The dog espied her before she saw him, for he was coming toward her when she discovered him. Big, shaggy, grayish white and black, with wild, keen face and eyes he assuredly looked the reputation Springer had accorded him. But sagacious, guarded as was his approach, he appeared friendly.
"Hello--doggie!" panted Ellen. "What's--wrong--up heah? "
He yelped, his ears lost their stiffness, his body sank a little, and his bushy tail wagged to and fro. What a gray, clear, intelligent look he gave her! Then he trotted back.
Ellen followed him around a corner of bluff to see the body of a man lying on his back. Fresh earth and gravel lay about him, attesting to his fall from above. He had on neither coat nor hat, and the position of his body and limbs suggested broken bones. As Ellen hurried to his side she saw that the front of his shirt, low down, was a bloody blotch.
But he could lift his head; his eyes were open; he was perfectly conscious. Ellen did not recognize the dusty, skinned face, yet the mold of features, the look of the eyes, seemed strangely familiar.
"You're--Jorth's--girl," he said, in faint voice of surprise.
"Yes, I'm Ellen Jorth," she replied. "An' are y'u Bill Isbel?"
"All thet's left of me. But I'm thankin' God somebody come--even a Jorth."
Ellen knelt beside him and examined the wound in his abdomen.
A heavy bullet had indeed, as Colter had avowed, torn clear through his middle. Even if he had not sustained other serious injury from the fall over the cliff, that terrible bullet wound meant death very shortly. Ellen shuddered. How inexplicable were men! How cruel, bloody, mindless!
"Isbel, I'm sorry--there's no hope," she said, low voiced. "Y'u've not long to live. I cain't help y'u. God knows I'd do so if I could."
"All over!" he sighed, with his eyes looking beyond her. "I reckon--I'm glad. . . . But y'u can--do somethin' for or me. Will y'u?"
"Indeed, Yes. Tell me," she replied, lifting his dusty head on her knee.
Her hands trembled as she brushed his wet hair back from his clammy brow.
"I've somethin'--on my conscience," he whispered.
The woman, the sensitive in Ellen, understood and pitied him then.
"Yes," she encouraged him.
"I stole cattle--my dad's an ' Blaisdell's--an' made deals--with Daggs.
. . . All the crookedness--wasn't on--Jorth's side. . . . I want--my brother Jean--to know."
"I'll try--to tell him," whispered Ellen, out of her great amaze.
"We were all--a bad lot--except Jean," went on Isbel. "Dad wasn't fair.
. . . God! how he hated Jorth! Jorth, yes, who was--your father. . . .
Wal, they're even now."
"How--so?" faltered Ellen.
"Your father killed dad. . . . At the last--dad wanted to--save us.
He sent word--he'd meet him--face to face--an' let thet end the feud.
They met out in the road. . . . But some one shot dad down--with a rifle--an' then your father finished him."
"An' then, Isbel," added Ellen, with unconscious mocking bitterness, "Your brother murdered my dad!"
"What!" whispered Bill Isbel. "Shore y'u've got--it wrong. I reckon Jean--could have killed--your father. . . . But he didn't. Queer, we all thought."
"Ah! . . . Who did kill my father?" burst out Ellen, and her voice rang like great hammers at her ears.
"It was Blue. He went in the store--alone--faced the whole gang alone.
Bluffed them--taunted them--told them he was King Fisher. . . . Then he killed--your dad--an' Jackson Jorth. . . . Jean was out--back of the store. We were out--front. There was shootin'. Colmor was hit.
Then Blue ran out--bad hurt. . . . Both of them--died in Meeker's yard."
"An' so Jean Isbel has not killed a Jorth!" said Ellen, in strange, deep voice.
"No," replied Isbel, earnestly. "I reckon this feud--was hardest on Jean. He never lived heah. . . . An' my sister Ann said--he got sweet on y'u. . . . Now did he?"
Slow, stinging tears filled Ellen's eyes, and her head sank low and lower.
"Yes--he did," she murmured, tremulously.
"Ahuh! Wal, thet accounts," replied Isbel, wonderingly. "Too bad! . . .
It might have been. . . . A man always sees--different when--he's dyin'.
. . . If I had--my life--to live over again! . . . My poor kids--deserted in their babyhood--ruined for life! All for nothin'. . . .
May God forgive--"
Then he choked and whispered for water.
Ellen laid his head back and, rising, she took his sombrero and started hurriedly down the slope, making dust fly and rocks roll. Her mind was a seething ferment. Leaping, bounding, sliding down the weathered slope, she gained the bench, to run across that, and so on down into the open canyon to the willow-bordered brook. Here she filled the sombrero with water and started back, forced now to walk slowly and carefully. It was then, with the violence and fury of intense muscular activity denied her, that the tremendous import of Bill Isbel's revelation burst upon her very flesh and blood and transfiguring the very world of golden light and azure sky and speaking forestland that encompassed her.
Not a drop of the precious water did she spill. Not a misstep did she make. Yet so great was the spell upon her that she was not aware she had climbed the steep slope until the dog yelped his welcome. Then with all the flood of her emotion surging and resurging she knelt to allay the parching thirst of this dying enemy whose words had changed frailty to strength, hate to love, and, the gloomy hell of despair to something unutterable. But she had returned too late. Bill Isbel was dead.
