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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Shore," he returned, with good nature. Jean saw Ellen Jorth lay the rifle lengthwise in a chink between two logs and then slowly turn, back to the wall. Jean knew her then, yet did not know her. The brown flash of her face seemed that of an older, graver woman.
She heard Daggs speak: "Lee, your little wildcat is shore heah. An' take mah hunch. Somebody has been talkin' to her." "Who has?" asked her father, in his husky voice. Ellen knew at once that he had been drinking. "Lord only knows," replied Daggs. "But shore it wasn't any friends of ours." "We cain't stop people's tongues," said Jorth, resignedly
The little gunman seemed to have about his inert presence something that suggested a rattlesnake's inherent knowledge of its destructiveness. Jean sat down and wiped his clammy face. "Jean, your dad reckoned to square accounts with Jorth, an' save us all," began Blue, puffing out a cloud of smoke. "But he reckoned too late.
He would come into the cabin and, utterly indifferent to Tad Jorth, he would try to make bold and unrestrained love to Ellen. When he caught her in one of her unresisting moments and was able to hold her in his arms and kiss her he seemed to be beside himself with the wonder of her.
An' he was wild in shootin' so wild thet he must hev missed. Then he wabbled an' Jorth run in a dozen steps, shootin' fast, till your dad fell over.... Jorth run closer, bent over him, an' then straightened up with an Apache yell, if I ever heerd one.... An' then Jorth backed slow lookin' all the time backed to the store, an' went in." Blue's voice ceased.
A thousand perplexing problems were solved in a second of whirling, revealing thought. "Ellen Jorth, you know your father's in with this Hash Knife Gang of rustlers," thundered Isbel. "Shore," she replied, with the cool, easy, careless defiance of a Texan. "You know he's got this Daggs to lead his faction against the Isbels?" "Shore."
He was conscious of an uplift, a gladdening of his spirit. Yet the ache remained. More than that, he found himself plunged deeper into conjecture, doubt. Had not the Ellen Jorth incident ended? He denied his father's indictment of her and accepted the faith of his sister. "Reckon that's aboot all, as dad says," he soliloquized. Yet was that all? He paced under the cedars. He watched the sun set.
At this juncture Jean refrained from further gaze at his father's face. "Lee Jorth had gotten out of goin' to war," went on the rancher, in lower, thicker voice. "He'd married my sweetheart, Ellen.... I knew the story long before I got well. He had run after her like a hound after a hare.... An' Ellen married him. Wal, when I was able to get aboot I went to see Jorth an' Ellen. I confronted them.
When I saw the change in proud, beautiful Ellen Sutton, an' how she still worshiped Jorth, it shore drove me near mad between pity an' hate.... Wal, I reckon in a Texan hate outlives any other feelin'. There came a strange turn of the wheel an' my fortunes changed. Like most young bloods of the day, I drank an' gambled. An' one night I run across Jorth an' a card-sharp friend. He fleeced me.
He imagined it would be the catastrophe of Ellen Jorth's calm acceptance of Colter's proposition. But down in Jean's miserable heart lived something that would not die. No mere words could kill it. How poignant that moment of her silence! How terribly he realized that if his intelligence and his emotion had believed her betraying words, his soul had not! But Ellen Jorth did not speak.
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