“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’ that 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 you 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,” answered 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 skin 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 heard 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 heered. No, Greaves wasn’t killed outright. He was cut something tumble … 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 heered a rustle behind him in the grass. He knowed someone was crawlin’ up 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’ I’m 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 have 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’ that to Greaves. It caused a lot of talk. An’ when Simm Bruce busted in, some of the gang hawed-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 more fellars come in an’ asked Meeker questions. He jist got to thet part … ‘Greaves, it’s the half-breed, an’ I’m 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 insurmountable 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 … 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 damn’ shame you two are divided by hate. Hate thet you had nothin’ to do with.”

  Sprague patted her hand, and rose to go. “Mebbe that fight will lick 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 that 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 all her physical being and rushed on and on through her veins, it gave her an irresistible impulse to fly, to sail through space, to run and run and run.

  At that 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 cañon 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 cañon 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 gathered 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, loomed the heavy thunderbolts along the battlements of the Tonto 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 promise 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 bare knees, and the sense of her muscles contracting and expanding in hard action,—all those 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 sky of the Tonto Basin, gloomed by purple and silver clouds, 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 unforgettable day. She rode to the promontory behind the pine thicket and beheld a scene that 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 sheet 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 cañon, cañon and range, on across the rolling leagues to the dim lofty peaks, all canopied over with angry, dusky, slow-drifting clouds, horizon-wide, smoky, and sulphurous. 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’s for me!” said Ellen. “In my mind … my heart … my soul.… Oh, God! 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 cover 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 exceedingly strong in her. It passed, that weakness of realization, and she awakened to the consciousness of love.

  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. 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 supremacy 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 legs, to the heave of her breast, to the ripple of muscles. Like a sleepy, indolent panther she rocked a little from side to side.

  Ellen knew not what she felt. To her, 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, in which 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 the 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 transplant that life could give to flesh. Her instinctive motions with her hands, always returning to her breast, betrayed the truth and the wonder of her state. It was her heart that was the birth and the center and the end of all this physical ecstasy. What had thought or character or custom or hate to do with Ellen Jorth then? She was bound by life to her sex. She was doomed to the bursting heart, the tingling veins, the thrilling nerves, the swelling breasts of a woman.

  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 enigma 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 enormity 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 beg 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 whispered hauntingly. “Too late?” she whispered. 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. 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. It had awakened to a splendid and uplifting love for a man who 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.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Ellen, utterly spent in body and mind, reached home that day, a melancholy, sultry twilight had fallen. Fitful flares of sheet lightning swept across the dark horizon to the east. The cabins were deserted. Antonio and the Mexican woman were gone. The circumstances made Ellen wonder, but she was too tired and too sunken in spirit to think long about it or to care. She fed and watered her horse, and left him in the corral. Then, supperless and without removing her clothes, she threw herself upon the bed, and at once sank into heavy slumber.