CHAPTER X
A hundred miles from the haunts most familiar with Duane's deeds, farup where the Nueces ran a trickling clear stream between yellow cliffs,stood a small deserted shack of covered mesquite poles. It had been madelong ago, but was well preserved. A door faced the overgrown trail,and another faced down into a gorge of dense thickets. On the borderfugitives from law and men who hid in fear of some one they had wrongednever lived in houses with only one door.
It was a wild spot, lonely, not fit for human habitation except for theoutcast. He, perhaps, might have found it hard to leave for most of theother wild nooks in that barren country. Down in the gorge therewas never-failing sweet water, grass all the year round, cool, shadyretreats, deer, rabbits, turkeys, fruit, and miles and miles ofnarrow-twisting, deep canon full of broken rocks and impenetrablethickets. The scream of the panther was heard there, the squall of thewildcat, the cough of the jaguar. Innumerable bees buzzed in the springblossoms, and, it seemed, scattered honey to the winds. All day therewas continuous song of birds, that of the mocking-bird loud and sweetand mocking above the rest.
On clear days--and rare indeed were cloudy days--with the subsidingof the wind at sunset a hush seemed to fall around the little hut.Far-distant dim-blue mountains stood gold-rimmed gradually to fade withthe shading of light.
At this quiet hour a man climbed up out of the gorge and sat in thewestward door of the hut. This lonely watcher of the west and listenerto the silence was Duane. And this hut was the one where, three yearsbefore, Jennie had nursed him back to life.
The killing of a man named Sellers, and the combination of circumstancesthat had made the tragedy a memorable regret, had marked, if not achange, at least a cessation in Duane's activities. He had trailedSellers to kill him for the supposed abducting of Jennie. He had trailedhim long after he had learned Sellers traveled alone. Duane wantedabsolute assurance of Jennie's death. Vague rumors, a few words here andthere, unauthenticated stories, were all Duane had gathered in years tosubstantiate his belief--that Jennie died shortly after the beginning ofher second captivity. But Duane did not know surely. Sellers might havetold him. Duane expected, if not to force it from him at the end, toread it in his eyes. But the bullet went too unerringly; it locked hislips and fixed his eyes.
After that meeting Duane lay long at the ranchhouse of a friend, andwhen he recovered from the wound Sellers had given him he started withtwo horses and a pack for the lonely gorge on the Nueces. There hehad been hidden for months, a prey to remorse, a dreamer, a victim ofphantoms.
It took work for him to find subsistence in that rocky fastness. Andwork, action, helped to pass the hours. But he could not work all thetime, even if he had found it to do. Then in his idle moments and atnight his task was to live with the hell in his mind.
The sunset and the twilight hour made all the rest bearable. The littlehut on the rim of the gorge seemed to hold Jennie's presence. It was notas if he felt her spirit. If it had been he would have been sure of herdeath. He hoped Jennie had not survived her second misfortune; and thatintense hope had burned into belief, if not surety. Upon his return tothat locality, on the occasion of his first visit to the hut, he hadfound things just as they had left them, and a poor, faded piece ofribbon Jennie had used to tie around her bright hair. No wanderingoutlaw or traveler had happened upon the lonely spot, which furtherendeared it to Duane.
A strange feature of this memory of Jennie was the freshness of it--thefailure of years, toil, strife, death-dealing to dim it--to deadenthe thought of what might have been. He had a marvelous gift ofvisualization. He could shut his eyes and see Jennie before him just asclearly as if she had stood there in the flesh. For hours he did that,dreaming, dreaming of life he had never tasted and now never wouldtaste. He saw Jennie's slender, graceful figure, the old brown raggeddress in which he had seen her first at Bland's, her little feet inMexican sandals, her fine hands coarsened by work, her round arms andswelling throat, and her pale, sad, beautiful face with its staring darkeyes. He remembered every look she had given him, every word she hadspoken to him, every time she had touched him. He thought of her beautyand sweetness, of the few things which had come to mean to him thatshe must have loved him; and he trained himself to think of these inpreference to her life at Bland's, the escape with him, and then herrecapture, because such memories led to bitter, fruitless pain. He hadto fight suffering because it was eating out his heart.
Sitting there, eyes wide open, he dreamed of the old homestead and hiswhite-haired mother. He saw the old home life, sweetened and filled bydear new faces and added joys, go on before his eyes with him a part ofit.
Then in the inevitable reaction, in the reflux of bitter reality, hewould send out a voiceless cry no less poignant because it was silent:"Poor fool! No, I shall never see mother again--never go home--neverhave a home. I am Duane, the Lone Wolf! Oh, God! I wish it were over!These dreams torture me! What have I to do with a mother, a home, awife? No bright-haired boy, no dark-eyed girl will ever love me. I aman outlaw, an outcast, dead to the good and decent world. I amalone--alone. Better be a callous brute or better dead! I shall go madthinking! Man, what is left to you? A hiding-place like a wolf's--lonelysilent days, lonely nights with phantoms! Or the trail and the road withtheir bloody tracks, and then the hard ride, the sleepless, hungry rideto some hole in rocks or brakes. What hellish thing drives me? Why can'tI end it all? What is left? Only that damned unquenchable spirit of thegun-fighter to live--to hang on to miserable life--to have no fear ofdeath, yet to cling like a leach--to die as gun-fighters seldom die,with boots off! Bain, you were first, and you're long avenged. I'dchange with you. And Sellers, you were last, and you're avenged. And youothers--you're avenged. Lie quiet in your graves and give me peace!"
But they did not lie quiet in their graves and give him peace.
A group of specters trooped out of the shadows of dusk and, gatheringround him, escorted him to his bed.
When Duane had been riding the trails passion-bent to escape pursuers,or passion-bent in his search, the constant action and toil andexhaustion made him sleep. But when in hiding, as time passed, graduallyhe required less rest and sleep, and his mind became more active. Littleby little his phantoms gained hold on him, and at length, but for thesaving power of his dreams, they would have claimed him utterly.
How many times he had said to himself: "I am an intelligent man. I'mnot crazy. I'm in full possession of my faculties. All this isfancy--imagination--conscience. I've no work, no duty, no ideal, nohope--and my mind is obsessed, thronged with images. And these imagesnaturally are of the men with whom I have dealt. I can't forget them.They come back to me, hour after hour; and when my tortured mind growsweak, then maybe I'm not just right till the mood wears out and lets mesleep."
So he reasoned as he lay down in his comfortable camp. The night wasstar-bright above the canon-walls, darkly shadowing down between them.The insects hummed and chirped and thrummed a continuous thick song, lowand monotonous. Slow-running water splashed softly over stones in thestream-bed. From far down the canon came the mournful hoot of an owl.The moment he lay down, thereby giving up action for the day, all thesethings weighed upon him like a great heavy mantle of loneliness. Intruth, they did not constitute loneliness.
And he could no more have dispelled thought than he could have reachedout to touch a cold, bright star.
He wondered how many outcasts like him lay under this star-studded,velvety sky across the fifteen hundred miles of wild country betweenEl Paso and the mouth of the river. A vast wild territory--a refuge foroutlaws! Somewhere he had heard or read that the Texas Rangers kept abook with names and records of outlaws--three thousand known outlaws.Yet these could scarcely be half of that unfortunate horde which hadbeen recruited from all over the states. Duane had traveled from camp tocamp, den to den, hiding-place to hiding-place, and he knew these men.Most of them were hopeless criminals; some were avengers; a few werewronged wanderers; and among them occasionally was a man, human in hisway,
honest as he could be, not yet lost to good.
But all of them were akin in one sense--their outlawry; and that starrynight they lay with their dark faces up, some in packs like wolves,others alone like the gray wolf who knew no mate. It did not make muchdifference in Duane's thought of them that the majority were steeped incrime and brutality, more often than not stupid from rum, incapable of afine feeling, just lost wild dogs.
Duane doubted that there was a man among them who did not realize hismoral wreck and ruin. He had met poor, half witted wretches who knew it.He believed he could enter into their minds and feel the truth ofall their lives--the hardened outlaw, coarse, ignorant, bestial, whomurdered as Bill Black had murdered, who stole for the sake of stealing,who craved money to gamble and drink, defiantly ready for death, and,like that terrible outlaw, Helm, who cried out on the scaffold, "Let herrip!"
The wild youngsters seeking notoriety and reckless adventure; thecowboys with a notch on their guns, with boastful pride in the knowledgethat they were marked by rangers; the crooked men from the North,defaulters, forgers, murderers, all pale-faced, flat-chested men not fitfor that wilderness and not surviving; the dishonest cattlemen, handand glove with outlaws, driven from their homes; the old grizzled,bow-legged genuine rustlers--all these Duane had come in contact with,had watched and known, and as he felt with them he seemed to see that astheir lives were bad, sooner or later to end dismally or tragically, sothey must pay some kind of earthly penalty--if not of conscience, thenof fear; if not of fear, then of that most terrible of all things torestless, active men--pain, the pang of flesh and bone.
Duane knew, for he had seen them pay. Best of all, moreover, he knew theinternal life of the gun-fighter of that select but by no means smallclass of which he was representative. The world that judged him and hiskind judged him as a machine, a killing-machine, with only mind enoughto hunt, to meet, to slay another man. It had taken three endless yearsfor Duane to understand his own father. Duane knew beyond all doubt thatthe gun-fighters like Bland, like Alloway, like Sellers, men who wereevil and had no remorse, no spiritual accusing Nemesis, had somethingfar more torturing to mind, more haunting, more murderous of rest andsleep and peace; and that something was abnormal fear of death. Duaneknew this, for he had shot these men; he had seen the quick, dark shadowin eyes, the presentiment that the will could not control, and then thehorrible certainty. These men must have been in agony at every meetingwith a possible or certain foe--more agony than the hot rend of abullet. They were haunted, too, haunted by this fear, by every victimcalling from the grave that nothing was so inevitable as death, whichlurked behind every corner, hid in every shadow, lay deep in the darktube of every gun. These men could not have a friend; they could notlove or trust a woman. They knew their one chance of holding on to lifelay in their own distrust, watchfulness, dexterity, and that hope, bythe very nature of their lives, could not be lasting. They had doomedthemselves. What, then, could possibly have dwelt in the depths oftheir minds as they went to their beds on a starry night like this, withmystery in silence and shadow, with time passing surely, and the darkfuture and its secret approaching every hour--what, then, but hell?
The hell in Duane's mind was not fear of man or fear of death. He wouldhave been glad to lay down the burden of life, providing death camenaturally. Many times he had prayed for it. But that overdeveloped,superhuman spirit of defense in him precluded suicide or the inviting ofan enemy's bullet. Sometimes he had a vague, scarcely analyzed idea thatthis spirit was what had made the Southwest habitable for the white man.
Every one of his victims, singly and collectively, returned to him forever, it seemed, in cold, passionless, accusing domination of thesehaunted hours. They did not accuse him of dishonor or cowardice orbrutality or murder; they only accused him of Death. It was as if theyknew more than when they were alive, had learned that life was a divinemysterious gift not to be taken. They thronged about him with theirvoiceless clamoring, drifted around him with their fading eyes.