Black Mesa. Zane Grey
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come to think aboot it, I cain’t say. I’ve rode a sight of ranges in my day, but never none like this one. An’ I’d hev to ride heah awhile before I could tell jest what it is that makes me feel sorta creepy.”
“It doesn’t lack color, beauty, magnificence,” replied Paul Manning thoughtfully. “There is a difference, though, between this and the Painted Desert behind us, or the canyon country beyond. And that difference is exactly what gripped me.”
“Hev you been oot heah before?” asked the cowboy.
“Only once. I’d ridden all over before I struck Bitter Seeps. Trying to find a place where I could stay. This is it. I was fascinated by that huge mesa up behind the trading post. It seems to stand for the loneliness and peace that pervade this desert.”
“Peace?—ah-huh. I reckon I get you,” replied Kintell slowly. “I’ve had my ideas aboot you, Manning. An’ if ever I seen a driven man you shore was him. . . . But thet doesn’t give me any hunch why you fetched me oot heah.”
“I must have some kind of work. Always leaned toward a ranch, cattle, horses, you know. But that always seemed impossible until last November when I inherited a little money. Now I can have what I used to want, and maybe having it will make me want it again. . . . I like you, Kintell. You’re the man to run my ranch.”
“How do you know thet?”
“I just feel it.”
“Wal, if I’d turn oot true to past performances you’d hev the wrong man.”
“Kintell, you hinted once before of a shady past. You can tell me what you’ve been and done, if you choose, but I’d rather you didn’t. I’ll gamble on you.”
“Did you hev this in mind when you got me oot of jail an’ mebbe saved my neck?”
“My memory is hazy on that point. I remember my trouble seemed so unendurable that I wanted to help some other poor devil. And I got you out of your fix. Then came my drunken spree, about which I can recollect but little. After that, then, the idea grew, and finally I brought you out here.”
While Wess Kintell pondered the matter, Paul watched him unobtrusively, conscious again of a return of the warm feeling the cowboy had stirred in him. No other person or thing had roused such a semblance of warmth in Paul Manning since the shock that had changed him. And he wanted to hold on to it. He yearned to recapture the old significance of life, the hope and joy that had been his, the love of adventure, the ambition to become a writer, the undaunted challenge to the future, to all that he had been before. . . . But at the moment he could not bring himself to again think over the long ruinous story of his relationship with Amy, and he shut the painful memories out of his mind.
This Texan, if he could be won over, appeared to be a man to tie to. He was a superb figure of a rider, tall, wide-shouldered, small-hipped and wiry, scarcely beyond his teens in years, yet exhibiting in his lean, lined face the sadness, the reckless hardness of maturity developed by life on the ranges.
“Wal, Manning, no man ever did so much for a stranger, an’ for Wess Kintell, as what you did,” the cowboy said with a slow and forceful earnestness. “I’ve shore been a hard nut, but to myself it always seemed every man’s hand, an’ every turn of luck was set against me. I wondered why you took it on yoreself to help me oot of the rottenest mess I was ever in. An’ you’ve told me, yore trouble was so great thet you had to help some other fellar in trouble. Thet’s a new idee, but I understand it. . . . An’ heah’s my hand, if you’ll take it, for all thet’s good in Wess Kintell.”
Paul felt a significance in the steellike grip of the cowboy’s lean brown hand, and the gray eyes that met his piercingly. The moment and the place were not commonplace. Something deep and intangible vibrated from that viselike hand-clasp along Paul’s nerves.
“Wess, I’m glad you are making a big issue of this moment,” he replied. “I recognize it, though I may not be able yet to rise to it. . . . I’ve been down so long. This wild idea of mine—to fight it out here in this desert—may be futile.”
“Wal, if the desert doesn’t kill you it shore will cure,” responded the Texan. “Yore bet is a good one. . . . May I ask, jest what yore trouble was? I’ve seen some drunks in my day, but thet last one of yore’s beat them all hollow. I shore was curious aboot you, after you got me oot. I heahed you never was strong for likker until this time. You ain’t a drinkin’ man, I know. Jest one turrible drunk . . . ! What was to blame, Manning? Now, don’t feel bad aboot comin’ clean with it. Mebbe gettin’ it oot will help. Anyway, then I’ll understand an’ never speak of it again.”
Paul bent over to hide his face from the other’s kind and searching gaze. To open that closed wound, to feel again the pang and the sting were not easy. But sooner or later he knew Kintell would want the truth.
“It was—a woman,” he finally said awkwardly.
“Wal, I reckoned so. Someone you loved an’ lost?”
“Yes.”
“Ah-huh. That happened to me onct. It only comes onct, the real genuine article. Thet was what made me a rollin’ stone. I shot the man . . . Wal, never mind aboot thet. . . . Did yore girl die?”
“No. She was—faithless.”
“Aw . . . ! Thet’s even wuss. . . . An’ pard, I’ll bet she was thet gold-haired dame you used to be seen with last fall. It comes back to me now.”
“Yes. She was the one.”
“Wal, no wonder! Thet girl was the loveliest I ever seen. I’d jest come to Wagontongue aboot thet time, an’ I shore recollect her. I seen her often. Not too tall an’ real slim, but say what a shape! An’ she had eyes thet could bore through a feller. Big brown eyes, wonderful bold an’ bright. She was not afraid to look at anyone, thet girl.”
“No doubt of the accuracy of your memory, Wess,” replied Paul.
“An’ she ran oot on you. . . !”
Kintell looked away across the desert. His lean brown jaw set hard. Paul divined that his admission had somehow pierced the cool, baffling armor of the Texan, and at that moment Paul could almost feel the intentness of the man, and something else that seemed imponderable, hard, even ruthless about him. The cowboy would not have taken such an episode lying down.
There was such a thing as revenge. Kintell had answered to that. The thought sent a hot gust, like a wave of fire, over Paul. . . . There had been a rival. All the time there had been a lover. But as swiftly as it had come the heat in his veins cooled.
The Texan spread a slow hand toward Black Mesa and the wide desert beyond—somehow reminiscent of the eloquent gesture of an Indian.
“An’ you reckon all this heah will ease you?” he queried.
Paul nodded. Ease him! He gazed down into the shallow gulch with its banks scarred by avalanches, its jumble of huge boulders, at the green-bordered pool shining yet strangely dark under the sun, at the mossy cliff with its streaks of gray, at the dark-portaled trading post among the cedars on the knoll, at the frowning black front of the mesa, wild in its magnificence of ruin, with its bleak rim reaching skyward. Then his eyes swept farther out to the gray desert, and once again he felt the strange, vague kinship with this desolation that had prompted his rash and inexplicable step.
“Quién sabe?” muttered the Texan, simply, as if he were alone. “Bitter water, hard as the hinges on the gates of hell. Stunted cedar an’ sage. Rocks forever an’ thet wasteland oot there. A black mountain with the face of the devil. A tradin’ post over the reservation line. A wretched lot of Indians, stuck for life in this ghastly hole. Haw, haw. . . ! Thet’s the ticket, an’ my friend wants to live heah!”
It seemed beyond the Texan’s comprehension. “Manning,” he went on, “I’ve rode this country. The human bein’s who live oot heah don’t count. Nature rules heah. This desert will be locked in snow an’ ice in winter, the coldest,