There still was no other permanent resident on Cane’s Mesa, although farranging cattlemen had been encroaching a little at a time, like wolves, as old Amos had become less able to mount his war horse, gather his sons with guns in hand to chase them away, and two summers after Elisabeth had buried her mother out back beneath the magnificent old cottonwood trees, within the little iron paling fence where old Amos also lay beneath his granite stone, a cowman named Arlen Chase had ridden into the yard, had sat his horse looking around at the massive old log buildings that were beginning to show signs of neglect and decay When Elisabeth had come forth from the barn, he had told her bluntly that he was there to stay, and had stepped off his horse—right into the barrel of a horse pistol that had belonged to old Amos and had nine notches upon its stag-handled grips.
Arlen Chase hadn’t stayed after all, but he had not left Cane Mesa, either. He had established his cow camp three miles northwest, close to where the ancient trail led off the mesa down to the lowland country, where it endlessly meandered until it came to the village—now the town—of Clearwater.
Chase’s obvious intent was to block access to the mesa. He was a lifelong free-graze cowman and knew a valuable asset when he saw one. Cane’s Mesa ran for roughly fifteen miles east to west, and from the northward high mountains to the sand-stone, rusty red bluffs southward, it ran another six miles. A man would never have to overgraze Cane’s Mesa to grow rich up there. All he would have to do would be to claim it and hold it. With that thought in mind, Arlen Chase hired riders who were more than range riders. Anyone could become a range rider, which required little enough talent, the Lord knew, but the other attributes Chase’s men possessed only came from being courageous and willing, and fiercely loyal. Most range men regarded loyalty as a primary virtue; they existed in a world of feudal concepts and convictions, but the surest way to strain a man’s sense of loyalty to the brand he rode for was to engage in activities that went against a man’s moral grain.
The men Arlen Chase hired were never moralists. If Chase chose to blockade the pass and inaugurate a quietly passive siege of that black-haired, blue-eyed woman in the clutch of old log buildings who never went anywhere without a gun that she could use as well as any man, that was entirely agreeable to his riders. They made jokes about it, and once in a while, with or without a little firewater inside them, they would swoop in close to the old buildings and let fly a few rounds into the mighty log walls, not with an intention of shooting the woman, but simply in order to see her race for her house and grab up an old rifle to fire back. It was something that endlessly amused them even though they had learned early that it would remain a source of laughter only as long as they remained well out of gun range. She was an astonishingly unerring marksman, and, while they respected her for that, it made the little impromptu attacks all the more zestful. They were a wild breed of men. Arlen Chase never made a point of enquiring into the past of his riders; he only insisted that they work hard and obey orders, which they usually did because that was how they had matured, but from time to time it was said, down in Clearwater, that, if there’d been any law in the New Mexico-Colorado border country beyond an occasional town marshal, Arlen Chase’s cow camps would have provided a jail-house full of fugitives.
For Elisabeth, imprisoned upon her mesa, existence was little different from what it had always been. She worked hard at keeping her band of horses where the grass was best, and, although her cattle had been steadily diminishing in number for several years, since even before Arlen Chase had squatted on the mesa chasing away all other encroaching cow-men, she tried to keep track of them, too.
Once, she had hired two riders down at Clear-water. They had lasted three weeks; subsequently one of them turned up in Chase’s camp, and the other one left the country never to return. After that, although she had tried to hire other men, none had ever arrived at her ranch. Not even the ones who had promised to ride up.
If they hadn’t been discouraged down in Clearwater, then they had been halted where the trail came up atop the mesa. Chase’s camp over there was a series of log corrals, some rough log structures thrown up in haste and with no genuine interest by his cow-boys, who did not like that kind of work, and an area of trampled earth and dead grass that covered about thirty acres of land. There was a fringe of trees along the mesa’s three borders, but down along the rusty old cliffs to the southward there was not a tree, just some scraggly underbrush that kept the sandstone from eroding too badly. Old Amos had often said they should plant trees there, for otherwise the cliffs were going slowly to wash away, but nothing had ever been done about that. There were always too many other things requiring more immediate attention. Planting trees, like planting anything else in the soil, was something old-timers either left to their young ones and womenfolk, or did themselves only when there was nothing else to claim their attention. And there was always something else; pioneering a land was nothing that could ever be accomplished in one man’s lifetime. The best old Amos had been able to achieve had been his buildings, his family and its roots into the good soil of Cane’s Mesa, and his armed defense of his private fief. Those things he had done well, but no man’s accomplishments out-last him by very much, any more than his dreams outlast him.
For Elisabeth Cane, it was a concern of silent irony that only she—a woman—had fully inherited her father’s strong, almost mystic love of the mesa. Five brothers had gone away, but because of a different course, they had learned to love, and, although Elisabeth had never learned that, she was a woman and she, therefore, understood it.
One of her sisters lived in Texas, married to a slow-drawling, gentle-acting, tough cowman who had come through on a trail drive. Maybe once a year Elisabeth would receive a letter from Texas. Her other sister had simply gone away. One night she had kissed Elisabeth, the youngest, and in the morning she and a fine chestnut horse were gone. Elisabeth had been unable to understand such a thing. When she had asked her mother, she’d been told simply that people were like the leaves of autumn, something within them blew them this way and that way; sometimes they came to earth in a stony, sere place, and sometimes they fared better, but whatever their destiny, its source lay within them, a personal thing.
Her mother had grieved. So had Amos who had been rapidly wearing out when that disappearance had occurred, but of her two parents Elisabeth had always felt that her mother’s feelings were the deeper, even though her mother was nowhere nearly as articulate as her father. He could thunder and roar and hurl challenges, and he could, as when her sister took the chestnut horse and rode out to find her own individual world, suddenly become softly still and thoughtful and surprisingly gentle to-ward his woman. He did not lack feelings; he simply had a very difficult time expressing them, explaining them, and, when he tried, as when he wanted to say something soft to Elisabeth, or any of his children, it came out gruffly.
All the memories were there, on Cane’s Mesa, in and around the massive old log structures. For Elisabeth, who had inherited from her father the soul sensation for her birthright, her heritage and the land where both still existed, and who had inherited from her mother a deep sense of almost fatalistic serenity, there was no other place.