Tonto Basin Page 3

  She seemed moody now and a note of detachment crept into her voice. Jean rose at once and went for his horse. If this girl did not desire to talk further, he certainly had no wish to annoy her. His mule had strayed off among the bleating sheep. Jean drove it back, and then led his horse up to where the girl stood. She appeared taller, and although not of robust build she was vigorous and lithe, with something about her that fitted the place. Jean was loathe to bid her good bye.

  “Which way is the Tonto Rim?” he asked, turning to his saddle girths.

  “South,” she replied, pointing. “It’s only a mile or so. I’ll walk down with you. Suppose you’re on your way to Grass Valley?”

  “Yes, I’ve relatives there,” he returned. He dreaded her next question, which he suspected would concern his name. But she did not ask. Taking up her rifle, she turned away. Jean strode ahead to her side. “Reckon if you walk, I won’t ride.”

  So he found himself beside a girl with the free step of a mountaineer. Her bare brown head came up nearly to his shoulder. It was a small, pretty head, graceful, well held, and the thick hair on it was a shiny soft brown. She wore it in a braid, rather untidily and tangled he thought, and it was tied with a string of buckskin. Altogether her apparel proclaimed poverty.

  Jean let the conversation languish for a little. He wanted to think what to say presently, and then he felt a rather vague pleasure in stalking beside her. Her profile was straight-cut and exquisite in line. From this side view the soft curve of lips could not be seen.

  She made several attempts to start conversation, all of which Jean ignored, manifestly to her growing constraint. Presently Jean, having decided what he wanted to say, suddenly began: “I like this adventure. Do you?”

  “Adventure! Meetin’ me in the woods?” And she laughed the laugh of youth. “Shore you must be hard up for adventure, stranger.”

  “Do you like it?” he persisted. And his eyes searched the half-averted face.

  “I might like it,” she answered frankly, “if … if my temper had not made a fool of me. I never meet anyone I care to talk to. Why should it not be … be pleasant to run across someone new … someone strange in this heah wild country.”

  “We are as we are,” said Jean simply. “I didn’t think you made a fool of yourself. If I thought so, would I want to see you again?”

  “Do you?” The brown face flashed at him with surprise, with a light he took for gladness. Because he wanted to appear calm and friendly, not too eager, he had to deny himself the thrill of meeting those changing eyes.

  “Sure I do. Reckon I’m overbold on such short acquaintance. But I might not have another chance to tell you. So please don’t hold it against me.”

  This declaration over, Jean felt relief, and something of exultation. He had been afraid he might not have the courage to make it. She walked on as before, only with her head bowed a little and her eyes downcast. No color but the gold-brown tan and the blue tracery of veins showed in her cheeks. He noticed then a slight swelling quiver of her throat, and he became alive to its graceful contour and to how full and pulsating it was, how nobly it set into the curve of her shoulder. Here in her quivering throat was the weakness of her, the evidence of her sex, the womanliness that belied the mountaineer’s stride and the grasp of strong brown hands on a rifle. It had an effect on Jean totally unaccountable to him, both in the strange warmth that stole over him and in the utterance he could not hold back.

  “Girl, we’re strangers, but what of that? We’ve met, an’ I tell you it means somethin’ to me. I’ve known girls for months an’ never felt this way. I don’t know who you are an’ I don’t care. You betrayed a good deal to me. You’re not happy. You’re lonely. An’ if I didn’t want to see you again for my own sake, I would for yours. Some things you said I’ll not forget soon. I’ve got a sister, an’ I know you have no brother. An’ I reckon.…”

  At this juncture, Jean, in his earnestness and quite without thought, grabbed her hand. The contact checked the flow of his speech and suddenly made him aghast at his temerity. But the girl did not make any effort to withdraw it. So Jean, inhaling a deep breath and trying to see through his bewilderment, held on bravely. Jean imagined he felt a faint, warm returning pressure. She was young, she was friendless, she was human. By this hand in his, Jean felt more than ever the loneliness of her. Then, just as he was about to speak again, she pulled her hand free.

  “Heah’s the Tonto Rim,” she said in her quaint Southern drawl. “An’ there’s your Tonto Basin.”

  Jean had been intent only on the girl. He had kept step beside her without taking note of what was ahead of him. At her words he looked up expectantly, to be struck mute.

  He felt a sheer force, a downward drawing of an immense abyss beneath him. As he looked afar, he saw a black basin of timbered country, the darkest, wildest, and ruggedest he had ever gazed upon, a hundred miles of blue distance across to an upflung mountain range, hazy purple against the sky. It seemed to be a stupendous gulf surrounded on three sides by bold, undulating lines of peaks and on his side by a wall so high that he felt lifted aloft on the rim of the sky.

  “Southeast you see the Sierra Anchas,” said the girl, pointing. “That notch in the range is the pass where sheep are driven to Phoenix and Maricopa. Those big rough mountains to the south are the Mazatzals. ’Round to the west is the Four Peaks Range. An’ you’re standin’ on the Tonto Rim.”

  Jean could not see at first just what the rim was, but by shifting his gaze westward he grasped this remarkable phenomenon of nature. For leagues and leagues a colossal red and yellow wall, a rampart, a mountain-faced cliff seemed to zigzag westward. Grand and bold were the promontories reaching out over the void. They ran toward the westering sun. Sweeping and impressive were the long lines slanting away from them, sloping darkly spotted down to merge into the black timber. Jean had never seen such a wild and rugged manifestation of nature’s depths and upheavals. He was held mute.

  “Stranger, look down,” said the girl.

  Jean’s sight was educated to judge heights and depths and distances. This wall on which he stood sheered precipitously down, so far that it made him dizzy to look, and then the craggy, broken cliffs merged into red-sided, cedar-greened slopes running down and down into gorges choked with forests and from which soared up a roar of rushing waters. Slope after slope, ridge beyond ridge, cañon merging into cañon—so the tremendous bowl sank away to its black, deceiving depths, a wilderness across which travel seemed impossible.

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Jean.

  “Indeed it is,” murmured the girl. “Shore that is Arizona. I reckon I love this. The heights an’ depths … the awfulness of its wildness!”

  “An’ you want to leave it?”

  “Yes an’ no. I don’t deny the peace that comes to me heah. But not often do I see the basin, an’ for that matter one doesn’t live on grand scenery.”

  “Child, even once in a while … this sight would cure any misery, if you only see. I’m glad I came. I’m glad you showed it to me first!”

  She, too, seemed under the spell of a vastness and loneliness and beauty and grandeur that could not but strike the heart.

  Jean took her hand again. “Girl, say you will meet me here,” he said, his voice ringing deeply in his ears.

  “Shore I will,” she replied softly, and turned to him. It seemed then that Jean saw her face for the first time. She was beautiful as he had never known beauty. Limned against that scene she gave it life—wild, sweet, young life—the poignant meaning of which haunted yet eluded him. But she belonged there. Her eyes were again searching his, as if for some lost part of herself, unrealized, never known before. Wondering, wistful, hopeful, glad—they were eyes that seemed, surprised, to reveal part of her soul.

  When her red lips parted, their tremulous movement was a magnet to Jean. An invisible and mighty force pulled him down to kiss them. Whatever the spell had been, that rude unconscious action broke it.

  “Heavens!” He jerked away, as if he expected to be struck. “Girl, I … I,” he gasped in amazement and sudden, dawning contrition. “I kissed you … but I swear it wasn’t intentional … I never thought.…”

  The anger that Jean anticipated failed to materialize. He stood, breathing hard, with a hand held out in unconscious appeal. By the same magic, perhaps, that had transfigured her a moment past, she was now invested again by the older character.

  “Shore, I reckon my callin’ you a gentleman was a little previous,” she said with a rather dry brittleness. “But, stranger, you’re sudden.”

  “You’re not insulted?” asked Jean hurriedly.

  “Oh, I’ve been kissed before. Shore men are all alike.”

  “They’re not,” he replied hotly, with a subtle rush of disillusion, a dulling of enchantment. “Don’t you class me with other men who’ve kissed you. I wasn’t myself when I did it … an’ I’d have gone on my knees to ask your forgiveness … but now I wouldn’t … an’ I wouldn’t kiss you again, either … even if you … you wanted it.”

  Jean read in her strange gaze what seemed to him a vague doubt, as if she was questioning herself.

  “Miss, I take that back,” added Jean shortly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. It was a mean trick for me to kiss you. A girl alone in the woods who’s gone out of her way to be kind to me! I don’t know why I forgot my manners. An’ I ask your pardon.”

  She looked away then, and presently pointed far out and down into the Tonto Basin. “There’s Grass Valley. That long gray spot in the black. It’s about fifteen miles. Ride along the rim that way till you cross a trail. Shore you can’t miss it. Then go down.”

  “I’m much obliged to you,” replied Jean, reluctantly accepting what he regarded as his dismissal. Turning his horse, he put his foot in the stirrup, then, hesitating, he looked across the saddle at the girl. Her abstraction, as she gazed away over the purple depths, suggested loneliness and wistfulness. She was not thinking of that scene spread so wondrously before her. It struck Jean she might be pondering a subtle change in his feeling and attitude, something he was conscious of, yet could not define.

  “Reckon this is good bye,” he said with hesitation.

  “Adiós, señor,” she replied, facing him again. She lifted the little carbine to the bottom of her elbow and, half turning, appeared ready to depart.

  “Adiós means good bye?” he queried.

  “Yes, good bye till tomorrow or good bye forever. Take it as you like.”

  “Then you’ll meet me here day after tomorrow?” How eagerly he spoke, on impulse, without a consideration of the intangible thing that had changed him.

  “Did I say I wouldn’t?”

  “No. But I reckoned you’d not care to … after … ,” he replied, breaking off in some confusion.

  “Shore I’ll be glad to meet you. Day after tomorrow about mid-afternoon. Right heah. Fetch all the news from Grass Valley.”

  “All right. Thanks. That’ll be … fine,” replied Jean, and, as he spoke, he experienced a buoyant thrill, a pleasant lightness of enthusiasm, much as always stirred boyishly in him at a prospect of adventure. Before it passed he wondered at it and felt unsure of himself. He needed to think.

  “Stranger, shore I’m not recollectin’ that you told me who you are,” she said.

  “No, reckon I didn’t tell,” he returned. “What difference does that make? I said I didn’t care who or what you are. Can’t you feel the same about me?”

  “Shore … I felt that way,” she replied, somewhat nonplussed, with the level brown gaze steadily on his face. “But now you make me think.”

  “Let’s meet without knowin’ any more about each other than we do now.”

  “Shore. I’d like that. In this big wild Arizona a girl … an’ I reckon a man … feels so insignificant. What’s a name, anyhow? Still, people an’ things have to be distinguished. I’ll call you ‘Stranger’ an’ be satisfied … if you say it’s fair for you not to tell me who you are.”

  “Fair! No, it’s not,” declared Jean, forced to confession. “My name’s Jean … Jean Isbel.”

  “Isbel!” she exclaimed with a violent start. “Shore you can’t be son of old Gass Isbel.… I’ve seen both his sons.”

  “He has three,” replied Jean with relief, now the secret was out. “I’m the youngest. I’m twenty-four. Never been out of Oregon till now. On my way.…”

  The brown color slowly faded out of her face, leaving her quite pale, with eyes that began to blaze. The suppleness of her seemed to stiffen.

  “My name’s Ellen Jorth,” she burst out passionately. “Does it mean anythin’ to you?”

  “Never heard it in my life,” protested Jean. “Sure I reckoned you belonged to the sheep raisers who’re on the outs with my father. That’s why I had to tell you I’m Jean Isbel. But, honest, I never heard of you or anyone by the name of Jorth.… Ellen Jorth. It’s strange an’ pretty.… Reckon I can be just as good a … a friend to you.…”

  “No Isbel can ever be a friend to me,” she said with bitter coldness. Stripped of her ease and her soft wistfulness, she stood before him one instant entirely another girl, a hostile enemy. Then she wheeled and strode off into the woods.

  Jean, in consternation, watched her swiftly draw away with her lithe, free step, wanting to follow her, wanting to call to her, but the resentment roused by her suddenly avowed hostility held him mute in his tracks. He watched her disappear, and, when the brown and green wall of forest swallowed the slender gray form, he fought against the insistent desire to follow her, and fought in vain.

  Chapter Two

  Ellen Jorth’s moccasined feet did not leave a distinguishable trail on the springy pine needle covering of the ground, and Jean could not find any trace of her. A little futile searching to and fro cooled his impulse and called pride to his rescue. Returning to his horse, he mounted, rode out behind the pack mule to start it along, and soon felt the relief of decision and action. Clumps of small pines grew thickly in spots on the Tonto Rim, making it necessary for him to skirt them, at which times he lost sight of the purple basin. Every time he came back to an opening through which he could see the wild ruggedness and colors and distances, his appreciation of their nature grew on him. Arizona from Yuma to the Little Colorado had been to him an endless waste of wind-scoured, sun-blasted barrenness. This black-forested, rock-rimmed land of untrodden ways was a world that in itself would satisfy him. Some instinct in Jean called for a lonely wild land, of fastnesses into which he could roam at will, and be the other strange self that he had always yearned to be but had never been.

  Every few moments there intruded into his flowing consciousness the flashing face of Ellen Jorth, the way she had looked at him, the things she had said. “Reckon I was a fool,” he soliloquized with an acute sense of humiliation. “She never saw how much in earnest I was.” Jean began to remember the circumstances with a vividness that disturbed and perplexed him.

  The accident of running across such a girl in that lonely place might be out of the ordinary, but it had happened. Surprise had made him dull. The charm of her appearance, the appeal of her manner, must have drawn him at the very first, but he had not recognized that. Only at her words—“Oh, I’ve been kissed before.”—had his feelings been checked in their heedless progress, and the utterance of them had made a difference he now sought to analyze. Some personality in him, some voice, some idea had begun to defend her even before he was conscious that he had arraigned her before the bar of his judgment. Such defense seemed clamoring in him now and he forced himself to listen. He wanted, in his hurt pride, to justify his amazing surrender to a sweet and sentimental impulse.

  He realized now that at first glance he should have recognized in her look, her poise, her voice the quality he called thoroughbred. Ragged and stained apparel did not prove her of a common sort. Jean had known a number of fine and wholesome girls of good family, and he remembered his sister. This Ellen Jorth was that kind of a girl, irrespective of her present environment. Jean championed her loyally, even after he had gratified his selfish pride.

  It was then—contending with an intangible and stealing glamour, unreal and fanciful, like the dream of a forbidden enchantment—that Jean arrived at the part in the little woodland drama where he had kissed Ellen Jorth and had been unrebuked. Why had she not resented his action? Dispelled was the illusion he had been dreamily and nobly constructing. Oh, I’ve been kissed before! The shock to him now exceeded his first dismay. Half bitterly she had spoken, and wholly scornful of herself, or of him, or of all men, for she had said all men were alike. Jean chafed under the smart of that, a taunt every decent man hated. Naturally every happy and healthy young man would want to kiss such red sweet lips. But if those lips had been for others—never for him! Jean reflected that not since childish games had he kissed a girl—until this brown-faced Ellen Jorth came his way. He wondered at it. Moreover he wondered at the significance he placed upon it. After all, was it not merely an accident? Why should he remember? Why should he ponder? What was the faint, deep, growing thrill that accompanied some of his thoughts?

  Riding along with busy mind, Jean almost crossed a well-beaten trail, leading through a pine thicket and down over the rim. Jean’s pack mule led the way without being driven. When Jean reached the edge of the bluff, one look down was enough to fetch him off his horse. That trail was steep, narrow, clogged with stones, and as full of sharp corners as a cross-cut saw. Once on the descent with a packed mule and a spirited horse, Jean had no time for mind-wanderings and very little for occasional glimpses out over the cedar tops to the vast blue hollow, asleep under a westering sun.

  The stones rattled, the dust rose, the cedar twigs snapped, the little avalanches of red earth slid down, the iron-shod hoofs rang on the rocks. This slope had been narrow at the apex in the rim where the trail led down a crack, and it widened in fan-shape as Jean descended. He zigzagged down a thousand feet before the slope benched into dividing ridges. Here the cedars and junipers failed and pines once more hid the sun. Deep ravines were black with brush. From somewhere rose a roar of running water, most pleasant to Jean’s ears. Fresh deer and bear tracks covered old ones made in the trail.