Monty Price's Nightmare by Zane Grey Read Free Book Online Page B

made possible the fulfillment of his dream. Like a slave he toiled to add to that precious treasure.
    Deep planted in his soul was a pas­sion that drove him, consumed him. It enormously magnified the importance of his little wage, of his bargaining with his fellows, of his jealous saving. It was the very life and fire of his blood—the bent of his mind—the secret of his endurance and his dream. And when he was away from the chuck wagon and the camp fire, out on the windy range or up in the pine-sloped forest, alone and free, then he was strangely happy, thoughtlessly happy, living in his dream, planning and wait­ing, always listening to the song of his nightingale.
    And that song was a song of secret revel—far away—where he gave up to this wind of flame that burned within him—where a passionate and irresistible strain in his blood found its outlet--where wanton red lips whispered, and wanton eyes, wine dark and seductive, lured him, and wanton arms twined around him.

Chapter II
    The rains failed to come that sum­mer. The gramma grass bleached on the open ranges and turned yellow up in the parks. But there was plenty of grass and water to last out the fall. It was fire the ranchers feared.
    Up on the forest ridges snow was al­ways due in November. But the dryest fall ever known in the Tonto passed into winter without rain or snow. On the open prairie the white grass waved in the wind, so dry it crinkled; and the forest ridges were tinder boxes waiting for a spark. The ranchers had all their men riding up the parks and draws and slopes after the cattle that kept work­ing farther and farther up. The stock that strayed was wild and hard to hold. There were far too few cowboys. And it was predicted, unless luck changed the weather, that there would be seri­ous losses.
    One morning above the low, gray-stoned, and black-fringed mountain range rose clouds of thick, creamy smoke. There was fire on the other side of the mountain. But unless the wind changed and drew fire in over the pass there was no danger on that score. The wind was right; it seldom changed at that season, though sometimes it blew a gale. Still the ranchers grew more anxious. The smoke clouds rolled up and spread and hid the top of the moun­tain, and then lifted slow, majestic col­umns of white and yellow toward the sky.
    * * * *
    On the day that Wentworth, along with other alarmed ranchers, sent men up to fight the fire in the pass, Monty Price quit his job and rode away. He did not tell anybody. He just took his little pack and his horse, and in the confusion of the hour he rode away. For days he felt that his call might come at any moment, and finally it had come. It did not occur to him that he was quitting Wentworth at a most criti­cal time; and it would not have made any difference to him if it had occurred to him.
    He rode away with bells in his heart. He felt like a boy at the prospect of a wonderful adventure. He felt like a man who had toiled and slaved, whose ambition had been supreme, and who had reached the pinnacle where his longing would be gratified. His free­dom stirred in him the ecstatic emotion of the shipwrecked mariner who from a lonely height beheld a sail, He was strained, tense, overwrought. For six months he had been chained to toil he hated. And now he was free. He was going. He was on the way. The keen wind seemed like wine. For once he saw the blue of the sky, the beauty of the bold peaks in the distance. And he pulled in his horse upon the ridge of a high foothill, where the trail forked, and looked across the ranges, away toward the south that called him.
    Monty Price was still a young man. Of light but powerful build, rangy and wiry, darkly bronzed, with eyes like coals of fire, he appeared a handsome cowboy. His face was hard, set, stern, like that of all men of his kind, and there was nothing in it to suggest his failing or that he deserved the brand that Muncie had put upon him.