Shadow on the Trail Read online

  A silence ensued, Wade sat on a box, gazing sphinxlike into the fire, his face thin and worn, his eyes somber. Elwood stood beside the window gazing out upon the bleak landscape. The cowboys had listened respectfully without the least expression of emotion. Hogue Kinsey gazed at Rona with a strange yearning in his eyes. Perhaps none but Wade saw the look Rona bestowed upon the cowboy.

  “Brandon, will you leave?” asked Pencarrow, driven by the silence.

  “If you need to ask—no!” replied Wade, without glancing up. His voice rang like steel.

  The rancher turned from Wade to Kinsey, and repeated the query.

  “Mr. Pencarrow, I’ll stick,” replied the cowboy, quietly.

  “Me too,” said Jerry.

  “Shucks, we ain’t begun to fight,” added Bilt Wood, laconically.

  The half-breed was slower to reply, his black eyes glittering:

  “Boss, I’m half Indian an’ never quit a trail.”

  That left Kid Marshall, the bowlegged little desperado of the group, always dry, cool, humorous, long-winded.

  “You couldn’t drive me away, Mr. Pencarrow,” he said. “Somehow we jest fit here. An’ it ain’t all Tex, either. I never seen any folks I liked to work for so much. Then this cabin is shore a cheerful camp for us. We’re gonna start huntin’ our winter supply of meat. Deer, elk, turkey—all hung up under the pines to freeze! There won’t be much work an’ plenty of fun. Among us there’s more money than we ever seen before. Shore it’ll go from one to another, though I reckon thet when spring comes I’ll have most of it. . . . But leavin’ all else aside the thing thet nails us here is the deal these hombres have given you. We admire you for standin’ pat when most any rancher would quit. We think powerful much of Hal an’ the girls for their nerve an’ loyalty to you. . . . An’ short an’ sweet, Mr. Pencarrow, we boys have joined hands with Tex an’ we know, if you an’ everybody else don’t, thet we’re gonna kill Blue an’ Harrobin.”

  Pencarrow, red and flustered, spread his hands to Brandon.

  “So we’re goin’ on cattle raisin’?” he asked gruffly.

  “We are. All this loss and labor and trouble has just been practice. We won’t make the same mistakes twice. These rustlers will make the same mistake too many times.”

  “Wal, I don’t know what to say,” rejoined Pencarrow, helplessly.

  “Dad, there’s nothing to say, except that we understand,” said Jacqueline, her dark eyes eloquently upon Wade. The girls went out with their father. Rona had a last look at Hogue, to that worthy’s confusion. Then Wade followed to close the door of the bunkhouse.

  “Pencarrow, it’d have been a pity to break up that outfit,” he said, feelingly.

  “I’m beat, Brandon. But to be honest I’m shore happy you’re all stayin’ on. I’ll get up an’ fight again.”

  “Good night, Tex,” spoke up Rona, archly, “you’re a fine hombre.”

  “Good night, Star Eyes,” replied Wade. “I’m afraid you worked havoc among my cowboys.”

  “Just you wait,” laughed Rona.

  Wade turned off on the trail through the snow toward his cabin. “I’ll walk over with you,” said Jacqueline, as casually as if she had been doing that regularly. She slipped her gloved hand inside his arm. If she had not been on his right, Wade believed she could have felt the great bound of his heart. He was many things besides being dazzled. There was no help for it. She meant to make him her friend. He could not insult her again. She walked in silence, her heavy buckskins crunching the half frozen snow. The sun had set pale and cold in the west; a dull wind blew from the north; calves were bawling in the pasture.

  “You had them well coached,” said Jacqueline.

  “Who?”

  “Your cowboys. They like us all, no doubt, as Kid Marshall said. But it is you who has. . . .”

  She broke off, and then presently: “Did you see Hogue’s eyes on Rona?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you catch her looking at him?”

  “That would have been hard to miss.”

  “Oh, dear! . . . My heart is fighting with my reason—my pride.”

  “Why?”

  “I could almost love that handsome devil myself.”

  Wade laughed, and it seemed to ease the vise-like pressure in his breast.

  “It’s always different when we make blunders ourselves.”

  She was silent again for quite a time, then she queried simply:

  “Will you come to supper tonight?”

  “No—thank you,” he replied, surprised into confusion.

  “Won’t you ever come—Tex?”

  “I—I think not.”

  “We are facing a long cold hard winter. . . . I’ll be lonely.”

  “You will indeed. . . . It’s a pity town is shut off. You and Rona need friends—some fun—excitement. It’ll be a long time before you’ll have neighbors on this range.”

  “I’ll be a little old lady with a lace cap and a querulous voice. . . . But I shall not miss town acquaintances. You remember what I told John McComb?”

  “Yes, he understands, apparently. I felt sorry for him. You were cruel. He’s desperately in love with you.”

  “Not cruel, but kind.”

  They reached his porch, and as Wade stepped up Jacqueline’s hand slipped from his arm. She remained standing below, looking up. Her lovely face, cold like pearl, was lit by great eyes of dark fire. Wade distrusted the moment; he dreaded the tiger in ambush within him; he had to look at her and he was afraid to.

  “If I were frozen—would you ask me in?” she inquired, calmly.

  “What a question! Certainly I would.”

  “Well, I am frozen.”

  “You! With that fleece-lined leather coat—your woolen dress—and heavy boots?” he ejaculated, feeling as silly and inadequate as his words.

  “I did not mean frozen by the snow and wind.”

  Wade felt helplessly unable to reply to this. He had further realization of the danger of being with her.

  “Brandon, I was hateful to you for a long time.”

  “Perhaps that was right—and best.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m particularly sorry I stooped so low as to flirt with John McComb. It failed of its purpose—and no doubt gave him the encouragement I later had to deny.”

  Wade looked the intense surprise and curiosity that he refused to voice.

  “Didn’t you guess why?”

  Wade shook his head.

  “I wanted to make you jealous.”

  “Well! . . .” he burst out, and halted, as if strangled. His veins seemed to swell with blood unable to flow freely.

  “You’re the only man of all that have come here—who—who never saw me,” she confessed, frankly. “I liked it at first. Now I don’t like it so much. It has been good for my vanity. . . . I shall continue to ask you to come to dinner—and to talk to me a little afterward. Won’t you? It’d be a kindness if no more.”

  “I told you—no,” he answered, sadly.

  “But don’t you like me at all?” she flashed, incredulously and wonderingly, stung by his persistence.

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “But don’t you?”

  “Yes. I—I like you, admire you, respect you more than words can tell.”

  “You do not!” she exclaimed, petulantly.

  She was irresistible. Wade divined the imperative need of cutting short this colloquy.

  “I must—since I’m going to die in your service presently,” he said, brutally.

  “Oh!” she cried, as if torn. He went on. “You have common sense, if you stop to think. What could you expect? It’s a hundred to one that I’ll be shot before I clean out these rustlers’ nests. Think! Suppose I more than liked you—or infinitely more, suppose you more than like me, which is ridiculous. It would soften me, shake my nerve—and I’d be easy game for Kent or some other gunman before I could save your father. . . . Try to see it that way. Good night.”


  When the hunting was over, Wade’s cowboys had little work outside of mending saddles, bridles, harness, and chopping wood, on which last they gambled as they did on everything.

  For Wade to be with them was to stay young. But he had a grave problem which gripped him as soon as he faced it, and which left little time for the cowboys.

  That problem was whether or not to spend the hidden fortune on cattle to throw upon Cedar Ranch Range.

  There had been a time when he repudiated the idea, scorned it, drove it from his consciousness. But one thing or another brought it back. The still small voice of conscience augmented into a thundering denial, yet the temptation kept pace with it. Some perverse devil argued with him, nagged him relentlessly, told him that it did not matter how he saved Pencarrow so long as he saved him. If it were dishonorable to use this ill-gotten wealth to save the rancher, and indirectly his gallant boy and lovely daughters, such dishonor could fall only upon him, should he ever be found out. Since he asked nothing for himself, how could his act be selfish or base?

  Wade feared he had lived so long with dishonest men that he did not know right from wrong. Hours he brooded before his fire over this puzzling moral side of his dilemma.

  There would come an hour, often in the dead of night, when he believed he had conquered the temptation, and he rejoiced in his decision. Nevertheless the next day or night the old insidious demanding whispers would be back at his ears.

  Every day he weakened in all save passion. The cowboys worried in vain about him. Sweet advances from Jacqueline left him cold. His avoidance of her could not have failed to be observed. Perhaps she saw this and was hurt, because she ceased openly to go out of her way to speak to him. But often when he returned to his cabin from a tramp in the snow down to Lightfoot’s place, or from a visit to the cowboys’ bunkhouse, he would find an apple pie or some like toothsome delicacy on his table. And many times a day he would look out of his window to see Jacqueline at hers, watching for him. This worked upon Wade so disastrously that for the time being he was incapable of clear thought. What an idiot he was to form the idea that she cared for him! Of all his torturing thoughts this one he most passionately dismissed. It was nothing—this pale sweet face of hers at the window—those dark eyes, seen even at that distance like deep gulfs—this watching so often, and especially from sunset to dusk when he returned from his work to his cabin, —all meant nothing except that she was lovely, and she worried about him because he had said he must die in her service.

  That trial did not help him in his ordeal, nor did the gradual loss of hope of Pencarrow, nor the wistful pathos of Rona, nor Hal’s failure to hide his dread in gaiety. Nor did the talk of the cowboys, thrilling and loyal and caustic as it was. He had inflamed them with his desire, trained their young hard minds to fear nothing, to hate thieves, and to burn with blood lust. They would talk for hours, planning, creating ways to meet every possible situation that might arise with the rustlers. On pleasant sunny days they would have a shooting match upon which stern practice they made wagers. Nor did Wade’s own incessant practice at throwing his gun contribute in any way to a heightening of his moral perception. No gunman ever practiced so relentlessly, so strung with passionless intensity, so coldly, swiftly, surely toward a longed-for meeting. Those winter days made Wade matchless in his speed, his physical perception, his genius to slay.

  Christmas Eve brought a surprise in shape of a dinner to the cowboys, kept secret until the very day. The boys whooped with joy, then lapsed into awe, and finally grew scared. But Hogue Kinsey swore he would beat into a jelly any one of them who dared flunk on that occasion. Wade felt both wretched and happy because he could not evade this invitation; he had to go when peace on earth and good will to men was the farthest thing from his mind; when at the peak of his temptation, divided between honor and dishonor, he knew he must see Jacqueline as he had never seen her.

  But he went, forgetting himself, glad for the pleasure of these hard homeless cowboys, to whom Christmas usually meant nothing but a debauch at some vile wayside inn. The Pencarrows made it merry for their guests. There was a heap of gifts under the Christmas tree, which told of some one’s thoughtfulness far in the past. The dinner was such as to make the cowboys eat as if it were to be the last time in their lives. Rona in a long white gown, new to the cowboys, appeared to have been transformed into a lovely radiant young woman. As for Jacqueline, who also wore white—a gown cut low and without sleeves—she seemed to Wade to move and speak from a glamorous haze. Her beauty when he first saw her that night had blinded him. Her shining eyes, dark as midnight, hiding with gladness some secret, gave his love an insupportable impetus. She had smiled at him, had given her hand, had called him Tex; and seemed to mean that she had dressed thus for him alone.

  After the dinner Kid Marshall was the only cowboy who could respond to Jacqueline’s merry call for a speech. Kid saw the opportunity of his life, one that he knew he would be unable to grasp. But he was valiant.

  “Our lovely hostesses, an’ our good boss,” he said, “We shore thank you for this grand feast, an’ more for the kindness of your hearts. It will never be forgotten by one of us. It has fetched into our lives somethin’ different. We, who for years have had no home, no mother, no sisters, no thought of Christ, will be the better for this gatherin’ at your table, for the human thought of us. Shore, when another Christmas rolls around some of us will be missin’. But to have been present here, to be made to feel worth kindness, to have the privilege of fightin’ for this family, will change our very lives. It will make us forget thet we have been drifters of the range, outcasts who had no hope of good, an’ we will be happy to die for you if thet must be.”

  Marshall’s pathos added the only sad touch to thet merry evening—a reminder of the stern menace that hung over Brandon and his riders.

  At parting Jacqueline pressed Wade’s hand, and with a dancing devil in her dark eyes she said: “After all, I succeeded in getting you to come to dinner, didn’t I?”

  “Indeed you did. Yet I—must thank you for something I feel and cannot speak.”

  “Was it so terrible?”

  Then Wade looked at her, with all the fire and force of his nature roused to passion. “Yes. For me it was terrible,” he said. “But I could have endured more for these cowboys—for what Kid Marshall said it meant to them.”

  “Terrible?” she whispered, pale in the lamplight that flared through the door. His words had shocked her.

  “I shall find it harder to be a man,” he returned simply, with regret.

  After that night his was a losing struggle. He knew it and suffered. All that he had done to keep true to the promise he had made his father seemed to totter in the balance. At the last, when Simm Bell sat dying, propped against that tree with his guns ready, he had seen clearly the bitter way of his life and the only hope for his son, and he had risen to the heights in his entreaty.

  That Christmas night Wade sat before the dying embers of his fire, wretched and elated by turns, trying to end this battle one way or the other. And at a date hour when he crawled into his blankets he had not come to a decision.

  The days passed, grew longer, and the sun warmer. All the south slopes were bare. March found the range showing a touch of green. Down on Lightfoot’s protected farm the mockingbirds had come back to sing.

  Wade welcomed the end of the long winter. The last few weeks he had been almost a recluse. He awaited the wearing out of his will or an illumination of mind.

  While practicing with his gun one day—a habit that had become almost mechanical—a thought, a query, coming from no source he divined, halted him. If he were killed presently in the meeting with Kent, what would become of all that money he had hidden. It would mold in the ground. It would do no good to make amends for its evil. It would be wasted.

  “It should be put to good use before I meet Kent,” he soliloquized. And he became lost in profound thought. The bell that called the cowboys to supper did not stir Wade. He sat in th
e dusk before the red embers of his neglected fire. And all at once he had a slight strange tremor. In his morbid state Wade took it as an omen of his own death. He would be killed this coming summer. And it magnified his hatred of these cattle thieves and his passion to break their strangle hold on that Arizona range. Also it brought out clearly and vividly from the darkness of his mind the thing that he must do. He would restore Pencarrow’s lost property, and therewith the happiness of his family. He would save Jacqueline from poverty, from being driven to sacrifice herself in marriage, perhaps even from being dragged from her home to the dens of these conscienceless outlaws.

  Wade seemed to come out of a nightmare. His thought quickened, his feeling eased from a cold clamp. What if he had been 1he son of a robber, and a robber himself? What if he were wrong in saving the Pencarrows with stolen money? Jacqueline would never know. His death would end forever any chance of his being indentified as Wade Holden, the thief and killer whom Mahaffey and his Texas Rangers had sworn to ride down. Rand Blue would recognize Wade, of that he was deadly certain, but it would then be too late for betrayal. Blue’s curse of amaze and fear, his yell of recognition, would be strangled in his throat.

  It was over—the long ordeal. He had fallen, but was happy in his debasement. His love for Jacqueline, his resolve to pay his debt to her, were stronger than honor, than his promise to his father, than his slow evolution toward an honest life. That was all there was to it. He had found himself at last. And as if by magic he attained the old cool unassailable spirit. He stood up and shook himself as if to rid himself of a shell, and he threw open his door as if to drive out the other side of him—that boy who still dreamed and hoped.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WADE had ridden up to the Pencarrow ranch house at different times and with varied emotions, but the whole sum of them could not compare with his state this lovely May morning, when, after watching eighteen thousand head of dusty tired cattle stream by down into the range, he rode slowly toward the porch.