Authors: To the Last Man
Unarmed, and hindered by a painful wound, Jean had kept a vigil near
camp all that silent and menacing night. Morning disclosed Gordon and
Fredericks stark and ghastly beside the burned-out camp-fire, their
guns clutched immovably in stiffened hands. Jean buried them as best
he could, and when they were under ground with flat stones on their
graves he knew himself to be indeed the last of the Isbel clan. And
all that was wild and savage in his blood and desperate in his spirit
rose to make him more than man and less than human. Then for the third
time during these tragic last days the wolf-dog Shepp came to him.
Jean washed the wound Queen had given him and bound it tightly. The
keen pang and burn of the lead was a constant and all-powerful reminder
of the grim work left for him to do. The whole world was no longer
large enough for him and whoever was left of the Jorths. The heritage
of blood his father had bequeathed him, the unshakable love for a
worthless girl who had so dwarfed and obstructed his will and so
bitterly defeated and reviled his poor, romantic, boyish faith, the
killing of hostile men, so strange in its after effects, the pursuits
and fights, and loss of one by one of his confederates—these had
finally engendered in Jean Isbel a wild, unslakable thirst, these had
been the cause of his retrogression, these had unalterably and
ruthlessly fixed in his darkened mind one fierce passion—to live and
die the last man of that Jorth-Isbel feud.
At sunrise Jean left this camp, taking with him only a small knapsack
of meat and bread, and with the eager, wild Shepp in leash he set out
on Queen's bloody trail.
Black drops of blood on the stones and an irregular trail of footprints
proved to Jean that the gunman was hard hit. Here he had fallen, or
knelt, or sat down, evidently to bind his wounds. Jean found strips of
scarf, red and discarded. And the blood drops failed to show on more
rocks. In a deep forest of spruce, under silver-tipped spreading
branches, Queen had rested, perhaps slept. Then laboring with dragging
steps, not improbably with a lame leg, he had gone on, up out of the
dark-green ravine to the open, dry, pine-tipped ridge. Here he had
rested, perhaps waited to see if he were pursued. From that point his
trail spoke an easy language for Jean's keen eye. The gunman knew he
was pursued. He had seen his enemy. Therefore Jean proceeded with a
slow caution, never getting within revolver range of ambush, using all
his woodcraft to trail this man and yet save himself. Queen traveled
slowly, either because he was wounded or else because he tried to
ambush his pursuer, and Jean accommodated his pace to that of Queen.
From noon of that day they were never far apart, never out of hearing
of a rifle shot.
The contrast of the beauty and peace and loneliness of the surroundings
to the nature of Queen's flight often obtruded its strange truth into
the somber turbulence of Jean's mind, into that fixed columnar idea
around which fleeting thoughts hovered and gathered like shadows.
Early frost had touched the heights with its magic wand. And the
forest seemed a temple in which man might worship nature and life
rather than steal through the dells and under the arched aisles like a
beast of prey. The green-and-gold leaves of aspens quivered in the
glades; maples in the ravines fluttered their red-and-purple leaves.
The needle-matted carpet under the pines vied with the long lanes of
silvery grass, alike enticing to the eye of man and beast. Sunny rays
of light, flecked with dust and flying insects, slanted down from the
overhanging brown-limbed, green-massed foliage. Roar of wind in the
distant forest alternated with soft breeze close at hand. Small
dove-gray squirrels ran all over the woodland, very curious about Jean
and his dog, rustling the twigs, scratching the bark of trees,
chattering and barking, frisky, saucy, and bright-eyed. A plaintive
twitter of wild canaries came from the region above the treetops—first
voices of birds in their pilgrimage toward the south. Pine cones
dropped with soft thuds. The blue jays followed these intruders in the
forest, screeching their displeasure. Like rain pattered the dropping
seeds from the spruces. A woody, earthy, leafy fragrance, damp with
the current of life, mingled with a cool, dry, sweet smell of withered
grass and rotting pines.
Solitude and lonesomeness, peace and rest, wild life and nature,
reigned there. It was a golden-green region, enchanting to the gaze of
man. An Indian would have walked there with his spirits.
And even as Jean felt all this elevating beauty and inscrutable spirit
his keen eye once more fastened upon the blood-red drops Queen had
again left on the gray moss and rock. His wound had reopened. Jean
felt the thrill of the scenting panther.
The sun set, twilight gathered, night fell. Jean crawled under a
dense, low-spreading spruce, ate some bread and meat, fed the dog, and
lay down to rest and sleep. His thoughts burdened him, heavy and black
as the mantle of night. A wolf mourned a hungry cry for a mate. Shepp
quivered under Jean's hand. That was the call which had lured him from
the ranch. The wolf blood in him yearned for the wild. Jean tied the
cowhide leash to his wrist. When this dark business was at an end
Shepp could be free to join the lonely mate mourning out there in the
forest. Then Jean slept.
Dawn broke cold, clear, frosty, with silvered grass sparkling, with a
soft, faint rustling of falling aspen leaves. When the sun rose red
Jean was again on the trail of Queen. By a frosty-ferned brook, where
water tinkled and ran clear as air and cold as ice, Jean quenched his
thirst, leaning on a stone that showed drops of blood. Queen, too, had
to quench his thirst. What good, what help, Jean wondered, could the
cold, sweet, granite water, so dear to woodsmen and wild creatures, do
this wounded, hunted rustler? Why did he not wait in the open to fight
and face the death he had meted? Where was that splendid and terrible
daring of the gunman? Queen's love of life dragged him on and on, hour
by hour, through the pine groves and spruce woods, through the oak
swales and aspen glades, up and down the rocky gorges, around the
windfalls and over the rotting logs.
The time came when Queen tried no more ambush. He gave up trying to
trap his pursuer by lying in wait. He gave up trying to conceal his
tracks. He grew stronger or, in desperation, increased his energy, so
that he redoubled his progress through the wilderness. That, at best,
would count only a few miles a day. And he began to circle to the
northwest, back toward the deep canyon where Blaisdell and Bill Isbel
had reached the end of their trails. Queen had evidently left his
comrades, had lone-handed it in his last fight, but was now trying to
get back to them. Somewhere in these wild, deep forest brakes the rest
of the Jorth faction had found a hiding place. Jean let Queen lead him
there.
Ellen Jorth would be with them. Jean had seen her. It had been his
shot that killed Colter's horse. And he had withheld further fire
because Colter had dragged the girl behind him, protecting his body
with hers. Sooner or later Jean would come upon their camp. She would
be there. The thought of her dark beauty, wasted in wantonness upon
these rustlers, added a deadly rage to the blood lust and righteous
wrath of his vengeance. Let her again flaunt her degradation in his
face and, by the God she had forsaken, he would kill her, and so end
the race of Jorths!
Another night fell, dark and cold, without starlight. The wind moaned
in the forest. Shepp was restless. He sniffed the air. There was a
step on his trail. Again a mournful, eager, wild, and hungry wolf cry
broke the silence. It was deep and low, like that of a baying hound,
but infinitely wilder. Shepp strained to get away. During the night,
while Jean slept, he managed to chew the cowhide leash apart and run
off.
Next day no dog was needed to trail Queen. Fog and low-drifting clouds
in the forest and a misty rain had put the rustler off his bearings. He
was lost, and showed that he realized it. Strange how a matured man,
fighter of a hundred battles, steeped in bloodshed, and on his last
stand, should grow panic-stricken upon being lost! So Jean Isbel read
the signs of the trail.
Queen circled and wandered through the foggy, dripping forest until he
headed down into a canyon. It was one that notched the Rim and led
down and down, mile after mile into the Basin. Not soon had Queen
discovered his mistake. When he did do so, night overtook him.
The weather cleared before morning. Red and bright the sun burst out
of the east to flood that low basin land with light. Jean found that
Queen had traveled on and on, hoping, no doubt, to regain what he had
lost. But in the darkness he had climbed to the manzanita slopes
instead of back up the canyon. And here he had fought the hold of that
strange brush of Spanish name until he fell exhausted.
Surely Queen would make his stand and wait somewhere in this devilish
thicket for Jean to catch up with him. Many and many a place Jean
would have chosen had he been in Queen's place. Many a rock and dense
thicket Jean circled or approached with extreme care. Manzanita grew
in patches that were impenetrable except for a small animal. The brush
was a few feet high, seldom so high that Jean could not look over it,
and of a beautiful appearance, having glossy, small leaves, a golden
berry, and branches of dark-red color. These branches were tough and
unbendable. Every bush, almost, had low branches that were dead, hard
as steel, sharp as thorns, as clutching as cactus. Progress was
possible only by endless detours to find the half-closed aisles between
patches, or else by crashing through with main strength or walking
right over the tops. Jean preferred this last method, not because it
was the easiest, but for the reason that he could see ahead so much
farther. So he literally walked across the tips of the manzanita brush.
Often he fell through and had to step up again; many a branch broke
with him, letting him down; but for the most part he stepped from fork
to fork, on branch after branch, with balance of an Indian and the
patience of a man whose purpose was sustaining and immutable.
On that south slope under the Rim the sun beat down hot. There was no
breeze to temper the dry air. And before midday Jean was laboring, wet
with sweat, parching with thirst, dusty and hot and tiring. It amazed
him, the doggedness and tenacity of life shown by this wounded rustler.
The time came when under the burning rays of the sun he was compelled
to abandon the walk across the tips of the manzanita bushes and take to
the winding, open threads that ran between. It would have been poor
sight indeed that could not have followed Queen's labyrinthine and
broken passage through the brush. Then the time came when Jean espied
Queen, far ahead and above, crawling like a black bug along the
bright-green slope. Sight then acted upon Jean as upon a hound in the
chase. But he governed his actions if he could not govern his
instincts. Slowly but surely he followed the dusty, hot trail, and
never a patch of blood failed to send a thrill along his veins.
Queen, headed up toward the Rim, finally vanished from sight. Had he
fallen? Was he hiding? But the hour disclosed that he was crawling.
Jean's keen eye caught the slow moving of the brush and enabled him to
keep just so close to the rustler, out of range of the six-shooters he
carried. And so all the interminable hours of the hot afternoon that
snail-pace flight and pursuit kept on.
Halfway up the Rim the growth of manzanita gave place to open, yellow,
rocky slope dotted with cedars. Queen took to a slow-ascending ridge
and left his bloody tracks all the way to the top, where in the
gathering darkness the weary pursuer lost them.
Another night passed. Daylight was relentless to the rustler. He
could not hide his trail. But somehow in a desperate last rally of
strength he reached a point on the heavily timbered ridge that Jean
recognized as being near the scene of the fight in the canyon. Queen
was nearing the rendezvous of the rustlers. Jean crossed tracks of
horses, and then more tracks that he was certain had been made days
past by his own party. To the left of this ridge must be the deep
canyon that had frustrated his efforts to catch up with the rustlers on
the day Blaisdell lost his life, and probably Bill Isbel, too.
Something warned Jean that he was nearing the end of the trail, and an
unaccountable sense of imminent catastrophe seemed foreshadowed by
vague dreads and doubts in his gloomy mind. Jean felt the need of
rest, of food, of ease from the strain of the last weeks. But his
spirit drove him implacably.
Queen's rally of strength ended at the edge of an open, bald ridge that
was bare of brush or grass and was surrounded by a line of forest on
three sides, and on the fourth by a low bluff which raised its gray
head above the pines. Across this dusty open Queen had crawled,
leaving unmistakable signs of his condition. Jean took long survey of
the circle of trees and of the low, rocky eminence, neither of which he
liked. It might be wiser to keep to cover, Jean thought, and work
around to where Queen's trail entered the forest again. But he was
tired, gloomy, and his eternal vigilance was failing. Nevertheless, he
stilled for the thousandth time that bold prompting of his vengeance
and, taking to the edge of the forest, he went to considerable pains to
circle the open ground. And suddenly sight of a man sitting back
against a tree halted Jean.
He stared to make sure his eyes did not deceive him. Many times stumps
and snags and rocks had taken on strange resemblance to a standing or
crouching man. This was only another suggestive blunder of the mind
behind his eyes—what he wanted to see he imagined he saw. Jean glided
on from tree to tree until he made sure that this sitting image indeed
was that of a man. He sat bolt upright, facing back across the open,
hands resting on his knees—and closer scrutiny showed Jean that he
held a gun in each hand.