember. It thrilled into the icy
fixity of his senses.

"We'll stay heah," was the response, and it was followed by a clinking
step of spurred boot.

"Shore I won't stay heah," declared Ellen. "It makes me sick when I
think of how Uncle Tad died in there alone--helpless--sufferin'.
The place seems haunted."

"Wal, I'll agree that it's tough on y'u. But what the hell CAN we do?"

A long silence ensued which Ellen did not break.

"Somethin' has come off round heah since early mawnin'," declared Colter.
"Somers an' Springer haven't got back. An' Antonio's gone. . . .
Now, honest, Ellen, didn't y'u heah rifle shots off somewhere?"

"I reckon I did," she responded, gloomily.

"An' which way?"

"Sounded to me up on the bluff, back pretty far."

"Wal, shore that's my idee. An' it makes me think hard. Y'u know
Somers come across the last camp of the Isbels. An' he dug into a
grave to find the bodies of Jim Gordon an' another man he didn't know.
Queen kept good his brag. He braced that Isbel gang an' killed those
fellars. But either him or Jean Isbel went off leavin' bloody tracks.
If it was Queen's y'u can bet Isbel was after him. An' if it was
Isbel's tracks, why shore Queen would stick to them. Somers an'
Springer couldn't follow the trail. They're shore not much good at
trackin'. But for days they've been ridin' the woods, hopin' to run
across Queen. . . . Wal now, mebbe they run across Isbel instead. An'
if they did an' got away from him they'll be heah sooner or later. If
Isbel was too many for them he'd hunt for my trail. I'm gamblin' that
either Queen or Jean Isbel is daid. I'm hopin' it's Isbel. Because if
he ain't daid he's the last of the Isbels, an' mebbe I'm the last of
Jorth's gang. . . . Shore I'm not hankerin' to meet the half-breed.
That's why I say we'll stay heah. This is as good a hidin' place as
there is in the country. We've grub. There's water an' grass."

"Me--stay heah with y'u--alone!"

The tone seemed a contradiction to the apparently accepted sense of
her words. Jean held his breath. But he could not still the slowly
mounting and accelerating faculties within that were involuntarily
rising to meet some strange, nameless import. He felt it. He imagined
it would be the catastrophe of Ellen Jorth's calm acceptance of Colter's
proposition. But down in Jean's miserable heart lived something that
would not die. No mere words could kill it. How poignant that moment
of her silence! How terribly he realized that if his intelligence and
his emotion had believed her betraying words, his soul had not!

But Ellen Jorth did not speak. Her brown head hung thoughtfully.
Her supple shoulders sagged a little.

"Ellen, what's happened to y'u?" went on Colter.

"All the misery possible to a woman," she replied, dejectedly.

"Shore I don't mean that way," he continued, persuasively. "I ain't
gainsayin' the hard facts of your life. It's been bad. Your dad was
no good. . . . But I mean I can't figger the change in y'u."

"No, I reckon y'u cain't," she said. "Whoever was responsible for
your make-up left out a mind--not to say feeling."

Colter drawled a low laugh.

"Wal, have that your own way. But how much longer are yu goin' to
be like this heah?"

"Like what?" she rejoined, sharply.

"Wal, this stand-offishness of yours?"

"Colter, I told y'u to let me alone," she said, sullenly.

"Shore. An' y'u did that before. But this time y'u're different.
. . . An' wal, I'm gettin' tired of it."

Here the cool, slow voice of the Texan sounded an inflexibility before
absent, a timber that hinted of illimitable power.

Ellen Jorth shrugged her lithe shoulders and, slowly rising, she picked
up the little rifle and turned to step into the cabin.

"Colter," she said, "fetch my pack an' my blankets in heah."

" Shore," he returned, with good nature.

Jean saw Ellen Jorth lay the rifle lengthwise in a chink between two
logs and then slowly turn, back to the wall. Jean knew her then,
yet did not know her. The brown flash of her face seemed that of an
older, graver woman. His strained gaze, like his waiting mind, had
expected something, he knew not what--a hardened face, a ghost of beauty,
a recklessness, a distorted, bitter, lost expression in keeping with her
fortunes. But he had reckoned falsely. She did not look like that.
There was incalculable change, but the beauty remained, somehow
different. Her red lips were parted. Her brooding eyes, looking out
straight from under the level, dark brows, seemed sloe black and
wonderful with their steady, passionate light.

Jean, in his eager, hungry devouring of the beloved face, did not on
the first instant grasp the significance of its expression. He was
seeing the features that had haunted him. But quickly he interpreted
her expression as the somber, hunted look of a woman who would bear no
more. Under the torn blouse her full breast heaved. She held her hands
clenched at her sides. She was' listening, waiting for that jangling,
slow step. It came, and with the sound she subtly changed. She was a
woman hiding her true feelings. She relaxed, and that strong, dark
look of fury seemed to fade back into her eyes.

Colter appeared at the door, carrying a roll of blankets and a pack.

"Throw them heah," she said. "I reckon y'u needn't bother coming in."

That angered the man. With one long stride he stepped over the doorsill,
down into the cabin, and flung the blankets at her feet and then the pack
after it. Whereupon he deliberately sat down in the door, facing her.
With one hand he slid off his sombrero, which fell outside, and with
the other he reached in his upper vest pocket for the little bag of
tobacco that showed there. All the time he looked at her. By the
light now unobstructed Jean descried Colter's face; and sight of it
then sounded the roll and drum of his passions.

"Wal, Ellen, I reckon we'll have it out right now an' heah," he said,
and with tobacco in one hand, paper in the other he began the operations
of making a cigarette. However, he scarcely removed his glance from her.

"Yes?" queried Ellen Jorth.

"I'm goin' to have things the way they were before--an' more," he
declared. The cigarette paper shook in his fingers.

"What do y'u mean?" she demanded.

"Y'u know what I mean," he retorted. Voice and action were subtly
unhinging this man's control over himself.

"Maybe I don't. I reckon y'u'd better talk plain."

The rustler had clear gray-yellow eyes, flawless, like, crystal,
and suddenly they danced with little fiery flecks.

"The last time I laid my hand on y'u I got hit for my pains.
An' shore that's been ranklin'."

"Colter, y'u'll get hit again if y'u. put your hands on me," she said,
dark, straight glance on him. A frown wrinkled the level brows.

"Y'u mean that?" he asked, thickly.

"I shore, do."

Manifestly he accepted her assertion. Something of incredulity and
bewilderment, that had vied with his resentment, utterly disappeared
from his face.

"Heah I've been waitin' for y'u to love me," he declared, with a gesture
not without dignified emotion. "Your givin' in without that wasn't so
much to me."

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