Riders of the Purple Sage

Down, down, down Venters strode, more and more feeling the weight of his burden as he descended, and still the valley lay below him. As all other canyons and coves and valleys had deceived him, so had this deep, nestling oval. At length he passed beyond the slope of weathered stone that spread fan-shape from the arch, and encountered a grassy terrace running to the right and about on a level with the tips of the oaks and cottonwoods below. Scattered here and there upon this shelf were clumps of aspens, and he walked through them into a glade that surpassed in beauty and adaptability for a wild home, any place he had ever seen. Silver spruces bordered the base of a precipitous wall that rose loftily. Caves indented its surface, and there were no detached ledges or weathered sections that might dislodge a stone. The level ground, beyond the spruces, dropped down into a little ravine. This was one dense line of slender aspens from which came the low splashing of water. And the terrace, lying open to the west, afforded unobstructed view of the valley of green treetops.

For his camp Venters chose a shady, grassy plot between the silver spruces and the cliff. Here, in the stone wall, had been wonderfully carved by wind or washed by water several deep caves above the level of the terrace. They were clean, dry, roomy.

He cut spruce boughs and made a bed in the largest cave and laid the girl there. The first intimation that he had of her being aroused from sleep or lethargy was a low call for water.

He hurried down into the ravine with his canteen. It was a shallow, grass-green place with aspens growing up everywhere. To his delight he found a tiny brook of swift-running water. Its faint tinge of amber reminded him of the spring at Cottonwoods, and the thought gave him a little shock. The water was so cold it made his fingers tingle as he dipped the canteen. Having returned to the cave, he was glad to see the girl drink thirstily. This time he noted that she could raise her head slightly without his help.

“You were thirsty,” he said. “It’s good water. I’ve found a fine place. Tell me – how do you feel?”

“There’s pain – here,” she replied, and moved her hand to her left side.

“Why, that’s strange! Your wounds are on your right side. I believe you’re hungry. Is the pain a kind of dull ache – a gnawing?”

“It’s like – that.”

“Then it’s hunger.” Venters laughed, and suddenly caught himself with a quick breath and felt again the little shock. When had he laughed? “It’s hunger,” he went on. “I’ve had that gnaw many a time. I’ve got it now. But you mustn’t eat. You can have all the water you want, but no food just yet.”

“Won’t I – starve?”

“No, people don’t starve easily. I’ve discovered that. You must lie perfectly still and rest and sleep – for days.”

“My hands – are dirty; my face feels – so hot and sticky; my boots hurt.” It was her longest speech as yet, and it trailed off in a whisper.

“Well, I’m a fine nurse!”

It annoyed him that he had never thought of these things. But then, awaiting her death and thinking of her comfort were vastly different matters. He unwrapped the blanket which covered her. What a slender girl she was! No wonder he had been able to carry her miles and pack her up that slippery ladder of stone. Her boots were of soft, fine leather, reaching clear to her knees. He recognized the make as one of a boot-maker in Sterling. Her spurs, that he had stupidly neglected to remove, consisted of silver frames and gold chains, and the rowels, large as silver dollars, were fancifully engraved. The boots slipped off rather hard. She wore heavy woollen rider’s stockings, half length, and these were pulled up over the ends of her short trousers. Venters took off the stockings to note her little feet were red and swollen. He bathed them. Then he removed his scarf and bathed her face and hands.

“I must see your wounds now,” he said, gently.

She made no reply, but watched him steadily as he opened her blouse and untied the bandage. His strong fingers trembled a little as he removed it. If the wounds had reopened! A chill struck him as he saw the angry red bullet-mark, and a tiny stream of blood winding from it down her white breast. Very carefully he lifted her to see that the wound in her back had closed perfectly. Then he washed the blood from her breast, bathed the wound, and left it unbandaged, open to the air.

Her eyes thanked him.

“Listen,” he said, earnestly. “I’ve had some wounds, and I’ve seen many. I know a little about them. The hole in your back has closed. If you lie still three days the one in your breast will close and you’ll be safe. The danger from hemorrhage will be over.”

He had spoken with earnest sincerity, almost eagerness.

“Why – do you – want me – to get well?” she asked, wonderingly.

The simple question seemed unanswerable except on grounds of humanity. But the circumstances under which he had shot this strange girl, the shock and realization, the waiting for death, the hope, had resulted in a condition of mind wherein Venters wanted her to live more than he had ever wanted anything. Yet he could not tell why. He believed the killing of the rustler and the subsequent excitement had disturbed him. For how else could he explain the throbbing of his brain, the heat of his blood, the undefined sense of full hours, charged, vibrant with pulsating mystery where once they had dragged in loneliness?

“I shot you,” he said, slowly, “and I want you to get well so I shall not have killed a woman. But – for your own sake, too—”

A terrible bitterness darkened her eyes, and her lips quivered.

“Hush,” said Venters. “You’ve talked too much already.”

In her unutterable bitterness he saw a darkness of mood that could not have been caused by her present weak and feverish state. She hated the life she had led, that she probably had been compelled to lead. She had suffered some unforgivable wrong at the hands of Oldring. With that conviction Venters felt a shame throughout his body, and it marked the rekindling of fierce anger and ruthlessness. In the past long year he had nursed resentment. He had hated the wilderness – the loneliness of the uplands. He had waited for something to come to pass. It had come. Like an Indian stealing horses he had skulked into the recesses of the canyons. He had found Oldring’s retreat; he had killed a rustler; he had shot an unfortunate girl, then had saved her from this unwitting act, and he meant to save her from the consequent wasting of blood, from fever and weakness. Starvation he had to fight for her and for himself. Where he had been sick at the letting of blood, now he remembered it in grim, cold calm. And as he lost that softness of nature, so he lost his fear of men. He would watch for Oldring, biding his time, and he would kill this great black-bearded rustler who had held a girl in bondage, who had used her to his infamous ends.

Venters surmised this much of the change in him – idleness had passed; keen, fierce vigor flooded his mind and body; all that had happened to him at Cottonwoods seemed remote and hard to recall; the difficulties and perils of the present absorbed him, held him in a kind of spell.

First, then, he fitted up the little cave adjoining the girl’s room for his own comfort and use. His next work was to build a fireplace of stones and to gather a store of wood. That done, he spilled the contents of his saddle-bags upon the grass and took stock. His outfit consisted of a small-handled axe, a hunting-knife, a large number of cartridges for rifle or revolver, a tin plate, a cup, and a fork and spoon, a quantity of dried beef and dried fruits, and small canvas bags containing tea, sugar, salt, and pepper. For him alone this supply would have been bountiful to begin a sojourn in the wilderness, but he was no longer alone. Starvation in the uplands was not an unheard-of thing; he did not, however, worry at all on that score, and feared only his possible inability to supply the needs of a woman in a weakened and extremely delicate condition.

If there was no game in the valley – a contingency he doubted – it would not be a great task for him to go by night to Oldring’s herd and pack out a calf. The exigency of the moment was to ascertain if there were game in Surprise Valley. Whitie still guarded the dilapidated rabbit, and Ring slept near by under a spruce. Venters called Ring and went to the edge of the terrace, and there halted to survey the valley.

He was prepared to find it larger than his unstudied glances had made it appear; for more than a casual idea of dimensions and a hasty conception of oval shape and singular beauty he had not had time. Again the felicity of the name he had given the valley struck him forcibly. Around the red perpendicular walls, except under the great arc of stone, ran a terrace fringed at the cliff-base by silver spruces; below that first terrace sloped another wider one densely overgrown with aspens, and the center of the valley was a level circle of oaks and alders, with the glittering green line of willows and cottonwood dividing it in half. Venters saw a number and variety of birds flitting among the trees. To his left, facing the stone bridge, an enormous cavern opened in the wall; and low down, just above the tree-tops, he made out a long shelf of cliff-dwellings, with little black, staring windows or doors. Like eyes they were, and seemed to watch him. The few cliff-dwellings he had seen – all ruins – had left him with haunting memory of age and solitude and of something past. He had come, in a way, to be a cliff-dweller himself, and those silent eyes would look down upon him, as if in surprise that after thousands of years a man had invaded the valley. Venters felt sure that he was the only white man who had ever walked under the shadow of the wonderful stone bridge, down into that wonderful valley with its circle of caves and its terraced rings of silver spruce and aspens.

The dog growled below and rushed into the forest. Venters ran down the declivity to enter a zone of light shade streaked with sunshine. The oak-trees were slender, none more than half a foot thick, and they grew close together, intermingling their branches. Ring came running back with a rabbit in his mouth. Venters took the rabbit and, holding the dog near him, stole softly on. There were fluttering of wings among the branches and quick bird-notes, and rustling of dead leaves and rapid patterings. Venters crossed well-worn trails marked with fresh tracks; and when he had stolen on a little farther he saw many birds and running quail, and more rabbits than he could count. He had not penetrated the forest of oaks for a hundred yards, had not approached anywhere near the line of willows and cottonwoods which he knew grew along a stream. But he had seen enough to know that Surprise Valley was the home of many wild creatures.

Venters returned to camp. He skinned the rabbits, and gave the dogs the one they had quarreled over, and the skin of this he dressed and hung up to dry, feeling that he would like to keep it. It was a particularly rich, furry pelt with a beautiful white tail. Venters remembered that but for the bobbing of that white tail catching his eye he would not have espied the rabbit, and he would never have discovered Surprise Valley. Little incidents of chance like this had turned him here and there in Deception Pass; and now they had assumed to him the significance and direction of destiny.

His good fortune in the matter of game at hand brought to his mind the necessity of keeping it in the valley. Therefore he took the axe and cut bundles of aspens and willows, and packed them up under the bridge to the narrow outlet of the gorge. Here he began fashioning a fence, by driving aspens into the ground and lacing them fast with willows. Trip after trip he made down for more building material, and the afternoon had passed when he finished the work to his satisfaction. Wildcats might scale the fence, but no coyote could come in to search for prey, and no rabbits or other small game could escape from the valley.

Upon returning to camp he set about getting his supper at ease, around a fine fire, without hurry or fear of discovery. After hard work that had definite purpose, this freedom and comfort gave him peculiar satisfaction. He caught himself often, as he kept busy round the camp-fire, stopping to glance at the quiet form in the cave, and at the dogs stretched cozily near him, and then out across the beautiful valley. The present was not yet real to him.

While he ate, the sun set beyond a dip in the rim of the curved wall. As the morning sun burst wondrously through a grand arch into this valley, in a golden, slanting shaft, so the evening sun, at the moment of setting, shone through a gap of cliffs, sending down a broad red burst to brighten the oval with a blaze of fire. To Venters both sunrise and sunset were unreal.

A cool wind blew across the oval, waving the tips of oaks, and while the light lasted, fluttering the aspen leaves into millions of facets of red, and sweeping the graceful spruces. Then with the wind soon came a shade and a darkening, and suddenly the valley was gray. Night came there quickly after the sinking of the sun. Venters went softly to look at the girl. She slept, and her breathing was quiet and slow. He lifted Ring into the cave, with stern whisper for him to stay there on guard. Then he drew the blanket carefully over her and returned to the camp-fire.

Though exceedingly tired, he was yet loath to yield to lassitude, but this night it was not from listening, watchful vigilance; it was from a desire to realize his position. The details of his wild environment seemed the only substance of a strange dream. He saw the darkening rims, the gray oval turning black, the undulating surface of forest, like a rippling lake, and the spear-pointed spruces. He heard the flutter of aspen leaves and the soft, continuous splash of falling water. The melancholy note of a canyon bird broke clear and lonely from the high cliffs. Venters had no name for this night singer, and he had never seen one, but the few notes, always pealing out just at darkness, were as familiar to him as the canyon silence. Then they ceased, and the rustle of leaves and the murmur of water hushed in a growing sound that Venters fancied was not of earth. Neither had he a name for this, only it was inexpressibly wild and sweet. The thought came that it might be a moan of the girl in her last outcry of life, and he felt a tremor shake him. But no! This sound was not human, though it was like despair. He began to doubt his sensitive perceptions, to believe that he half-dreamed what he thought he heard. Then the sound swelled with the strengthening of the breeze, and he realized it was the singing of the wind in the cliffs.

By and by a drowsiness overcame him, and Venters began to nod, half asleep, with his back against a spruce. Rousing himself and calling Whitie, he went to the cave. The girl lay barely visible in the dimness. Ring crouched beside her, and the patting of his tail on the stone assured Venters that the dog was awake and faithful to his duty. Venters sought his own bed of fragrant boughs; and as he lay back, somehow grateful for the comfort and safety, the night seemed to steal away from him and he sank softly into intangible space and rest and slumber.

Venters awakened to the sound of melody that he imagined was only the haunting echo of dream music. He opened his eyes to another surprise of this valley of beautiful surprises. Out of his cave he saw the exquisitely fine foliage of the silver spruces crossing a round space of blue morning sky; and in this lacy leafage fluttered a number of gray birds with black and white stripes and long tails. They were mocking-birds, and they were singing as if they wanted to burst their throats. Venters listened. One long, silver-tipped branch dropped almost to his cave, and upon it, within a few yards of him, sat one of the graceful birds. Venters saw the swelling and quivering of its throat in song. He arose, and when he slid down out of his cave the birds fluttered and flew farther away.

Venters stepped before the opening of the other cave and looked in. The girl was awake, with wide eyes and listening look, and she had a hand on Ring’s neck.

“Mocking-birds!” she said.

“Yes,” replied Venters, “and I believe they like our company.”

“Where are we?”

“Never mind now. After a little I’ll tell you.”

“The birds woke me. When I heard them – and saw the shiny trees – and the blue sky – and then a blaze of gold dropping down – I wondered—”

She did not complete her fancy, but Venters imagined he understood her meaning. She appeared to be wandering in mind. Venters felt her face and hands and found them burning with fever. He went for water, and was glad to find it almost as cold as if flowing from ice. That water was the only medicine he had, and he put faith in it. She did not want to drink, but he made her swallow, and then he bathed her face and head and cooled her wrists.

The day began with the heightening of the fever. Venters spent the time reducing her temperature, cooling her hot cheeks and temples. He kept close watch over her, and at the least indication of restlessness, that he knew led to tossing and rolling of the body, he held her tightly, so no violent move could reopen her wounds. Hour after hour she babbled and laughed and cried and moaned in delirium; but whatever her secret was she did not reveal it.

Attended by something somber for Venters, the day passed. At night in the cool winds the fever abated and she slept.

The second day was a repetition of the first. On the third he seemed to see her wither and waste away before his eyes. That day he scarcely went from her side for a moment, except to run for fresh, cool water; and he did not eat. The fever broke on the fourth day and left her spent and shrunken, a slip of a girl with life only in her eyes. They hung upon Venters with a mute observance, and he found hope in that.

To rekindle the spark that had nearly flickered out, to nourish the little life and vitality that remained in her, was Venters’s problem. But he had little resource other than the meat of the rabbits and quail; and from these he made broths and soups as best he could, and fed her with a spoon. It came to him that the human body, like the human soul, was a strange thing and capable of recovering from terrible shocks. For almost immediately she showed faint signs of gathering strength. There was one more waiting day, in which he doubted, and spent long hours by her side as she slept, and watched the gentle swell of her breast rise and fall in breathing, and the wind stir the tangled chestnut curls. On the next day he knew that she would live.

Upon realizing it he abruptly left the cave and sought his accustomed seat against the trunk of a big spruce, where once more he let his glance stray along the sloping terraces. She would live, and the somber gloom lifted out of the valley, and he felt relief that was pain. Then he roused to the call of action, to the many things he needed to do in the way of making camp fixtures and utensils, to the necessity of hunting food, and the desire to explore the valley.

But he decided to wait a few more days before going far from camp, because he fancied that the girl rested easier when she could see him near at hand. And on the first day her languor appeared to leave her in a renewed grip of life. She awoke stronger from each short slumber; she ate greedily, and she moved about in her bed of boughs; and always, it seemed to Venters, her eyes followed him. He knew now that her recovery would be rapid. She talked about the dogs, about the caves, the valley, about how hungry she was, till Venters silenced her, asking her to put off further talk till another time. She obeyed, but she sat up in her bed, and her eyes roved to and fro, and always back to him.

Upon the second morning she sat up when he awakened her, and would not permit him to bathe her face and feed her, which actions she performed for herself. She spoke little, however, and Venters was quick to catch in her the first intimations of thoughtfulness and curiosity and appreciation of her situation. He left camp and took Whitie out to hunt for rabbits. Upon his return he was amazed and somewhat anxiously concerned to see his invalid sitting with her back to a corner of the cave and her bare feet swinging out. Hurriedly he approached, intending to advise her to lie down again, to tell her that perhaps she might overtax her strength. The sun shone upon her, glinting on the little head with its tangle of bright hair and the small, oval face with its pallor, and dark-blue eyes underlined by dark-blue circles. She looked at him and he looked at her. In that exchange of glances he imagined each saw the other in some different guise. It seemed impossible to Venters that this frail girl could be Oldring’s Masked Rider. It flashed over him that he had made a mistake which presently she would explain.

“Help me down,” she said.

“But – are you well enough?” he protested. “Wait – a little longer.”

“I’m weak – dizzy. But I want to get down.”

He lifted her – what a light burden now! – and stood her upright beside him, and supported her as she essayed to walk with halting steps. She was like a stripling of a boy; the bright, small head scarcely reached his shoulder. But now, as she clung to his arm, the rider’s costume she wore did not contradict, as it had done at first, his feeling of her femininity. She might be the famous Masked Rider of the uplands, she might resemble a boy; but her outline, her little hands and feet, her hair, her big eyes and tremulous lips, and especially a something that Venters felt as a subtle essence rather than what he saw, proclaimed her sex.

She soon tired. He arranged a comfortable seat for her under the spruce that overspread the camp-fire.

“Now tell me – everything,” she said.

He recounted all that had happened from the time of his discovery of the rustlers in the canyon up to the present moment.

“You shot me – and now you’ve saved my life?”

“Yes. After almost killing you I’ve pulled you through.”

“Are you glad?”

“I should say so!”

Her eyes were unusually expressive, and they regarded him steadily; she was unconscious of that mirroring of her emotions and they shone with gratefulness and interest and wonder and sadness.

“Tell me – about yourself?” she asked.

He made this a briefer story, telling of his coming to Utah, his various occupations till he became a rider, and then how the Mormons had practically driven him out of Cottonwoods, an outcast.

Then, no longer able to withstand his own burning curiosity, he questioned her in turn.

“Are you Oldring’s Masked Rider?”

“Yes,” she replied, and dropped her eyes.

“I knew it – I recognized your figure – and mask, for I saw you once. Yet I can’t believe it! … But you never were really that rustler, as we riders knew him? A thief – a marauder – a kidnapper of women – a murderer of sleeping riders!”

“No! I never stole – or harmed any one – in all my life. I only rode and rode—”

“But why – why?” he burst out. “Why the name? I understand Oldring made you ride. But the black mask – the mystery – the things laid to your hands – the threats in your infamous name – the night-riding credited to you – the evil deeds deliberately blamed on you and acknowledged by rustlers – even Oldring himself! Why? Tell me why?”

“I never knew that,” she answered low. Her drooping head straightened, and the large eyes, larger now and darker, met Venters’s with a clear, steadfast gaze in which he read truth. It verified his own conviction.

“Never knew? That’s strange! Are you a Mormon?”

“No.”

“Is Oldring a Mormon?”

“No.”

“Do you – care for him?”

“Yes. I hate his men – his life – sometimes I almost hate him!”

Venters paused in his rapid-fire questioning, as if to brace him self to ask for a truth that would be abhorrent for him to confirm, but which he seemed driven to hear.

“What are – what were you to Oldring?”

Like some delicate thing suddenly exposed to blasting heat, the girl wilted; her head dropped, and into her white, wasted cheeks crept the red of shame.

Venters would have given anything to recall that question. It seemed so different – his thought when spoken. Yet her shame established in his mind something akin to the respect he had strangely been hungering to feel for her.

“D—n that question! – forget it!” he cried, in a passion of pain for her and anger at himself. “But once and for all – tell me – I know it, yet I want to hear you say so – you couldn’t help yourself?”

“Oh no.”

“Well, that makes it all right with me,” he went on, honestly. “I – I want you to feel that… you see – we’ve been thrown together – and – and I want to help you – not hurt you. I thought life had been cruel to me, but when I think of yours I feel mean and little for my complaining. Anyway, I was a lonely outcast. And now! … I don’t see very clearly what it all means. Only we are here – together. We’ve got to stay here, for long, surely till you are well. But you’ll never go back to Oldring. And I’m sure helping you will help me, for I was sick in mind. There’s something now for me to do. And if I can win back your strength – then get you away, out of this wild country – help you somehow to a happier life – just think how good that’ll be for me!”

Chapter 10

Love

During all these waiting days Venters, with the exception of the afternoon when he had built the gate in the gorge, had scarcely gone out of sight of camp and never out of hearing. His desire to explore Surprise Valley was keen, and on the morning after his long talk with the girl he took his rifle and, calling Ring, made a move to start. The girl lay back in a rude chair of boughs he had put together for her. She had been watching him, and when he picked up the gun and called the dog Venters thought she gave a nervous start.

“I’m only going to look over the valley,” he said.

“Will you be gone long?”

“No,” he replied, and started off. The incident set him thinking of his former impression that, after her recovery from fever, she did not seem at ease unless he was close at hand. It was fear of being alone, due, he concluded, most likely to her weakened condition. He must not leave her much alone.

As he strode down the sloping terrace, rabbits scampered before him, and the beautiful valley quail, as purple in color as the sage on the uplands, ran fleetly along the ground into the forest. It was pleasant under the trees, in the gold-flecked shade, with the whistle of quail and twittering of birds everywhere. Soon he had passed the limit of his former excursions and entered new territory. Here the woods began to show open glades and brooks running down from the slope, and presently he emerged from shade into the sunshine of a meadow. The shaking of the high grass told him of the running of animals, what species he could not tell, but from Ring’s manifest desire to have a chase they were evidently some kind wilder than rabbits. Venters approached the willow and cottonwood belt that he had observed from the height of slope. He penetrated it to find a considerable stream of water and great half-submerged mounds of brush and sticks, and all about him were old and new gnawed circles at the base of the cottonwoods.

“Beaver!” he exclaimed. “By all that’s lucky! The meadow’s full of beaver! How did they ever get here?”

Beaver had not found a way into the valley by the trail of the cliff-dwellers, of that he was certain; and he began to have more than curiosity as to the outlet or inlet of the stream. When he passed some dead water, which he noted was held by a beaver dam, there was a current in the stream, and it flowed west. Following its course, he soon entered the oak forest again, and passed through to find himself before massed and jumbled ruins of cliff wall. There were tangled thickets of wild plum-trees and other thorny growths that made passage extremely laborsome. He found innumerable tracks of wildcats and foxes. Rustlings in the thick undergrowth told him of stealthy movements of these animals. At length his further advance appeared futile, for the reason that the stream disappeared in a split at the base of immense rocks over which he could not climb. To his relief he concluded that though beaver might work their way up the narrow chasm where the water rushed, it would be impossible for men to enter the valley there.

This western curve was the only part of the valley where the walls had been split asunder, and it was a wildly rough and inaccessible corner. Going back a little way, he leaped the stream and headed toward the southern wall. Once out of the oaks he found again the low terrace of aspens, and above that the wide, open terrace fringed by silver spruces. This side of the valley contained the wind or water worn caves. As he pressed on, keeping to the upper terrace, cave after cave opened out of the cliff; now a large one, now a small one. Then yawned, quite suddenly and wonderfully above him, the great cavern of the cliff-dwellers.

It was still a goodly distance, and he tried to imagine, if it appeared so huge from where he stood, what it would be when he got there. He climbed the terrace and then faced a long, gradual ascent of weathered rock and dust, which made climbing too difficult for attention to anything else. At length he entered a zone of shade, and looked up. He stood just within the hollow of a cavern so immense that he had no conception of its real dimensions. The curved roof, stained by ages of leakage, with buff and black and rust-colored streaks, swept up and loomed higher and seemed to soar to the rim of the cliff. Here again was a magnificent arch, such as formed the grand gateway to the valley, only in this instance it formed the dome of a cave instead of the span of a bridge.

Venters passed onward and upward. The stones he dislodged rolled down with strange, hollow crack and roar. He had climbed a hundred rods inward, and yet he had not reached the base of the shelf where the cliff-dwellings rested, a long half-circle of connected stone house, with little dark holes that he had fancied were eyes. At length he gained the base of the shelf, and here found steps cut in the rock. These facilitated climbing, and as he went up he thought how easily this vanished race of men might once have held that stronghold against an army. There was only one possible place to ascend, and this was narrow and steep.

Venters had visited cliff-dwellings before, and they had been in ruins, and of no great character or size but this place was of proportions that stunned him, and it had not been desecrated by the hand of man, nor had it been crumbled by the hand of time. It was a stupendous tomb. It had been a city. It was just as it had been left by its builders. The little houses were there, the smoke-blackened stains of fires, the pieces of pottery scattered about cold hearths, the stone hatchets; and stone pestles and mealing-stones lay beside round holes polished by years of grinding maize – lay there as if they had been carelessly dropped yesterday. But the cliff-dwellers were gone!

Dust! They were dust on the floor or at the foot of the shelf, and their habitations and utensils endured. Venters felt the sublimity of that marvelous vaulted arch, and it seemed to gleam with a glory of something that was gone. How many years had passed since the cliff-dwellers gazed out across the beautiful valley as he was gazing now? How long had it been since women ground grain in those polished holes? What time had rolled by since men of an unknown race lived, loved, fought, and died there? Had an enemy destroyed them? Had disease destroyed them, or only that greatest destroyer – time? Venters saw a long line of blood-red hands painted low down upon the yellow roof of stone. Here was strange portent, if not an answer to his queries. The place oppressed him. It was light, but full of a transparent gloom. It smelled of dust and musty stone, of age and disuse. It was sad. It was solemn. It had the look of a place where silence had become master and was now irrevocable and terrible and could not be broken. Yet, at the moment, from high up in the carved crevices of the arch, floated down the low, strange wail of wind – a knell indeed for all that had gone.

Venters, sighing, gathered up an armful of pottery, such pieces as he thought strong enough and suitable for his own use, and bent his steps toward camp. He mounted the terrace at an opposite point to which he had left. He saw the girl looking in the direction he had gone. His footsteps made no sound in the deep grass, and he approached close without her being aware of his presence. Whitie lay on the ground near where she sat, and he manifested the usual actions of welcome, but the girl did not notice them. She seemed to be oblivious to everything near at hand. She made a pathetic figure drooping there, with her sunny hair contrasting so markedly with her white, wasted cheeks and her hands listlessly clasped and her little bare feet propped in the framework of the rude seat. Venters could have sworn and laughed in one breath at the idea of the connection between this girl and Oldring’s Masked Rider. She was the victim of more than accident of fate – a victim to some deep plot the mystery of which burned him. As he stepped forward with a half-formed thought that she was absorbed in watching for his return, she turned her head and saw him. A swift start, a change rather than rush of blood under her white cheeks, a flashing of big eyes that fixed their glance upon him, transformed her face in that single instant of turning, and he knew she had been watching for him, that his return was the one thing in her mind. She did not smile; she did not flush; she did not look glad. All these would have meant little compared to her indefinite expression. Venters grasped the peculiar, vivid, vital something that leaped from her face. It was as if she had been in a dead, hopeless clamp of inaction and feeling, and had been suddenly shot through and through with quivering animation. Almost it was as if she had returned to life.

And Venters thought with lightning swiftness, “I’ve saved her – I’ve unlinked her from that old life – she was watching as if I were all she had left on earth – she belongs to me!” The thought was startlingly new. Like a blow it was in an unprepared moment. The cheery salutation he had ready for her died unborn and he tumbled the pieces of pottery awkwardly on the grass while some unfamiliar, deep-seated emotion, mixed with pity and glad assurance of his power to succor her, held him dumb.

“What a load you had!” she said. “Why, they’re pots and crocks! Where did you get them?”

Venters laid down his rifle, and, filling one of the pots from his canteen, he placed it on the smoldering campfire.

“Hope it’ll hold water,” he said, presently. “Why, there’s an enormous cliff-dwelling just across here. I got the pottery there. Don’t you think we needed something? That tin cup of mine has served to make tea, broth, soup – everything.”

“I noticed we hadn’t a great deal to cook in.”

She laughed. It was the first time. He liked that laugh, and though he was tempted to look at her, he did not want to show his surprise or his pleasure.

“Will you take me over there, and all around in the valley – pretty soon, when I’m well?” she added.

“Indeed I shall. It’s a wonderful place. Rabbits so thick you can’t step without kicking one out. And quail, beaver, foxes, wildcats. We’re in a regular den. But – haven’t you ever seen a cliff-dwelling?’

“No. I’ve heard about them, though. The – the men say the Pass is full of old houses and ruins.”

“Why, I should think you’d have run across one in all your riding around,” said Venters. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, and he essayed a perfectly casual manner, and pretended to be busy assorting pieces of pottery. She must have no cause again to suffer shame for curiosity of his. Yet never in all his days had he been so eager to hear the details of anyone’s life.

“When I rode – I rode like the wind,” she replied, “and never had time to stop for anything.”

“I remember that day I – I met you in the Pass – how dusty you were, how tired your horse looked. Were you always riding?”

“Oh, no. Sometimes not for months, when I was shut up in the cabin.”

Venters tried to subdue a hot tingling.

“You were shut up, then?” he asked, carelessly.

“When Oldring went away on his long trips – he was gone for months sometimes – he shut me up in the cabin.”

“What for?”

“Perhaps to keep me from running away. I always threatened that. Mostly, though, because the men got drunk at the villages. But they were always good to me. I wasn’t afraid.”

“A prisoner! That must have been hard on you?”

“I liked that. As long as I can remember I’ve been locked up there at times, and those times were the only happy ones I ever had. It’s a big cabin, high up on a cliff, and I could look out. Then I had dogs and pets I had tamed, and books. There was a spring inside, and food stored, and the men brought me fresh meat. Once I was there one whole winter.”

It now required deliberation on Venters’s part to persist in his unconcern and to keep at work. He wanted to look at her, to volley questions at her.

“As long as you can remember – you’ve lived in Deception Pass?” he went on.

“I’ve a dim memory of some other place, and women and children; but I can’t make anything of it. Sometimes I think till I’m weary.”

“Then you can read – you have books?”

“Oh yes, I can read, and write, too, pretty well. Oldring is educated. He taught me, and years ago an old rustler lived with us, and he had been something different once. He was always teaching me.”

“So Oldring takes long trips,” mused Venters. “Do you know where he goes?”

“No. Every year he drives cattle north of Sterling – then does not return for months. I heard him accused once of living two lives – and he killed the man. That was at Stone Bridge.”

Venters dropped his apparent task and looked up with an eagerness he no longer strove to hide.

“Bess,” he said, using her name for the first time, “I suspected Oldring was something besides a rustler. Tell me, what’s his purpose here in the Pass? I believe much that he has done was to hide his real work here.”

“You’re right. He’s more than a rustler. In fact, as the men say, his rustling cattle is now only a bluff. There’s gold in the canyons!”

“Ah!”

“Yes, there’s gold, not in great quantities, but gold enough for him and his men. They wash for gold week in and week out. Then they drive a few cattle and go into the villages to drink and shoot and kill – to bluff the riders.”

“Drive a few cattle! But, Bess, the Withersteen herd, the red herd – twenty-five hundred head! That’s not a few. And I tracked them into a valley near here.”

“Oldring never stole the red herd. He made a deal with Mormons. The riders were to be called in, and Oldring was to drive the herd and keep it till a certain time – I won’t know when – then drive it back to the range. What his share was I didn’t hear.”

“Did you hear why that deal was made?” queried Venters.

“No. But it was a trick of Mormons. They’re full of tricks. I’ve heard Oldring’s men tell about Mormons. Maybe the Withersteen woman wasn’t minding her halter! I saw the man who made the deal. He was a little, queer-shaped man, all humped up. He sat his horse well. I heard one of our men say afterward there was no better rider on the sage than this fellow. What was the name? I forget.”

“Jerry Card?” suggested Venters.

“That’s it. I remember – it’s a name easy to remember – and Jerry Card appeared to be on fair terms with Oldring’s men.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” replied Venters, thoughtfully. Verification of his suspicions in regard to Tull’s underhand work – for the deal with Oldring made by Jerry Card assuredly had its inception in the Mormon Elder’s brain, and had been accomplished through his orders – revived in Venters a memory of hatred that had been smothered by press of other emotions. Only a few days had elapsed since the hour of his encounter with Tull, yet they had been forgotten and now seemed far off, and the interval one that now appeared large and profound with incalculable change in his feelings. Hatred of Tull still existed in his heart, but it had lost its white heat. His affection for Jane Withersteen had not changed in the least; nevertheless, he seemed to view it from another angle and see it as another thing – what, he could not exactly define. The recalling of these two feelings was to Venters like getting glimpses into a self that was gone; and the wonder of them – perhaps the change which was too illusive for him – was the fact that a strange irritation accompanied the memory and a desire to dismiss it from mind. And straightway he did dismiss it, to return to thoughts of his significant present.

“Bess, tell me one more thing,” he said. “Haven’t you known any women – any young people?”

“Sometimes there were women with the men; but Oldring never let me know them. And all the young people I ever saw in my life was when I rode fast through the villages.”

Perhaps that was the most puzzling and thought-provoking thing she had yet said to Venters. He pondered, more curious the more he learned, but he curbed his inquisitive desires, for he saw her shrinking on the verge of that shame, the causing of which had occasioned him such self-reproach. He would ask no more. Still he had to think, and he found it difficult to think clearly. This sad-eyed girl was so utterly different from what it would have been reason to believe such a remarkable life would have made her. On this day he had found her simple and frank, as natural as any girl he had ever known. About her there was something sweet. Her voice was low and well modulated. He could not look into her face, meet her steady, unabashed, yet wistful eyes, and think of her as the woman she had confessed herself. Oldring’s Masked Rider sat before him, a girl dressed as a man. She had been made to ride at the head of infamous forays and drives. She had been imprisoned for many months of her life in an obscure cabin. At times the most vicious of men had been her companions; and the vilest of women, if they had not been permitted to approach her, had, at least, cast their shadows over her. But – but in spite of all this – there thundered at Venters some truth that lifted its voice higher than the clamoring facts of dishonor, some truth that was the very life of her beautiful eyes; and it was innocence.

In the days that followed, Venters balanced perpetually in mind this haunting conception of innocence over against the cold and sickening fact of an unintentional yet actual gift. How could it be possible for the two things to be true? He believed the latter to be true, and he would not relinquish his conviction of the former; and these conflicting thoughts augmented the mystery that appeared to be a part of Bess. In those ensuing days, however, it became clear as clearest light that Bess was rapidly regaining strength; that, unless reminded of her long association with Oldring, she seemed to have forgotten it; that, like an Indian who lives solely from moment to moment, she was utterly absorbed in the present.

Day by day Venters watched the white of her face slowly change to brown, and the wasted cheeks fill out by imperceptible degrees. There came a time when he could just trace the line of demarcation between the part of her face once hidden by a mask and that left exposed to wind and sun. When that line disappeared in clear bronze tan it was as if she had been washed clean of the stigma of Oldring’s Masked Rider. The suggestion of the mask always made Venters remember; now that it was gone he seldom thought of her past. Occasionally he tried to piece together the several stages of strange experience and to make a whole. He had shot a masked outlaw the very sight of whom had been ill omen to riders; he had carried off a wounded woman whose bloody lips quivered in prayer; he had nursed what seemed a frail, shrunken boy; and now he watched a girl whose face had become strangely sweet, whose dark-blue eyes were ever upon him without boldness, without shyness, but with a steady, grave, and growing light. Many times Venters found the clear gaze embarrassing to him, yet, like wine, it had an exhilarating effect. What did she think when she looked at him so? Almost he believed she had no thought at all. All about her and the present there in Surprise Valley, and the dim yet subtly impending future, fascinated Venters and made him thoughtful as all his lonely vigils in the sage had not.

Chiefly it was the present that he wished to dwell upon; but it was the call of the future which stirred him to action. No idea had he of what that future had in store for Bess and him. He began to think of improving Surprise Valley as a place to live in, for there was no telling how long they would be compelled to stay there. Venters stubbornly resisted the entering into his mind of an insistent thought that, clearly realized, might have made it plain to him that he did not want to leave Surprise Valley at all. But it was imperative that he consider practical matters; and whether or not he was destined to stay long there, he felt the immediate need of a change of diet. It would be necessary for him to go farther afield for a variety of meat, and also that he soon visit Cottonwoods for a supply of food.

It occurred again to Venters that he could go to the canyon where Oldring kept his cattle, and at little risk he could pack out some beef. He wished to do this, however, without letting Bess know of it till after he had made the trip. Presently he hit upon the plan of going while she was asleep.

That very night he stole out of camp, climbed up under the stone bridge, and entered the outlet to the Pass. The gorge was full of luminous gloom. Balancing Rock loomed dark and leaned over the pale descent. Transformed in the shadowy light, it took shape and dimensions of a spectral god waiting – waiting for the moment to hurl himself down upon the tottering walls and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass. At night more than by day Venters felt something fearful and fateful in that rock, and that it had leaned and waited through a thousand years to have somehow to deal with his destiny.

“Old man, if you must roll, wait till I get back to the girl, and then roll!” he said, aloud, as if the stones were indeed a god.

And those spoken words, in their grim note to his ear, as well as contents to his mind, told Venters that he was all but drifting on a current which he had not power nor wish to stem.

Venters exercised his usual care in the matter of hiding tracks from the outlet, yet it took him scarcely an hour to reach Oldring’s cattle. Here sight of many calves changed his original intention, and instead of packing out meat he decided to take a calf out alive. He roped one, securely tied its feet, and swung it over his shoulder. Here was an exceedingly heavy burden, but Venters was powerful – he could take up a sack of grain and with ease pitch it over a pack-saddle – and he made long distance without resting. The hardest work came in the climb up to the outlet and on through to the valley. When he had accomplished it, he became fired with another idea that again changed his intention. He would not kill the calf, but keep it alive. He would go back to Oldring’s herd and pack out more calves. Thereupon he secured the calf in the best available spot for the moment and turned to make a second trip.

When Venters got back to the valley with another calf, it was close upon daybreak. He crawled into his cave and slept late.

Bess had no inkling that he had been absent from camp nearly all night, and only remarked solicitously that he appeared to be more tired than usual, and more in the need of sleep. In the afternoon Venters built a gate across a small ravine near camp, and here corralled the calves; and he succeeded in completing his task without Bess being any the wiser.

That night he made two more trips to Oldring’s range, and again on the following night, and yet another on the next. With eight calves in his corral, he concluded that he had enough; but it dawned upon him then that he did not want to kill one. “I’ve rustled Oldring’s cattle,” he said, and laughed. He noted then that all the calves were red. “Red!” he exclaimed. “From the red herd. I’ve stolen Jane Withersteen’s cattle! … That’s about the strangest thing yet.”

One more trip he undertook to Oldring’s valley, and this time he roped a yearling steer and killed it and cut out a small quarter of beef. The howling of coyotes told him he need have no apprehension that the work of his knife would be discovered. He packed the beef back to camp and hung it upon a spruce-tree. Then he sought his bed.

On the morrow he was up bright and early, glad that he had a surprise for Bess. He could hardly wait for her to come out. Presently she appeared and walked under the spruce. Then she approached the camp-fire. There was a tinge of healthy red in the bronze of her cheeks, and her slender form had begun to round out in graceful lines.

“Bess, didn’t you say you were tired of rabbit?” inquired Venters. “And quail and beaver?”

“Indeed I did.”

“What would you like?”

“I’m tired of meat, but if we have to live on it I’d like some beef.”

“Well, how does that strike you?” Venters pointed to the quarter hanging from the spruce-tree. “We’ll have fresh beef for a few days, then we’ll cut the rest into strips and dry it.”

“Where did you get that?” asked Bess, slowly.

“I stole that from Oldring.”

“You went back to the canyon – you risked – ” While she hesitated the tinge of bloom faded out of her cheeks.

“It wasn’t any risk, but it was hard work.”

“I’m sorry I said I was tired of rabbit. Why! How – When did you get that beef?”

“Last night.”

“While I was asleep?”

“Yes.”

“I woke last night sometime – but I didn’t know.”

Her eyes were widening, darkening with thought, and whenever they did so the steady, watchful, seeing gaze gave place to the wistful light. In the former she saw as the primitive woman without thought; in the latter she looked inward, and her gaze was the reflection of a troubled mind. For long Venters had not seen that dark change, that deepening of blue, which he thought was beautiful and sad. But now he wanted to make her think.

“I’ve done more than pack in that beef,” he said. “For five nights I’ve been working while you slept. I’ve got eight calves corralled near a ravine. Eight calves, all alive and doing fine!”

“You went five nights!”

All that Venters could make of the dilation of her eyes, her slow pallor, and her exclamation, was fear – fear for herself or for him.

“Yes. I didn’t tell you, because I knew you were afraid to be left alone.”

“Alone?” She echoed his word, but the meaning of it was nothing to her. She had not even thought of being left alone. It was not, then, fear for herself, but for him. This girl, always slow of speech and action, now seemed almost stupid. She put forth a hand that might have indicated the groping of her mind. Suddenly she stepped swiftly to him, with a look and touch that drove from him any doubt of her quick intelligence or feeling.

“Oldring has men watch the herds – they would kill you. You must never go again!”

When she had spoken, the strength and the blaze of her died, and she swayed toward Venters.

“Bess, I’ll not go again,” he said, catching her.

She leaned against him, and her body was limp and vibrated to a long, wavering tremble. Her face was upturned to his. Woman’s face, woman’s eyes, woman’s lips – all acutely and blindly and sweetly and terribly truthful in their betrayal! But as her fear was instinctive, so was her clinging to this one and only friend.

Venters gently put her from him and steadied her upon her feet; and all the while his blood raced wild, and a thrilling tingle unsteadied his nerve, and something – that he had seen and felt in her – that he could not understand – seemed very close to him, warm and rich as a fragrant breath, sweet as nothing had ever before been sweet to him.

With all his will Venters strove for calmness and thought and judgment unbiased by pity, and reality unswayed by sentiment. Bess’s eyes were still fixed upon him with all her soul bright in that wistful light. Swiftly, resolutely he put out of mind all of her life except what had been spent with him. He scorned himself for the intelligence that made him still doubt. He meant to judge her as she had judged him. He was face to face with the inevitableness of life itself. He saw destiny in the dark, straight path of her wonderful eyes. Here was the simplicity, the sweetness of a girl contending with new and strange and enthralling emotions here the living truth of innocence; here the blind terror of a woman confronted with the thought of death to her savior and protector. All this Venters saw, but, besides, there was in Bess’s eyes a slow-dawning consciousness that seemed about to break out in glorious radiance.

“Bess, are you thinking?” he asked.

“Yes – oh yes!”

“Do you realize we are here alone – man and woman?”

“Yes.”

“Have you thought that we may make our way out to civilization, or we may have to stay here – alone – hidden from the world all our lives?”

“I never thought – till now.”

“Well, what’s your choice – to go – or to stay here – alone with me?”

“Stay!” New-born thought of self, ringing vibrantly in her voice, gave her answer singular power.

Venters trembled, and then swiftly turned his gaze from her face – from her eyes. He knew what she had only half divined – that she loved him.

Chapter 11

Faith and Unfaith

At Jane Withersteen’s home the promise made to Mrs. Larkin to care for little Fay had begun to be fulfilled. Like a gleam of sunlight through the cottonwoods was the coming of the child to the gloomy house of Withersteen. The big, silent halls echoed with childish laughter. In the shady court, where Jane spent many of the hot July days, Fay’s tiny feet pattered over the stone flags and splashed in the amber stream. She prattled incessantly. What a difference, Jane thought, a child made in her home! It had never been a real home, she discovered. Even the tidiness and neatness she had so observed, and upon which she had insisted to her women, became, in the light of Fay’s smile, habits that now lost their importance. Fay littered the court with Jane’s books and papers, and other toys her fancy improvised, and many a strange craft went floating down the little brook.

And it was owing to Fay’s presence that Jane Withersteen came to see more of Lassiter. The rider had for the most part kept to the sage. He rode for her, but he did not seek her except on business; and Jane had to acknowledge in pique that her overtures had been made in vain. Fay, however, captured Lassiter the moment he first laid eyes on her.

Jane was present at the meeting, and there was something about it which dimmed her sight and softened her toward this foe of her people. The rider had clanked into the court, a tired yet wary man, always looking for the attack upon him that was inevitable and might come from any quarter; and he had walked right upon little Fay. The child had been beautiful even in her rags and amid the surroundings of the hovel in the sage, but now, in a pretty white dress, with her shining curls brushed and her face clean and rosy, she was lovely. She left her play and looked up at Lassiter.

If there was not an instinct for all three of them in that meeting, an unreasoning tendency toward a closer intimacy, then Jane Withersteen believed she had been subject to a queer fancy. She imagined any child would have feared Lassiter. And Fay Larkin had been a lonely, a solitary elf of the sage, not at all an ordinary child, and exquisitely shy with strangers. She watched Lassiter with great, round, grave eyes, but showed no fear. The rider gave Jane a favorable report of cattle and horses; and as he took the seat to which she invited him, little Fay edged as much as half an inch nearer. Jane replied to his look of inquiry and told Fay’s story. The rider’s gray, earnest gaze troubled her. Then he turned to Fay and smiled in a way that made Jane doubt her sense of the true relation of things. How could Lassiter smile so at a child when he had made so many children fatherless? But he did smile, and to the gentleness she had seen a few times he added something that was infinitely sad and sweet. Jane’s intuition told her that Lassiter had never been a father, but if life ever so blessed him he would be a good one. Fay, also, must have found that smile singularly winning. For she edged closer and closer, and then, by way of feminine capitulation, went to Jane, from whose side she bent a beautiful glance upon the rider.

Lassiter only smiled at her.

Jane watched them, and realized that now was the moment she should seize, if she was ever to win this man from his hatred. But the step was not easy to take. The more she saw of Lassiter the more she respected him, and the greater her respect the harder it became to lend herself to mere coquetry. Yet as she thought of her great motive, of Tull, and of that other whose name she had schooled herself never to think of in connection with Milly Erne’s avenger, she suddenly found she had no choice. And her creed gave her boldness far beyond the limit to which vanity would have led her.

“Lassiter, I see so little of you now,” she said, and was conscious of heat in her cheeks.

“I’ve been riding hard,” he replied.

“But you can’t live in the saddle. You come in sometimes. Won’t you come here to see me – oftener?”

“Is that an order?”

“Nonsense! I simply ask you to come to see me when you find time.”

“Why?”

The query once heard was not so embarrassing to Jane as she might have imagined. Moreover, it established in her mind a fact that there existed actually other than selfish reasons for her wanting to see him. And as she had been bold, so she determined to be both honest and brave.

“I’ve reasons – only one of which I need mention,” she answered. “If it’s possible I want to change you toward my people. And on the moment I can conceive of little I wouldn’t do to gain that end.”

How much better and freer Jane felt after that confession! She meant to show him that there was one Mormon who could play a game or wage a fight in the open.

“I reckon,” said Lassiter, and he laughed.

It was the best in her, if the most irritating, that Lassiter always aroused.

“Will you come?” She looked into his eyes, and for the life of her could not quite subdue an imperiousness that rose with her spirit. “I never asked so much of any man – except Bern Venters.”

“’Pears to me that you’d run no risk, or Venters, either. But mebbe that doesn’t hold good for me.”

“You mean it wouldn’t be safe for you to be often here? You look for ambush in the cottonwoods?”

“Not that so much.”

At this juncture little Fay sidled over to Lassiter.

“Has oo a little dirt?” she inquired.

“No, lassie,” replied the rider.

Whatever Fay seemed to be searching for in Lassiter’s sun-reddened face and quiet eyes she evidently found. “Oo tan tom to see me,” she added, and with that, shyness gave place to friendly curiosity. First his sombrero with its leather band and silver ornaments commanded her attention; next his quirt, and then the clinking, silver spurs. These held her for some time, but presently, true to childish fickleness, she left off playing with them to look for something else. She laughed in glee as she ran her little hands down the slippery, shiny surface of Lassiter’s leather chaps. Soon she discovered one of the hanging gun – sheaths, and she dragged it up and began tugging at the huge black handle of the gun. Jane Withersteen repressed an exclamation. What significance there was to her in the little girl’s efforts to dislodge that heavy weapon! Jane Withersteen saw Fay’s play and her beauty and her love as most powerful allies to her own woman’s part in a game that suddenly had acquired a strange zest and a hint of danger. And as for the rider, he appeared to have forgotten Jane in the wonder of this lovely child playing about him. At first he was much the shyer of the two. Gradually her confidence overcame his backwardness, and he had the temerity to stroke her golden curls with a great hand. Fay rewarded his boldness with a smile, and when he had gone to the extreme of closing that great hand over her little brown one, she said, simply, “I like oo!”

Sight of his face then made Jane oblivious for the time to his character as a hater of Mormons. Out of the mother longing that swelled her breast she divined the child hunger in Lassiter.

He returned the next day, and the next; and upon the following he came both at morning and at night. Upon the evening of this fourth day Jane seemed to feel the breaking of a brooding struggle in Lassiter. During all these visits he had scarcely a word to say, though he watched her and played absent-mindedly with Fay. Jane had contented herself with silence. Soon little Fay substituted for the expression of regard, “I like oo,” a warmer and more generous one, “I love oo.”

Thereafter Lassiter came oftener to see Jane and her little protégée. Daily he grew more gentle and kind, and gradually developed a quaintly merry mood. In the morning he lifted Fay upon his horse and let her ride as he walked beside her to the edge of the sage. In the evening he played with the child at an infinite variety of games she invented, and then, oftener than not, he accepted Jane’s invitation to supper. No other visitor came to Withersteen House during those days. So that in spite of watchfulness he never forgot, Lassiter began to show he felt at home there. After the meal they walked into the grove of cottonwoods or up by the lakes, and little Fay held Lassiter’s hand as much as she held Jane’s. Thus a strange relationship was established, and Jane liked it. At twilight they always returned to the house, where Fay kissed them and went in to her mother. Lassiter and Jane were left alone.

Then, if there were anything that a good woman could do to win a man and still preserve her self-respect, it was something which escaped the natural subtlety of a woman determined to allure. Jane’s vanity, that after all was not great, was soon satisfied with Lassiter’s silent admiration. And her honest desire to lead him from his dark, blood-stained path would never have blinded her to what she owed herself. But the driving passion of her religion, and its call to save Mormons’ lives, one life in particular, bore Jane Withersteen close to an infringement of her womanhood. In the beginning she had reasoned that her appeal to Lassiter must be through the senses. With whatever means she possessed in the way of adornment she enhanced her beauty. And she stooped to artifices that she knew were unworthy of her, but which she deliberately chose to employ. She made of herself a girl in every variable mood wherein a girl might be desirable. In those moods she was not above the methods of an inexperienced though natural flirt. She kept close to him whenever opportunity afforded; and she was forever playfully, yet passionately underneath the surface, fighting him for possession of the great black guns. These he would never yield to her. And so in that manner their hands were often and long in contact. The more of simplicity that she sensed in him the greater the advantage she took.

She had a trick of changing – and it was not altogether voluntary – from this gay, thoughtless, girlish coquettishness to the silence and the brooding, burning mystery of a woman’s mood. The strength and passion and fire of her were in her eyes, and she so used them that Lassiter had to see this depth in her, this haunting promise more fitted to her years than to the flaunting guise of a wilful girl.

The July days flew by. Jane reasoned that if it were possible for her to be happy during such a time, then she was happy. Little Fay completely filled a long aching void in her heart. In fettering the hands of this Lassiter she was accomplishing the greatest good of her life, and to do good even in a small way rendered happiness to Jane Withersteen. She had attended the regular Sunday services of her church; otherwise she had not gone to the village for weeks. It was unusual that none of her churchmen or friends had called upon her of late; but it was neglect for which she was glad. Judkins and his boy riders had experienced no difficulty in driving the white herd. So these warm July days were free of worry, and soon Jane hoped she had passed the crisis; and for her to hope was presently to trust, and then to believe. She thought often of Venters, but in a dreamy, abstract way. She spent hours teaching and playing with little Fay. And the activity of her mind centered around Lassiter. The direction she had given her will seemed to blunt any branching off of thought from that straight line. The mood came to obsess her.

In the end, when her awakening came, she learned that she had built better than she knew. Lassiter, though kinder and gentler than ever, had parted with his quaint humor and his coldness and his tranquility to become a restless and unhappy man. Whatever the power of his deadly intent toward Mormons, that passion now had a rival, the one equally burning and consuming. Jane Withersteen had one moment of exultation before the dawn of a strange uneasiness. What if she had made of herself a lure, at tremendous cost to him and to her, and all in vain!

That night in the moonlit grove she summoned all her courage and, turning suddenly in the path, she faced Lassiter and leaned close to him, so that she touched him and her eyes looked up to his.

“Lassiter! … Will you do anything for me?”

In the moonlight she saw his dark, worn face change, and by that change she seemed to feel him immovable as a wall of stone.

Jane slipped her hands down to the swinging gun-sheaths, and when she had locked her fingers around the huge, cold handles of the guns, she trembled as with a chilling ripple over all her body.

“May I take your guns?”

“Why?” he asked, and for the first time to her his voice carried a harsh note. Jane felt his hard, strong hands close round her wrists. It was not wholly with intent that she leaned toward him, for the look of his eyes and the feel of his hands made her weak.

“It’s no trifle – no woman’s whim – it’s deep – as my heart. Let me take them?”

“Why?”

“I want to keep you from killing more men – Mormons. You must let me save you from more wickedness – more wanton bloodshed – ” Then the truth forced itself falteringly from her lips. “You must – let – help me to keep my vow to Milly Erne. I swore to her – as she lay dying – that if ever any one came here to avenge her – I swore I would stay his hand. Perhaps I – I alone can save the – the man who – who – Oh, Lassiter! … I feel that I can’t change you – then soon you’ll be out to kill – and you’ll kill by instinct – and among the Mormons you kill will be the one – who …Lassiter, if you care a little for me – let me – for my sake – let me take your guns!”

As if her hands had been those of a child, he unclasped their clinging grip from the handles of his guns, and, pushing her away, he turned his gray face to her in one look of terrible realization and then strode off into the shadows of the cottonwoods.

When the first shock of her futile appeal to Lassiter had passed, Jane took his cold, silent condemnation and abrupt departure not so much as a refusal to her entreaty as a hurt and stunned bitterness for her attempt at his betrayal. Upon further thought and slow consideration of Lassiter’s past actions, she believed he would return and forgive her. The man could not be hard to a woman, and she doubted that he could stay away from her. But at the point where she had hoped to find him vulnerable see now began to fear he was proof against all persuasion. The iron and stone quality that she had early suspected in him had actually cropped out as an impregnable barrier. Nevertheless, if Lassiter remained in Cottonwoods she would never give up her hope and desire to change him. She would change him if she had to sacrifice everything dear to her except hope of heaven. Passionately devoted as she was to her religion, she had yet refused to marry a Mormon. But a situation had developed wherein self paled in the great white light of religious duty of the highest order. That was the leading motive, the divinely spiritual one; but there were other motives, which, like tentacles, aided in drawing her will to the acceptance of a possible abnegation. And through the watches of that sleepless night Jane Withersteen, in fear and sorrow and doubt, came finally to believe that if she must throw herself into Lassiter’s arms to make him abide by “Thou shalt not kill!” she would yet do well.

In the morning she expected Lassiter at the usual hour, but she was not able to go at once to the court, so she sent little Fay. Mrs. Larkin was ill and required attention. It appeared that the mother, from the time of her arrival at Withersteen House, had relaxed and was slowly losing her hold on life. Jane had believed that absence of worry and responsibility coupled with good nursing and comfort would mend Mrs. Larkin’s broken health. Such, however, was not the case.

When Jane did get out to the court, Fay was there alone, and at the moment embarking on a dubious voyage down the stone-lined amber stream upon a craft of two brooms and a pillow. Fay was as delightfully wet as she could possibly wish to get.

Clatter of hoofs distracted Fay and interrupted the scolding she was gleefully receiving from Jane. The sound was not the light-spirited trot that Bells made when Lassiter rode him into the outer court. This was slower and heavier, and Jane did not recognize in it any of her other horses. The appearance of Bishop Dyer startled Jane. He dismounted with his rapid, jerky motion flung the bridle, and, as he turned toward the inner court and stalked up on the stone flags, his boots rang. In his authoritative front, and in the red anger unmistakably flaming in his face, he reminded Jane of her father.

“Is that the Larkin pauper?” he asked, bruskly, without any greeting to Jane.

“It’s Mrs. Larkin’s little girl,” replied Jane, slowly.

“I hear you intend to raise the child?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you mean to give her Mormon bringing-up?”

“No.”

His questions had been swift. She was amazed at a feeling that someone else was replying for her.

“I’ve come to say a few things to you.” He stopped to measure her with stern, speculative eye.

Jane Withersteen loved this man. From earliest childhood she had been taught to revere and love bishops of her church. And for ten years Bishop Dyer had been the closest friend and counselor of her father, and for the greater part of that period her own friend and Scriptural teacher. Her interpretation of her creed and her religious activity in fidelity to it, her acceptance of mysterious and holy Mormon truths, were all invested in this Bishop. Bishop Dyer as an entity was next to God. He was God’s mouthpiece to the little Mormon community at Cottonwoods. God revealed himself in secret to this mortal.

And Jane Withersteen suddenly suffered a paralyzing affront to her consciousness of reverence by some strange, irresistible twist of thought wherein she saw this Bishop as a man. And the train of thought hurdled the rising, crying protests of that other self whose poise she had lost. It was not her Bishop who eyed her in curious measurement. It was a man who tramped into her presence without removing his hat, who had no greeting for her, who had no semblance of courtesy. In looks, as in action, he made her think of a bull stamping cross-grained into a corral. She had heard of Bishop Dyer forgetting the minister in the fury of a common man, and now she was to feel it. The glance by which she measured him in turn momentarily veiled the divine in the ordinary. He looked a rancher; he was booted, spurred, and covered with dust; he carried a gun at his hip, and she remembered that he had been known to use it. But during the long moment while he watched her there was nothing commonplace in the slow-gathering might of his wrath.

“Brother Tull has talked to me,” he began. “It was your father’s wish that you marry Tull, and my order. You refused him?”

“Yes.”

“You would not give up your friendship with that tramp Venters?”

“No.”

“But you’ll do as I order!” he thundered. “Why, Jane Withersteen, you are in danger of becoming a heretic! You can thank your Gentile friends for that. You face the damning of your soul to perdition.”

In the flux and reflux of the whirling torture of Jane’s mind, that new, daring spirit of hers vanished in the old habitual order of her life. She was a Mormon, and the Bishop regained ascendance.

“It’s well I got you in time, Jane Withersteen. What would your father have said to these goings-on of yours? He would have put you in a stone cage on bread and water. He would have taught you something about Mormonism. Remember, you’re a born Mormon. There have been Mormons who turned heretic – damn their souls! – but no born Mormon ever left us yet. Ah, I see your shame. Your faith is not shaken. You are only a wild girl.” The Bishop’s tone softened. “Well, it’s enough that I got to you in time… Now tell me about this Lassiter. I hear strange things.”

“What do you wish to know?” queried Jane.

“About this man. You hired him?”

“Yes, he’s riding for me. When my riders left me I had to have any one I could get.”

“Is it true what I hear – that he’s a gun-man, a Mormon-hater, steeped in blood?”

“True – terribly true, I fear.”

“But what’s he doing here in Cottonwoods? This place isn’t notorious enough for such a man. Sterling and the villages north, where there’s universal gun-packing and fights every day – where there are more men like him, it seems to me they would attract him most. We’re only a wild, lonely border settlement. It’s only recently that the rustlers have made killings here. Nor have there been saloons till lately, nor the drifting in of outcasts. Has not this gun-man some special mission here?”

Jane maintained silence.

“Tell me,” ordered Bishop Dyer, sharply.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me that.”

“Bishop Dyer, I don’t want to tell.”

He waved his hand in an imperative gesture of command. The red once more leaped to his face, and in his steel-blue eyes glinted a pin-point of curiosity.

“That first day,” whispered Jane, “Lassiter said he came here to find – Milly Erne’s grave!”

With downcast eyes Jane watched the swift flow of the amber water. She saw it and tried to think of it, of the stones, of the ferns; but, like her body, her mind was in a leaden vise. Only the Bishop’s voice could release her. Seemingly there was silence of longer duration than all her former life.

“For what – else?” When Bishop Dyer’s voice did cleave the silence it was high, curiously shrill, and on the point of breaking. It released Jane’s tongue, but she could not lift her eyes.

“To kill the man who persuaded Milly Erne to abandon her home and her husband – and her God!”

With wonderful distinctness Jane Withersteen heard her own clear voice. She heard the water murmur at her feet and flow on to the sea; she heard the rushing of all the waters in the world. They filled her ears with low, unreal murmurings – these sounds that deadened her brain and yet could not break the long and terrible silence. Then, from somewhere – from an immeasurable distance – came a slow, guarded, clinking, clanking step. Into her it shot electrifying life. It released the weight upon her numbed eyelids. Lifting her eyes she saw – ashen, shaken, stricken – not the Bishop but the man! And beyond him, from round the corner came that soft, silvery step. A long black boot with a gleaming spur swept into sight – and then Lassiter! Bishop Dyer did not see, did not hear: he stared at Jane in the throes of sudden revelation.

“Ah, I understand!” he cried, in hoarse accents. “That’s why you made love to this Lassiter – to bind his hands!”

It was Jane’s gaze riveted upon the rider that made Bishop Dyer turn. Then clear sight failed her. Dizzily, in a blur, she saw the Bishop’s hand jerk to his hip. She saw gleam of blue and spout of red. In her ears burst a thundering report. The court floated in darkening circles around her, and she fell into utter blackness.

The darkness lightened, turned to slow-drifting haze, and lifted. Through a thin film of blue smoke she saw the rough-hewn timbers of the court roof. A cool, damp touch moved across her brow. She smelled powder, and it was that which galvanized her suspended thought. She moved, to see that she lay prone upon the stone flags with her head on Lassiter’s knee, and he was bathing her brow with water from the stream. The same swift glance, shifting low, brought into range of her sight a smoking gun and splashes of blood.

“Ah-h!” she moaned, and was drifting, sinking again into darkness, when Lassiter’s voice arrested her.

“It’s all right, Jane. It’s all right.”

“Did – you – kill – him?” she whispered.

“Who? That fat party who was here? No. I didn’t kill him.”

“Oh! … Lassiter!”

“Say! It was queer for you to faint. I thought you were such a strong woman, not faintish like that. You’re all right now – only some pale. I thought you’d never come to. But I’m awkward round women folks. I couldn’t think of anythin’.”

“Lassiter! … the gun there! … the blood!”

“So that’s troublin’ you. I reckon it needn’t. You see it was this way. I come round the house an’ seen that fat party an’ heard him talkin’ loud. Then he seen me, an’ very impolite goes straight for his gun. He oughtn’t have tried to throw a gun on me – whatever his reason was. For that’s meetin’ me on my own grounds. I’ve seen runnin’ molasses that was quicker ’n him. Now I didn’t know who he was, visitor or friend or relation of yours, though I seen he was a Mormon all over, an’ I couldn’t get serious about shootin’. So I winged him – put a bullet through his arm as he was pullin’ at his gun. An’ he dropped the gun there, an’ a little blood. I told him he’d introduced himself sufficient, an’ to please move out of my vicinity. An’ he went.”

Lassiter spoke with slow, cool, soothing voice, in which there was a hint of levity, and his touch, as he continued to bathe her brow, was gentle and steady. His impassive face, and the kind gray eyes, further stilled her agitation.

“He drew on you first, and you deliberately shot to cripple him – you wouldn’t kill him – you – Lassiter?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Jane kissed his hand.

All that was calm and cool about Lassiter instantly vanished.

“Don’t do that! I won’t stand it! An’ I don’t care a damn who that fat party was.”

He helped Jane to her feet and to a chair. Then with the wet scarf he had used to bathe her face he wiped the blood from the stone flags and, picking up the gun, he threw it upon a couch. With that he began to pace the court, and his silver spurs jangled musically, and the great gun-sheaths softly brushed against his leather chaps.

“So – it’s true – what I heard him say?” Lassiter asked, presently halting before her. “You made love to me – to bind my hands?”

“Yes,” confessed Jane. It took all her woman’s courage to meet the gray storm of his glance.

“All these days that you’ve been so friendly an’ like a pardner – all these evenin’s that have been so bewilderin’ to me – your beauty – an’ – an’ the way you looked an’ came close to me – they were woman’s tricks to bind my hands?”

“Yes.”

“An’ your sweetness that seemed so natural, an’ your throwin’ little Fay an’ me so much together – to make me love the child – all that was for the same reason?”

“Yes.”

Lassiter flung his arms – a strange gesture for him.

“Mebbe it wasn’t much in your Mormon thinkin’, for you to play that game. But to ring the child in – that was hellish!”

Jane’s passionate, unheeding zeal began to loom darkly.

“Lassiter, whatever my intention in the beginning, Fay loves you dearly – and I – I’ve grown to – to like you.”

“That’s powerful kind of you, now,” he said. Sarcasm and scorn made his voice that of a stranger. “An’ you sit there an’ look me straight in the eyes! You’re a wonderful strange woman, Jane Withersteen.”

“I’m not ashamed, Lassiter. I told you I’d try to change you.”

“Would you mind tellin’ me just what you tried?”

“I tried to make you see beauty in me and be softened by it. I wanted you to care for me so that I could influence you. It wasn’t easy. At first you were stone-blind. Then I hoped you’d love little Fay, and through that come to feel the horror of making children fatherless.”

“Jane Withersteen, either you’re a fool or noble beyond my understandin’. Mebbe you’re both. I know you’re blind. What you meant is one thing – what you did was to make me love you.”

“Lassiter!”

“I reckon I’m a human bein’, though I never loved any one but my sister, Milly Erne. That was long—”

“Oh, are you Milly’s brother?”

“Yes, I was, an’ I loved her. There never was any one but her in my life till now. Didn’t I tell you that long ago I back-trailed myself from women? I was a Texas ranger till – till Milly left home, an’ then I became somethin’ else – Lassiter! For years I’ve been a lonely man set on one thing. I came here an’ met you. An’ now I’m not the man I was. The change was gradual, an’ I took no notice of it. I understand now that never-satisfied longin’ to see you, listen to you, watch you, feel you near me. It’s plain now why you were never out of my thoughts. I’ve had no thoughts but of you. I’ve lived an’ breathed for you. An’ now when I know what it means – what you’ve done – I’m burnin’ up with hell’s fire!”

“Oh, Lassiter – no – no – you don’t love me that way!” Jane cased.

“If that’s what love is, then I do.”

“Forgive me! I didn’t mean to make you love me like that. Oh, what a tangle of our lives! You – Milly Erne’s brother! And I – heedless, mad to melt your heart toward Mormons. Lassiter, I may be wicked but not wicked enough to hate. If I couldn’t hate Tull, could I hate you?”

“After all, Jane, mebbe you’re only blind – Mormon blind. That only can explain what’s close to selfishness—”

“I’m not selfish. I despise the very word. If I were free—”

“But you’re not free. Not free of Mormonism. An’ in playin’ this game with me you’ve been unfaithful.”

“Unfaithful!” faltered Jane.

“Yes, I said unfaithful. You’re faithful to your Bishop an’ unfaithful to yourself. You’re false to your womanhood an’ true to your religion. But for a savin’ innocence you’d have made yourself low an’ vile – betrayin’ yourself, betrayin’ me – all to bind my hands an’ keep me from snuffin’ out Mormon life. It’s your damned Mormon blindness.”

“Is it vile – is it blind – is it only Mormonism to save human life? No, Lassiter, that’s God’s law, divine, universal for all Christians.”

“The blindness I mean is blindness that keeps you from seein’ the truth. I’ve known many good Mormons. But some are blacker than hell. You won’t see that even when you know it. Else, why all this blind passion to save the life of that – that…”

Jane shut out the light, and the hands she held over her eyes trembled and quivered against her face.

“Blind – yes, an’ let me make it clear an’ simple to you,” Lassiter went on, his voice losing its tone of anger. “Take, for instance, that idea of yours last night when you wanted my guns. It was good an’ beautiful, an’ showed your heart – but – why, Jane, it was crazy. Mind I’m assumin’ that life to me is as sweet as to any other man. An’ to preserve that life is each man’s first an’ closest thought. Where would any man be on this border without guns? Where, especially, would Lassiter be? Well, I’d be under the sage with thousands of other men now livin’ an’ sure better men than me. Gun-packin’ in the West since the Civil War has growed into a kind of moral law. An’ out here on this border it’s the difference between a man an’ somethin’ not a man. Look what your takin’ Venters’s guns from him all but made him! Why, your churchmen carry guns. Tull has killed a man an’ drawed on others. Your Bishop has shot a half dozen men, an’ it wasn’t through prayers of his that they recovered. An’ today he’d have shot me if he’d been quick enough on the draw. Could I walk or ride down into Cottonwoods without my guns? This is a wild time, Jane Withersteen, this year of our Lord eighteen seventy-one.”

“No time – for a woman!” exclaimed Jane, brokenly. “Oh, Lassiter, I feel helpless – lost – and don’t know where to turn. If I am blind – then – I need some one – a friend – you, Lassiter – more than ever!”

“Well, I didn’t say nothin’ about goin’ back on you, did I?”

Chapter 12

The Invisible Hand

Jane received a letter from Bishop Dyer, not in his own handwriting, which stated that the abrupt termination of their interview had left him in some doubt as to her future conduct. A slight injury had incapacitated him from seeking another meeting at present, the letter went on to say, and ended with a request which was virtually a command, that she call upon him at once.

The reading of the letter acquainted Jane Withersteen with the fact that something within her had all but changed. She sent no reply to Bishop Dyer nor did she go to see him. On Sunday she remained absent from the service – for the second time in years – and though she did not actually suffer there was a dead-lock of feelings deep within her, and the waiting for a balance to fall on either side was almost as bad as suffering. She had a gloomy expectancy of untoward circumstances, and with it a keen-edged curiosity to watch developments. She had a half-formed conviction that her future conduct – as related to her churchmen – was beyond her control and would be governed by their attitude toward her. Something was changing in her, forming, waiting for decision to make it a real and fixed thing. She had told Lassiter that she felt helpless and lost in the fateful tangle of their lives; and now she feared that she was approaching the same chaotic condition of mind in regard to her religion. It appalled her to find that she questioned phases of that religion. Absolute faith had been her serenity. Though leaving her faith unshaken, her serenity had been disturbed, and now it was broken by open war between her and her ministers. That something within her – a whisper – which she had tried in vain to hush had become a ringing voice, and it called to her to wait. She had transgressed no laws of God. Her churchmen, however invested with the power and the glory of a wonderful creed, however they sat in inexorable judgment of her, must now practice toward her the simple, common, Christian virtue they professed to preach, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you!”

Jane Withersteen, waiting in darkness of mind, remained faithful still. But it was darkness that must soon be pierced by light. If her faith were justified, if her churchmen were trying only to intimidate her, the fact would soon be manifest, as would their failure, and then she would redouble her zeal toward them and toward what had been the best work of her life – work for the welfare and happiness of those among whom she lived, Mormon and Gentile alike. If that secret, intangible power closed its toils round her again, if that great invisible hand moved here and there and everywhere, slowly paralyzing her with its mystery and its inconceivable sway over her affairs, then she would know beyond doubt that it was not chance, nor jealousy, nor intimidation, nor ministerial wrath at her revolt, but a cold and calculating policy thought out long before she was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an atom.

Then might come her ruin. Then might come her fall into black storm. Yet she would rise again, and to the light. God would be merciful to a driven woman who had lost her way.

A week passed. Little Fay played and prattled and pulled at Lassiter’s big black guns. The rider came to Withersteen House oftener than ever. Jane saw a change in him, though it did not relate to his kindness and gentleness. He was quieter and more thoughtful. While playing with Fay or conversing with Jane he seemed to be possessed of another self that watched with cool, roving eyes, that listened, listened always as if the murmuring amber stream brought messages, and the moving leaves whispered something. Lassiter never rode Bells into the court any more, nor did he come by the lane or the paths. When he appeared it was suddenly and noiselessly out of the dark shadow of the grove.

“I left Bells out in the sage,” he said, one day at the end of that week. “I must carry water to him.”

“Why not let him drink at the trough or here?” asked Jane, quickly.

“I reckon it’ll be safer for me to slip through the grove. I’ve been watched when I rode in from the sage.”

“Watched? By whom?”

“By a man who thought he was well hid. But my eyes are pretty sharp. An’, Jane,” he went on, almost in a whisper, “I reckon it’d be a good idea for us to talk low. You’re spied on here by your women.”

“Lassiter!” she whispered in turn. “That’s hard to believe. My women love me.”

“What of that?” he asked. “Of course they love you. But they’re Mormon women.”

Jane’s old, rebellious loyalty clashed with her doubt.

“I won’t believe it,” she replied, stubbornly.

“Well then, just act natural an’ talk natural, an’ pretty soon – give them time to hear us – pretend to go over there to the table, an’ then quick-like make a move for the door an’ open it.”

“I will,” said Jane, with heightened color. Lassiter was right; he never made mistakes; he would not have told her unless he positively knew. Yet Jane was so tenacious of faith that she had to see with her own eyes, and so constituted that to employ even such small deceit toward her women made her ashamed, and angry for her shame as well as theirs. Then a singular thought confronted her that made her hold up this simple ruse – which hurt her, though it was well justified – against the deceit she had wittingly and eagerly used toward Lassiter. The difference was staggering in its suggestion of that blindness of which he had accused her. Fairness and justice and mercy, that she had imagined were anchor-cables to hold fast her soul to righteousness had not been hers in the strange, biased duty that had so exalted and confounded her.

Presently Jane began to act her little part, to laugh and play with Fay, to talk of horses and cattle to Lassiter. Then she made deliberate mention of a book in which she kept records of all pertaining to her stock, and she walked slowly toward the table, and when near the door she suddenly whirled and thrust it open. Her sharp action nearly knocked down a woman who had undoubtedly been listening.

“Hester,” said Jane, sternly, “you may go home, and you need not come back.”

Jane shut the door and returned to Lassiter. Standing unsteadily, she put her hand on his arm. She let him see that doubt had gone, and how this stab of disloyalty pained her.

“Spies! My own women! … Oh, miserable!” she cried, with flashing, tearful eyes.

“I hate to tell you,” he replied. By that she knew he had long spared her. “It’s begun again – that work in the dark.”

“Nay, Lassiter – it never stopped!”

So bitter certainty claimed her at last, and trust fled Withersteen House and fled forever. The women who owed much to Jane Withersteen changed not in love for her, nor in devotion to their household work, but they poisoned both by a thousand acts of stealth and cunning and duplicity. Jane broke out once and caught them in strange, stone-faced, unhesitating falsehood. Thereafter she broke out no more. She forgave them because they were driven. Poor, fettered, and sealed Hagars, how she pitied them! What terrible thing bound them and locked their lips, when they showed neither consciousness of guilt toward their benefactress nor distress at the slow wearing apart of long-established and dear ties?

“The blindness again!” cried Jane Withersteen. “In my sisters as in me! …O God!”

There came a time when no words passed between Jane and her women. Silently they went about their household duties, and secretly they went about the underhand work to which they had been bidden. The gloom of the house and the gloom of its mistress, which darkened even the bright spirit of little Fay, did not pervade these women. Happiness was not among them, but they were aloof from gloom. They spied and listened; they received and sent secret messengers; and they stole Jane’s books and records, and finally the papers that were deeds of her possessions. Through it all they were silent, rapt in a kind of trance. Then one by one, without leave or explanation or farewell, they left Withersteen House, and never returned.

Coincident with this disappearance Jane’s gardeners and workers in the alfalfa fields and stable men quit her, not even asking for their wages. Of all her Mormon employees about the great ranch only Jerd remained. He went on with his duty, but talked no more of the change than if it had never occurred.

“Jerd,” said Jane, “what stock you can’t take care of turn out in the sage. Let your first thought be for Black Star and Night. Keep them in perfect condition. Run them every day and watch them always.”

Though Jane Withersteen gave them such liberality, she loved her possessions. She loved the rich, green stretches of alfalfa, and the farms, and the grove, and the old stone house, and the beautiful, ever-faithful amber spring, and every one of a myriad of horses and colts and burros and fowls down to the smallest rabbit that nipped her vegetables; but she loved best her noble Arabian steeds. In common with all riders of the upland sage Jane cherished two material things – the cold, sweet, brown water that made life possible in the wilderness and the horses which were a part of that life. When Lassiter asked her what Lassiter would be without his guns he was assuming that his horse was part of himself. So Jane loved Black Star and Night because it was her nature to love all beautiful creatures – perhaps all living things; and then she loved them because she herself was of the sage and in her had been born and bred the rider’s instinct to rely on his four-footed brother. And when Jane gave Jerd the order to keep her favorites trained down to the day it was a half-conscious admission that presaged a time when she would need her fleet horses.

Jane had now, however, no leisure to brood over the coils that were closing round her. Mrs. Larkin grew weaker as the August days began; she required constant care; there was little Fay to look after; and such household work as was imperative. Lassiter put Bells in the stable with the other racers, and directed his efforts to a closer attendance upon Jane. She welcomed the change. He was always at hand to help, and it was her fortune to learn that his boast of being awkward around women had its root in humility and was not true.

His great, brown hands were skilled in a multiplicity of ways which a woman might have envied. He shared Jane’s work, and was of especial help to her in nursing Mrs. Larkin. The woman suffered most at night, and this often broke Jane’s rest. So it came about that Lassiter would stay by Mrs. Larkin during the day, when she needed care, and Jane would make up the sleep she lost in night-watches. Mrs. Larkin at once took kindly to the gentle Lassiter, and, without ever asking who or what he was, praised him to Jane. “He’s a good man and loves children,” she said. How sad to hear this truth spoken of a man whom Jane thought lost beyond all redemption! Yet ever and ever Lassiter towered above her, and behind or through his black, sinister figure shone something luminous that strangely affected Jane. Good and evil began to seem incomprehensibly blended in her judgment. It was her belief that evil could not come forth from good; yet here was a murderer who dwarfed in gentleness, patience, and love any man she had ever known.

She had almost lost track of her more outside concerns when early one morning Judkins presented himself before her in the courtyard.

Thin, hard, burnt, bearded, with the dust and sage thick on him, with his leather wrist-bands shining from use, and his boots worn through on the stirrup side, he looked the rider of riders. He wore two guns and carried a Winchester.

Jane greeted him with surprise and warmth, set meat and bread and drink before him; and called Lassiter out to see him. The men exchanged glances, and the meaning of Lassiter’s keen inquiry and Judkins’s bold reply, both unspoken, was not lost upon Jane.

“Where’s your hoss?” asked Lassiter, aloud.

“Left him down the slope,” answered Judkins. “I footed it in a ways, an’ slept last night in the sage. I went to the place you told me you ’most always slept, but didn’t strike you.”

“I moved up some, near the spring, an’ now I go there nights.”

“Judkins – the white herd?” queried Jane, hurriedly.

“Miss Withersteen, I make proud to say I’ve not lost a steer. Fer a good while after thet stampede Lassiter milled we hed no trouble. Why, even the sage dogs left us. But it’s begun agin – thet flashin’ of lights over ridge tips, an’ queer puffin’ of smoke, an’ then at night strange whistles an’ noises. But the herd’s acted magnificent. An’ my boys, say, Miss Withersteen, they’re only kids, but I ask no better riders. I got the laugh in the village fer takin’ them out. They’re a wild lot, an’ you know boys hev more nerve than grown men, because they don’t know what danger is.

“I’m not denyin’ there’s danger. But they glory in it, an’ mebbe I like it myself – anyway, we’ll stick. We’re goin’ to drive the herd on the far side of the first break of Deception Pass. There’s a great round valley over there, an’ no ridges or piles of rocks to aid these stampeders. The rains are due. We’ll hev plenty of water fer a while. An’ we can hold thet herd from anybody except Oldrin’. I come in fer supplies. I’ll pack a couple of burros an’ drive out after dark tonight.”

“Judkins, take what you want from the store-room. Lassiter will help you. I – I can’t thank you enough… but – wait.”

Jane went to the room that had once been her father’s, and from a secret chamber in the thick stone wall she took a bag of gold, and, carrying it back to the court, she gave it to the rider.

“There, Judkins, and understand that I regard it as little for your loyalty. Give what is fair to your boys, and keep the rest. Hide it. Perhaps that would be wisest.”

“Oh… Miss Withersteen!” ejaculated the rider. “I couldn’t earn so much in – in ten years. It’s not right – I oughtn’t take it.”

“Judkins, you know I’m a rich woman. I tell you I’ve few faithful friends. I’ve fallen upon evil days. God only knows what will become of me and mine! So take the gold.”

She smiled in understanding of his speechless gratitude, and left him with Lassiter. Presently she heard him speaking low at first, then in louder accents emphasized by the thumping of his rifle on the stones.

“As infernal a job as even you, Lassiter, ever heerd of.”

“Why, son,” was Lassiter’s reply, “this breakin’ of Miss Withersteen may seem bad to you, but it ain’t bad – yet. Some of these wall-eyed fellers who look jest as if they was walkin’ in the shadow of Christ himself, right down the sunny road, now they can think of things an’ do things that are really hell-bent.”

Jane covered her ears and ran to her own room, and there like caged lioness she paced to and fro till the coming of little Fay reversed her dark thoughts.

The following day, a warm and muggy one threatening rain awhile Jane was resting in the court, a horseman clattered through he grove and up to the hitching-rack. He leaped off and approached Jane with the manner of a man determined to execute difficult mission, yet fearful of its reception. In the gaunt, wiry figure and the lean, brown face Jane recognized one of her Mormon riders, Blake. It was he of whom Judkins had long since spoken. Of all the riders ever in her employ Blake owed her the most, and as he stepped before her, removing his hat and making manly efforts to subdue his emotion, he showed that he remembered.

“Miss Withersteen, mother’s dead,” he said.

“Oh – Blake!” exclaimed Jane, and she could say no more.

“She died free from pain in the end, and she’s buried – resting at last, thank God! … I’ve come to ride for you again, if you’ll have me. Don’t think I mentioned mother to get your sympathy. When she was living and your riders quit, I had to also. I was afraid of what might be done – said to her… Miss Withersteen, we can’t talk of – of what’s going on now—”

“Blake, do you know?”

“I know a great deal. You understand, my lips are shut. But without explanation or excuse I offer my services. I’m a Mormon – I hope a good one. But – there are some things! … It’s no use, Miss Withersteen, I can’t say any more – what I’d like to. But will you take me back?”

“Blake! … You know what it means?”

“I don’t care. I’m sick of – of – I’ll show you a Mormon who’ll be true to you!”

“But, Blake – how terribly you might suffer for that!”

“Maybe. Aren’t you suffering now?”

“God knows indeed I am!”

“Miss Withersteen, it’s a liberty on my part to speak so, but I know you pretty well – know you’ll never give in. I wouldn’t if I were you. And I – I must – Something makes me tell you the worst is yet to come. That’s all. I absolutely can’t say more. Will you take me back – let me ride for you – show everybody what I mean?”

“Blake, it makes me happy to hear you. How my riders hurt me when they quit!” Jane felt the hot tears well to her eyes and splash down upon her hands. “I thought so much of them – tried so hard to be good to them. And not one was true. You’ve made it easy to forgive. Perhaps many of them really feel as you do, but dare not return to me. Still, Blake, I hesitate to take you back. Yet I want you so much.”

“Do it, then. If you’re going to make your life a lesson to Mormon women, let me make mine a lesson to the men. Right is right. I believe in you, and here’s my life to prove it.”

“You hint it may mean your life!” said Jane, breathless and low.

“We won’t speak of that. I want to come back. I want to do what every rider aches in his secret heart to do for you…Miss Withersteen, I hoped it’d not be necessary to tell you that my mother on her deathbed told me to have courage. She knew how the thing galled me – she told me to come back… Will you take me?”

“God bless you, Blake! Yes, I’ll take you back. And will you – will you accept gold from me?”

“Miss Withersteen!”

“I just gave Judkins a bag of gold. I’ll give you one. If you will not take it you must not come back. You might ride for me a few months – weeks – days till the storm breaks. Then you’d have nothing, and be in disgrace with your people. We’ll forearm you against poverty, and me against endless regret. I’ll give you gold which you can hide – till some future time.”

“Well, if it pleases you,” replied Blake. “But you know I never thought of pay. Now, Miss Withersteen, one thing more. I want to see this man Lassiter. Is he here?”

“Yes, but, Blake – what – Need you see him? Why?” asked Jane, instantly worried. “I can speak to him – tell him about you.”

“That won’t do. I want to – I’ve got to tell him myself. Where is he?”

“Lassiter is with Mrs. Larkin. She is ill. I’ll call him,” answered Jane, and going to the door she softly called for the rider. A faint, musical jingle preceded his step – then his tall form crossed the threshold.

“Lassiter, here’s Blake, an old rider of mine. He has come back to me and he wishes to speak to you.”

Blake’s brown face turned exceedingly pale.

“Yes, I had to speak to you,” he said, swiftly. “My name’s Blake. I’m a Mormon and a rider. Lately I quit Miss Withersteen. I’ve come to beg her to take me back. Now I don’t know you; but I know – what you are. So I’ve this to say to your face. It would never occur to this woman to imagine – let alone suspect me to be a spy. She couldn’t think it might just be a low plot to come here and shoot you in the back. Jane Withersteen hasn’t that kind of a mind… Well, I’ve not come for that. I want to help her – to pull a bridle along with Judkins and – and you. The thing is – do you believe me?”

“I reckon I do,” replied Lassiter. How this slow, cool speech contrasted with Blake’s hot, impulsive words! “You might have saved some of your breath. See here, Blake, cinch this in your mind. Lassiter has met some square Mormons! An’ mebbe—”

“Blake,” interrupted Jane, nervously anxious to terminate a colloquy that she perceived was an ordeal for him. “Go at once and fetch me a report of my horses.”

“Miss Withersteen! … You mean the big drove – down in the sage-cleared fields?”

“Of course,” replied Jane. “My horses are all there, except the blooded stock I keep here.”

“Haven’t you heard – then?”

“Heard? No! What’s happened to them?”

“They’re gone, Miss Withersteen, gone these ten days past. Dorn told me, and I rode down to see for myself.”

“Lassiter – did you know?” asked Jane, whirling to him.

“I reckon so… But what was the use to tell you?”

It was Lassiter turning away his face and Blake studying the stone flags at his feet that brought Jane to the understanding of what she betrayed. She strove desperately, but she could not rise immediately from such a blow.

“My horses! My horses! What’s become of them?”

“Dorn said the riders report another drive by Oldring… And I trailed the horses miles down the slope toward Deception Pass.”

“My red herd’s gone! My horses gone! The white herd will go next. I can stand that. But if I lost Black Star and Night, it would be like parting with my own flesh and blood. Lassiter – Blake – am I in danger of losing my racers?”

“A rustler – or – or anybody stealin’ hosses of yours would most of all want the blacks,” said Lassiter. His evasive reply was affirmative enough. The other rider nodded gloomy acquiescence.

“Oh! Oh!” Jane Withersteen choked, with violent utterance.

“Let me take charge of the blacks?” asked Blake. “One more rider won’t be any great help to Judkins. But I might hold Black Star and Night, if you put such store on their value.”

“Value! Blake, I love my racers. Besides, there’s another reason why I mustn’t lose them. You go to the stables. Go with Jerd every day when he runs the horses, and don’t let them out of your sight. If you would please me – win my gratitude, guard my black racers.”

When Blake had mounted and ridden out of the court Lassiter regarded Jane with the smile that was becoming rarer as the days sped by.

“’Pears to me, as Blake says, you do put some store on them hosses. Now I ain’t gainsayin’ that the Arabians are the handsomest hosses I ever seen. But Bells can beat Night, an’ run neck an’ neck with Black Star.”

“Lassiter, don’t tease me now. I’m miserable – sick. Bells is fast, but he can’t stay with the blacks, and you know it. Only Wrangle can do that.”

“I’ll bet that big raw-boned brute can more’n show his heels to your black racers. Jane, out there in the sage, on a long chase, Wrangle could kill your favorites.”

“No, no,” replied Jane, impatiently. “Lassiter, why do you say that so often? I know you’ve teased me at times, and I believe it’s only kindness. You’re always trying to keep my mind off worry. But you mean more by this repeated mention of my racers?”

“I reckon so.” Lassiter paused, and for the thousandth time in her presence moved his black sombrero round and round, as if counting the silver pieces on the band. “Well, Jane, I’ve sort of read a little that’s passin’ in your mind.”

“You think I might fly from my home – from Cottonwoods – from the Utah border?”

“I reckon. An’ if you ever do an’ get away with the blacks I wouldn’t like to see Wrangle left here on the sage. Wrangle could catch you. I know Venters had him. But you can never tell. Mebbe he hasn’t got him now… Besides – things are happenin’, an’ somethin’ of the same queer nature might have happened to Venters.”

“God knows you’re right! … Poor Bern, how long he’s gone! In my trouble I’ve been forgetting him. But, Lassiter, I’ve little fear for him. I’ve heard my riders say he’s as keen as a wolf…

“As to your reading my thoughts – well, your suggestion makes an actual thought of what was only one of my dreams. I believe I dreamed of flying from this wild borderland, Lassiter. I’ve strange dreams. I’m not always practical and thinking of my many duties, as you said once. For instance – if I dared – if I dared I’d ask you to saddle the blacks and ride away with me – and hide me.”

“Jane!”

The rider’s sunburnt face turned white. A few times Jane had seen Lassiter’s cool calm broken – when he had met little Fay, when he had learned how and why he had come to love both child and mistress, when he had stood beside Milly Erne’s grave. But one and all they could not be considered in the light of his present agitation. Not only did Lassiter turn white – not only did he grow tense, not only did he lose his coolness, but also he suddenly, violently, hungrily took her into his arms and crushed her to his breast.

“Lassiter!” cried Jane, trembling. It was an action for which she took sole blame. Instantly, as if dazed, weakened, he released her. “Forgive me!” went on Jane. “I’m always forgetting your – your feelings. I thought of you as my faithful friend. I’m always making you out more than human… only, let me say – I meant that – about riding away. I’m wretched, sick of this – this – Oh, something bitter and black grows on my heart!”

“Jane, the hell – of it,” he replied, with deep intake of breath, “is you can’t ride away. Mebbe realizin’ it accounts for my grabbin’ you – that way, as much as the crazy boy’s rapture your words gave me. I don’t understand myself… But the hell of this game is – you can’t ride away.”

“Lassiter! … What on earth do you mean? I’m an absolutely free woman.”

“You ain’t absolutely anythin’ of the kind… I reckon I’ve got to tell you!”

“Tell me all. It’s uncertainty that makes me a coward. It’s faith and hope – blind love, if you will, that makes me miserable. Every day I awake believing – still believing. The day grows, and with it doubts, fears, and that black bat hate that bites hotter and hotter into my heart. Then comes night – I pray – I pray for all, and for myself – I sleep – and I awake free once more, trustful, faithful, to believe – to hope! Then, O my God! I grow and live a thousand years till night again! … But if you want to see me a woman, tell me why I can’t ride away – tell me what more I’m to lose – tell me the worst.”

“Jane, you’re watched. There’s no single move of yours, except when you’re hid in your house, that ain’t seen by sharp eyes. The cottonwood grove’s full of creepin’, crawlin’ men. Like Indians in the grass. When you rode, which wasn’t often lately, the sage was full of sneakin’ men. At night they crawl under your windows into the court, an’ I reckon into the house. Jane Withersteen, you know, never locked a door! This here grove’s a hummin’ bee-hive of mysterious happenin’s. Jane, it ain’t so much that these spies keep out of my way as me keepin’ out of theirs. They’re goin’ to try to kill me. That’s plain. But mebbe I’m as hard to shoot in the back as in the face. So far I’ve seen fit to watch only. This all means, Jane, that you’re a marked woman. You can’t get away – not now. Mebbe later, when you’re broken, you might. But that’s sure doubtful. Jane, you’re to lose the cattle that’s left – your home an’ ranch – an’ Amber Spring. You can’t even hide a sack of gold! For it couldn’t be slipped out of the house, day or night, an’ hid or buried, let alone be rid off with. You may lose all. I’m tellin’ you, Jane, hopin’ to prepare you, if the worst does come. I told you once before about that strange power I’ve got to feel things.”

“Lassiter, what can I do?”

“Nothin’, I reckon, except know what’s comin’ an’ wait an’ be game. If you’d let me make a call on Tull, an’ a long-deferred call on – ”

“Hush! … Hush!” she whispered.

“Well, even that wouldn’t help you any in the end.”

“What does it mean? Oh, what does it mean? I am my father’s daughter – a Mormon, yet I can’t see! I’ve not failed in religion – in duty. For years I’ve given with a free and full heart. When my father died I was rich. If I’m still rich it’s because I couldn’t find enough ways to become poor. What am I, what are my possessions to set in motion such intensity of secret oppression?”

“Jane, the mind behind it all is an empire builder.”

“But, Lassiter, I would give freely – all I own to avert this – this wretched thing. If I gave – that would leave me with faith still. Surely my – my churchmen think of my soul? If I lose my trust in them—”

“Child, be still!” said Lassiter, with a dark dignity that had in it something of pity. “You are a woman, fine an’ big an’ strong, an’ your heart matches your size. But in mind you’re a child. I’ll say a little more – then I’m done. I’ll never mention this again. Among many thousands of women you’re one who has bucked against your churchmen. They tried you out, an’ failed of persuasion, an’ finally of threats. You meet now the cold steel of a will as far from Christlike as the universe is wide. You’re to be broken. Your body’s to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into the world. But your soul? … What do they care for your soul?”

Chapter 13

Solitude and Storm

In his hidden valley Venters awakened from sleep, and his ears rang with innumerable melodies from full-throated mockingbirds, and his eyes opened wide upon the glorious golden shaft of sunlight shining through the great stone bridge. The circle of cliffs surrounding Surprise Valley lay shrouded in morning mist, a dim blue low down along the terraces, a creamy, moving cloud along the ramparts. The oak forest in the center was a plumed and tufted oval of gold.

He saw Bess under the spruces. Upon her complete recovery of strength she always rose with the dawn. At the moment she was feeding the quail she had tamed. And she had begun to tame the mocking-birds. They fluttered among the branches overhead and some left off their songs to flit down and shyly hop near the twittering quail. Little gray and white rabbits crouched in the grass, now nibbling, now laying long ears flat and watching the dogs.

Venters’s swift glance took in the brightening valley, and Bess and her pets, and Ring and Whitie. It swept over all to return again and rest upon the girl. She had changed. To the dark trousers and blouse she had added moccasins of her own make, but she no longer resembled a boy. No eye could have failed to mark the rounded contours of a woman. The change had been to grace and beauty. A glint of warm gold gleamed from her hair, and a tint of red shone in the clear dark brown of cheeks. The haunting sweetness of her lips and eyes, that earlier had been illusive, a promise, had become a living fact. She fitted harmoniously into that wonderful setting; she was like Surprise Valley – wild and beautiful.

Venters leaped out of his cave to begin the day.

He had postponed his journey to Cottonwoods until after the passing of the summer rains. The rains were due soon. But until their arrival and the necessity for his trip to the village he sequestered in a far corner of mind all thought of peril, of his past life, and almost that of the present. It was enough to live. He did not want to know what lay hidden in the dim and distant future. Surprise Valley had enchanted him. In this home of the cliff-dwellers there were peace and quiet and solitude, and another thing, wondrous as the golden morning shaft of sunlight, that he dared not ponder over long enough to understand.

The solitude he had hated when alone he had now come to love. He was assimilating something from this valley of gleams and shadows. From this strange girl he was assimilating more.

The day at hand resembled many days gone before. As Venters had no tools with which to build, or to till the terraces, he remained idle. Beyond the cooking of the simple fare there were no tasks. And as there were no tasks, there was no system. He and Bess began one thing, to leave it; to begin another, to leave that; and then do nothing but lie under the spruces and watch the great cloud-sails majestically move along the ramparts, and dream and dream. The valley was a golden, sunlit world. It was silent. The sighing wind and the twittering quail and the singing birds, even the rare and seldom-occurring hollow crack of a sliding weathered stone, only thickened and deepened that insulated silence.

Venters and Bess had vagrant minds.

“Bess, did I tell you about my horse Wrangle?” inquired Venters.

“A hundred times,” she replied.

“Oh, have I? I’d forgotten. I want you to see him. He’ll carry us both.”

“I’d like to ride him. Can he run?”

“Run? He’s a demon. Swiftest horse on the sage! I hope he’ll stay in that canyon.”

“He’ll stay.”

They left camp to wander along the terraces, into the aspen ravines, under the gleaming walls. Ring and Whitie wandered in the fore, often turning, often trotting back, open-mouthed and solemn-eyed and happy. Venters lifted his gaze to the grand archway over the entrance to the valley, and Bess lifted hers to follow his, and both were silent. Sometimes the bridge held their attention for a long time. Today a soaring eagle attracted them.

“How he sails!” exclaimed Bess. “I wonder where his mate is?”

“She’s at the nest. It’s on the bridge in a crack near the top.”

“I see her often. She’s almost white.”

They wandered on down the terrace, into the shady, sun-flecked forest. A brown bird fluttered crying from a bush. Bess peeped into the leaves. “Look! A nest and four little birds. They’re not afraid of us. See how they open their mouths. They’re hungry.”

Rabbits rustled the dead brush and pattered away. The forest was full of a drowsy hum of insects. Little darts of purple, that were running quail, crossed the glades. And a plaintive, sweet peeping came from the coverts. Bess’s soft step disturbed a sleeping lizard that scampered away over the leaves. She gave chase and caught it, a slim creature of nameless color but of exquisite beauty.

“Jewel eyes,” she said. “It’s like a rabbit – afraid. We won’t eat you. There – go.”

Murmuring water drew their steps down into a shallow shaded ravine where a brown brook brawled softly over mossy stones. Multitudes of strange, gray frogs with white spots and black eyes lined the rocky bank and leaped only at close approach. Then Venters’s eye descried a very thin, very long green snake coiled round a sapling. They drew closer and closer till they could have touched it. The snake had no fear and watched them with scintillating eyes.

“It’s pretty,” said Bess. “How tame! I thought snakes always ran.”

“No. Even the rabbits didn’t run here till the dogs chased them.”

On and on they wandered to the wild jumble of massed and broken fragments of cliff at the west end of the valley. The roar of the disappearing stream dinned in their ears. Into this maze of rocks they threaded a tortuous way, climbing, descending, halting to gather wild plums and great lavender lilies, and going on at the will of fancy. Idle and keen perceptions guided them equally.

“Oh, let us climb there!” cried Bess, pointing upward to a small space of terrace left green and shady between huge abutments of broken cliff. And they climbed to the nook and rested and looked out across the valley to the curling column of blue smoke from their campfire. But the cool shade and the rich grass and the fine view were not what they had climbed for. They could not have told, although whatever had drawn them was well-satisfying. Light, sure-footed as a mountain goat, Bess pattered down at Venters’s heels; and they went on, calling the dogs, eyes dreamy and wide, listening to the wind and the bees and the crickets and the birds.

Part of the time Ring and Whitie led the way, then Venters, then Bess; and the direction was not an object. They left the sun-streaked shade of the oaks, brushed the long grass of the meadows, entered the green and fragrant swaying willows, to stop, at length, under the huge old cottonwoods where the beavers were busy.

Here they rested and watched. A dam of brush and logs and mud and stones backed the stream into a little lake. The round, rough beaver houses projected from the water. Like the rabbits, the beavers had become shy. Gradually, however, as Venters and Bess knelt low, holding the dogs, the beavers emerged to swim with logs and gnaw at cottonwoods and pat mud walls with their paddle-like tails, and, glossy and shiny in the sun, to go on with their strange, persistent industry. They were the builders. The lake was a mud-hole, and the immediate environment a scarred and dead region, but it was a wonderful home of wonderful animals.

“Look at that one – he puddles in the mud,” said Bess. “And there! See him dive! Hear them gnawing! I’d think they’d break their teeth. How’s it they can stay out of the water and under the water?”

And she laughed.

Then Venters and Bess wandered farther, and, perhaps not all unconsciously this time, wended their slow steps to the cave of the cliff-dwellers, where she liked best to go.

The tangled thicket and the long slant of dust and little chips of weathered rock and the steep bench of stone and the worn steps all were arduous work for Bess in the climbing. But she gained the shelf, gasping, hot of cheek, glad of eye, with her hand in Venters’s. Here they rested. The beautiful valley glittered below with its millions of wind-turned leaves bright-faced in the sun, and the mighty bridge towered heavenward, crowned with blue sky. Bess, however, never rested for long. Soon she was exploring, and Venters followed; she dragged forth from corners and shelves a multitude of crudely fashioned and painted pieces of pottery, and he carried them. They peeped down into the dark holes of the kivas, and Bess gleefully dropped a stone and waited for the long-coming hollow sound to rise. They peeped into the little globular houses, like mud-wasp nests, and wondered if these had been store-places for grain, or baby cribs, or what; and they crawled into the larger houses and laughed when they bumped their heads on the low roofs, and they dug in the dust of the floors. And they brought from dust and darkness armloads of treasure which they carried to the light. Flints and stones and strange curved sticks and pottery they found; and twisted grass rope that crumbled in their hands, and bits of whitish stone which crushed to powder at a touch and seemed to vanish in the air.

“That white stuff was bone,” said Venters, slowly. “Bones of a cliff-dweller.”

“No!” exclaimed Bess.

“Here’s another piece. Look! … Whew! dry, powdery smoke! That’s bone.”

Then it was that Venters’s primitive, childlike mood, like a savage’s, seeing, yet unthinking, gave way to the encroachment of civilized thought. The world had not been made for a single day’s play or fancy or idle watching. The world was old. Nowhere could be gotten a better idea of its age than in this gigantic silent tomb. The gray ashes in Venters’s hand had once been bone of a human being like himself. The pale gloom of the cave had shadowed people long ago. He saw that Bess had received the same shock – could not in moments such as this escape her feeling living, thinking destiny.

“Bern, people have lived here,” she said, with wide, thoughtful eyes.

“Yes,” he replied.

“How long ago?”

“A thousand years and more.”

“What were they?”

“Cliff-dwellers. Men who had enemies and made their homes high out of reach.”

“They had to fight?”

“Yes.”

“They fought for – what?”

“For life. For their homes, food, children, parents – for their women!”

“Has the world changed any in a thousand years?”

“I don’t know – perhaps a little.”

“Have men?”

“I hope so – I think so.”

“Things crowd into my mind,” she went on, and the wistful light in her eyes told Venters the truth of her thoughts. “I’ve ridden the border of Utah. I’ve seen people – know how they live – but they must be few of all who are living. I had my books and I studied them. But all that doesn’t help me any more. I want to go out into the big world and see it. Yet I want to stay here more. What’s to become of us? Are we cliff-dwellers? We’re alone here. I’m happy when I don’t think. These – these bones that fly into dust – they make me sick and a little afraid. Did the people who lived here once have the same feelings as we have? What was the good of their living at all? They’re gone! What’s the meaning of it all – of us?”

“Bess, you ask more than I can tell. It’s beyond me. Only there was laughter here once – and now there’s silence. There was life – and now there’s death. Men cut these little steps, made these arrow-heads and mealing-stones, plaited the ropes we found, and left their bones to crumble in our fingers. As far as time is concerned it might all have been yesterday. We’re here today. Maybe we’re higher in the scale of human beings – in intelligence. But who knows? We can’t be any higher in the things for which life is lived at all.”

“What are they?”

“Why – I suppose relationship, friendship – love.”

“Love!”

“Yes. Love of man for woman – love of woman for man. That’s the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.”

She said no more. Wistfulness of glance deepened into sadness.

“Come, let us go,” said Venters.

Action brightened her. Beside him, holding his hand she slipped down the shelf, ran down the long, steep slant of sliding stones, out of the cloud of dust, and likewise out of the pale gloom.

“We beat the slide,” she cried.

The miniature avalanche cracked and roared, and rattled itself into an inert mass at the base of the incline. Yellow dust like the gloom of the cave, but not so changeless, drifted away on the wind; the roar clapped in echo from the cliff, returned, went back, and came again to die in the hollowness. Down on the sunny terrace there was a different atmosphere. Ring and Whitie leaped around Bess. Once more she was smiling, gay, and thoughtless, with the dream-mood in the shadow of her eyes.

“Bess, I haven’t seen that since last summer. Look!” said Venters, pointing to the scalloped edge of rolling purple clouds that peeped over the western wall. “We’re in for a storm.”

“Oh, I hope not. I’m afraid of storms.”

“Are you? Why?”

“Have you ever been down in one of these walled-up pockets in a bad storm?”

“No, now I think of it, I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s terrible. Every summer I get scared to death and hide somewhere in the dark. Storms up on the sage are bad, but nothing to what they are down here in the canyons. And in this little valley – why, echoes can rap back and forth so quick they’ll split our ears.”

“We’re perfectly safe here, Bess.”

“I know. But that hasn’t anything to do with it. The truth is I’m afraid of lightning and thunder, and thunder-claps hurt my head. If we have a bad storm, will you stay close to me?”

“Yes.”

When they got back to camp the afternoon was closing, and it was exceedingly sultry. Not a breath of air stirred the aspen leaves, and when these did not quiver the air was indeed still. The dark-purple clouds moved almost imperceptibly out of the west.

“What have we for supper?” asked Bess.

“Bern, can’t you think of another new way to cook rabbit?” went on Bess, with earnestness.

“What do you think I am – a magician?” retorted Venters.

“I wouldn’t dare tell you. But, Bern, do you want me to turn into a rabbit?”

There was a dark-blue, merry flashing of eyes and a parting of lips; then she laughed. In that moment she was naive and wholesome.

“Rabbit seems to agree with you,” replied Venters. “You are well and strong – and growing very pretty.”

Anything in the nature of compliment he had never before said to her, and just now he responded to a sudden curiosity to see its effect. Bess stared as if she had not heard aright, slowly blushed, and completely lost her poise in happy confusion.

“I’d better go right away,” he continued, “and fetch supplies from Cottonwoods.”

A startlingly swift change in the nature of her agitation made him reproach himself for his abruptness.

“No, no, don’t go!” she said. “I didn’t mean – that about the rabbit. I – I was only trying to be – funny. Don’t leave me all alone!”

“Bess, I must go sometime.”

“Wait then. Wait till after the storms.”

The purple cloud-bank darkened the lower edge of the setting sun, crept up and up, obscuring its fiery red heart, and finally passed over the last ruddy crescent of its upper rim.

The intense dead silence awakened to a long, low, rumbling roll of thunder.

“Oh!” cried Bess, nervously.

“We’ve had big black clouds before this without rain,” said Venters. “But there’s no doubt about that thunder. The storms are coming. I’m glad. Every rider on the sage will hear that thunder with glad ears.”

Venters and Bess finished their simple meal and the few tasks around the camp, then faced the open terrace, the valley, and the west, to watch and await the approaching storm.

It required keen vision to see any movement whatever in the purple clouds. By infinitesimal degrees the dark cloud-line merged upward into the golden-red haze of the afterglow of sunset. A shadow lengthened from under the western wall across the valley. As straight and rigid as steel rose the delicate spear-pointed silver spruces; the aspen leaves, by nature pendant and quivering, hung limp and heavy; no slender blade of grass moved. A gentle splashing of water came from the ravine. Then again from out of the west sounded the low, dull, and rumbling roll of thunder.

A wave, a ripple of light, a trembling and turning of the aspen leaves, like the approach of a breeze on the water, crossed the valley from the west; and the lull and the deadly stillness and the sultry air passed away on a cool wind.

The night bird of the canyon, with clear and melancholy notes announced the twilight. And from all along the cliffs rose the faint murmur and moan and mourn of the wind singing in the caves. The bank of clouds now swept hugely out of the western sky. Its front was purple and black, with gray between, a bulging, mushrooming, vast thing instinct with storm. It had a dark, angry, threatening aspect. As if all the power of the winds were pushing and piling behind, it rolled ponderously across the sky. A red flare burned out instantaneously, flashed from the west to east, and died. Then from the deepest black of the purple cloud burst a boom. It was like the bowling of a huge boulder along the crags and ramparts, and seemed to roll on and fall into the valley to bound and bang and boom from cliff to cliff.

“Oh!” cried Bess, with her hands over her ears. “What did I tell you?”

“Why, Bess, be reasonable!” said Venters.

“I’m a coward.”

“Not quite that, I hope. It’s strange you’re afraid. I love a storm.”

“I tell you a storm down in these canyons is an awful thing. I know Oldring hated storms. His men were afraid of them. There was one who went deaf in a bad storm, and never could hear again.”

“Maybe I’ve lots to learn, Bess. I’ll lose my guess if this storm isn’t bad enough. We’re going to have heavy wind first, then lightning and thunder, then the rain. Let’s stay out as long as we can.”

The tips of the cottonwoods and the oaks waved to the east, and the rings of aspens along the terraces twinkled their myriad of bright faces in fleet and glancing gleam. A low roar rose from the leaves of the forest, and the spruces swished in the rising wind. It came in gusts, with light breezes between. As it increased in strength the lulls shortened in length till there was a strong and steady blow all the time, and violent puffs at intervals, and sudden whirling currents. The clouds spread over the valley, rolling swiftly and low, and twilight faded into a sweeping darkness. Then the singing of the wind in the caves drowned the swift roar of rustling leaves; then the song swelled to a mourning, moaning wail; then with the gathering power of the wind the wail changed to a shriek. Steadily the wind strengthened and constantly the strange sound changed.

The last bit of blue sky yielded to the on-sweep of clouds. Like angry surf the pale gleams of gray, amid the purple of that scudding front, swept beyond the eastern rampart of the valley. The purple deepened to black. Broad sheets of lightning flared over the western wall. There were not yet any ropes or zigzag streaks darting down through the gathering darkness. The storm center was still beyond Surprise Valley.

“Listen! … Listen!” cried Bess, with her lips close to Venters’s ear. “You’ll hear Oldring’s knell!”

“What’s that?”

“Oldring’s knell. When the wind blows a gale in the caves it makes what the rustlers call Oldring’s knell. They believe it bodes his death. I think he believes so, too. It’s not like any sound on earth…It’s beginning. Listen!”

The gale swooped down with a hollow unearthly howl. It yelled and pealed and shrilled and shrieked. It was made up of a thousand piercing cries. It was a rising and a moving sound. Beginning at the western break of the valley, it rushed along each gigantic cliff, whistling into the caves and cracks, to mount in power, to bellow a blast through the great stone bridge. Gone, as into an engulfing roar of surging waters, it seemed to shoot back and begin all over again.

It was only wind, thought Venters. Here sped and shrieked the sculptor that carved out the wonderful caves in the cliffs. It was only a gale, but as Venters listened, as his ears became accustomed to the fury and strife, out of it all or through it or above it pealed low and perfectly clear and persistently uniform a strange sound that had no counterpart in all the sounds of the elements. It was not of earth or of life. It was the grief and agony of the gale. A knell of all upon which it blew!

Black night enfolded the valley. Venters could not see his companion, and knew of her presence only through the tightening hold of her hand on his arm. He felt the dogs huddle closer to him. Suddenly the dense, black vault overhead split asunder to a blue-white, dazzling streak of lightning. The whole valley lay vividly clear and luminously bright in his sight. Upreared, vast and magnificent, the stone bridge glimmered like some grand god of storm in the lightning’s fire. Then all flashed black again – blacker than pitch – a thick, impenetrable coal-blackness. And there came a ripping, crashing report. Instantly an echo resounded with clapping crash. The initial report was nothing to the echo. It was a terrible, living, reverberating, detonating crash. The wall threw the sound across, and could have made no greater roar if it had slipped in avalanche. From cliff to cliff the echo went in crashing retort and banged in lessening power, and boomed in thinner volume, and clapped weaker and weaker till a final clap could not reach across the waiting cliff.

In the pitchy darkness Venters led Bess, and, groping his way, by feel of hand found the entrance to her cave and lifted her up. On the instant a blinding flash of lightning illumined the cave and all about him. He saw Bess’s face white now with dark, frightened eyes. He saw the dogs leap up, and he followed suit. The golden glare vanished; all was black; then came the splitting crack and the infernal din of echoes.

Bess shrank closer to him and closer, found his hands, and pressed them tightly over her ears, and dropped her face upon his shoulder, and hid her eyes.

Then the storm burst with a succession of ropes and streaks and shafts of lightning, playing continuously, filling the valley with a broken radiance; and the cracking shots followed each other swiftly till the echoes blended in one fearful, deafening crash.

Venters looked out upon the beautiful valley – beautiful now as never before – mystic in its transparent, luminous gloom, weird in the quivering, golden haze of lightning. The dark spruces were tipped with glimmering lights; the aspens bent low in the winds, as waves in a tempest at sea; the forest of oaks tossed wildly and shone with gleams of fire. Across the valley the huge cavern of the cliff-dwellers yawned in the glare, every little black window as clear as at noonday; but the night and the storm added to their tragedy. Flung arching to the black clouds, the great stone bridge seemed to bear the brunt of the storm. It caught the full fury of the rushing wind. It lifted its noble crown to meet the lightnings. Venters thought of the eagles and their lofty nest in a niche under the arch. A driving pall of rain, black as the clouds, came sweeping on to obscure the bridge and the gleaming walls and the shining valley. The lightning played incessantly, streaking down through opaque darkness of rain. The roar of the wind, with its strange knell and the re-crashing echoes, mingled with the roar of the flooding rain, and all seemingly were deadened and drowned in a world of sound.

In the dimming pale light Venters looked down upon the girl. She had sunk into his arms, upon his breast, burying her face. She clung to him. He felt the softness of her, and the warmth, and the quick heave of her breast. He saw the dark, slender, graceful outline of her form. A woman lay in his arms! And he held her closer. He who had been alone in the sad, silent watches of the night was not now and never must be again alone. He who had yearned for the touch of a hand felt the long tremble and the heart-beat of a woman. By what strange chance had she come to love him! By what change – by what marvel had she grown into a treasure!

No more did he listen to the rush and roar of the thunder-storm. For with the touch of clinging hands and the throbbing bosom he grew conscious of an inward storm – the tingling of new chords of thought, strange music of unheard, joyous bells sad dreams dawning to wakeful delight, dissolving doubt, resurging hope, force, fire, and freedom, unutterable sweetness of desire. A storm in his breast – a storm of real love.

Chapter 14

West Wind

When the storm abated Venters sought his own cave, and late in the night, as his blood cooled and the stir and throb and thrill subsided, he fell asleep.

With the breaking of dawn his eyes unclosed. The valley lay drenched and bathed, a burnished oval of glittering green. The rain-washed walls glistened in the morning light. Waterfalls of many forms poured over the rims. One, a broad, lacy sheet, thin as smoke, slid over the western notch and struck a ledge in its downward fall, to bound into broader leap, to burst far below into white and gold and rosy mist.

Venters prepared for the day, knowing himself a different man.

“It’s a glorious morning,” said Bess, in greeting.

“Yes. After the storm the west wind,” he replied.

“Last night was I – very much of a baby?” she asked, watching him.

“Pretty much.”

“Oh, I couldn’t help it!”

“I’m glad you were afraid.”

“Why?” she asked, in slow surprise.

“I’ll tell you some day,” he answered, soberly. Then around the camp-fire and through the morning meal he was silent; afterward he strolled thoughtfully off alone along the terrace. He climbed a great yellow rock raising its crest among the spruces, and there he sat down to face the valley and the west.

“I love her!”

Aloud he spoke – unburdened his heart – confessed his secret. For an instant the golden valley swam before his eyes, and the walls waved, and all about him whirled with tumult within.

“I love her! … I understand now.”

Reviving memory of Jane Withersteen and thought of the complications of the present amazed him with proof of how far he had drifted from his old life. He discovered that he hated to take up the broken threads, to delve into dark problems and difficulties. In this beautiful valley he had been living a beautiful dream. Tranquility had come to him, and the joy of solitude, and interest in all the wild creatures and crannies of this incomparable valley – and love. Under the shadow of the great stone bridge God had revealed Himself to Venters.

“The world seems very far away,” he muttered, “but it’s there – and I’m not yet done with it. Perhaps I never shall be…Only – how glorious it would be to live here always and never think again!”

Whereupon the resurging reality of the present, as if in irony of his wish, steeped him instantly in contending thought. Out of it all he presently evolved these things: he must go to Cottonwoods; he must bring supplies back to Surprise Valley; he must cultivate the soil and raise corn and stock, and, most imperative of all, he must decide the future of the girl who loved him and whom he loved. The first of these things required tremendous effort, the last one, concerning Bess, seemed simply and naturally easy of accomplishment. He would marry her. Suddenly, as from roots of poisonous fire, flamed up the forgotten truth concerning her. It seemed to wither and shrivel up all his joy on its hot, tearing way to his heart. She had been Oldring’s Masked Rider. To Venters’s question, “What were you to Oldring?” she had answered with scarlet shame and drooping head.

“What do I care who she is or what she was!” he cried, passionately. And he knew it was not his old self speaking. It was this softer, gentler man who had awakened to new thoughts in the quiet valley. Tenderness, masterful in him now, matched the absence of joy and blunted the knife-edge of entering jealousy. Strong and passionate effort of will, surprising to him, held back the poison from piercing his soul.

“Wait! … Wait!” he cried, as if calling. His hand pressed his breast, and he might have called to the pang there. “Wait! It’s all so strange – so wonderful. Anything can happen. Who am I to judge her? I’ll glory in my love for her. But I can’t tell it – can’t give up to it.”

Certainly he could not then decide her future. Marrying her was impossible in Surprise Valley and in any village south of Sterling. Even without the mask she had once worn she would easily have been recognized as Oldring’s Rider. No man who had ever seen her would forget her, regardless of his ignorance as to her sex. Then more poignant than all other argument was the fact that he did not want to take her away from Surprise Valley. He resisted all thought of that. He had brought her to the most beautiful and wildest place of the uplands; he had saved her, nursed her back to strength, watched her bloom as one of the valley lilies; he knew her life there to be pure and sweet – she belonged to him, and he loved her. Still these were not all the reasons why he did not want to take her away. Where could they go? He feared the rustlers – he feared the riders – he feared the Mormons. And if he should ever succeed in getting Bess safely away from these immediate perils, he feared the sharp eyes of women and their tongues, the big outside world with its problems of existence. He must wait to decide her future, which, after all, was deciding his own. But between her future and his something hung impending. Like Balancing Rock, which waited darkly over the steep gorge, ready to close forever the outlet to Deception Pass, that nameless thing, as certain yet intangible as fate, must fall and close forever all doubts and fears of the future.

“I’ve dreamed,” muttered Venters, as he rose. “Well, why not? … To dream is happiness! But let me just once see this clearly wholly; then I can go on dreaming till the thing falls. I’ve got to tell Jane Withersteen. I’ve dangerous trips to take. I’ve work here to make comfort for this girl. She’s mine. I’ll fight to keep her safe from that old life. I’ve already seen her forget it. I love her. And if a beast ever rises in me I’ll burn my hand off before I lay it on her with shameful intent. And, by God! sooner or later I’ll kill the man who hid her and kept her in Deception Pass!”

As he spoke the west wind softly blew in his face. It seemed to soothe his passion. That west wind was fresh, cool, fragrant, and it carried a sweet, strange burden of far-off things – tidings of life in other climes, of sunshine asleep on other walls – of other places where reigned peace. It carried, too, sad truth of human hearts and mystery – of promise and hope unquenchable. Surprise Valley was only a little niche in the wide world whence blew that burdened wind. Bess was only one of millions at the mercy of unknown motive in nature and life. Content had come to Venters in the valley; happiness had breathed in the slow, warm air; love as bright as light had hovered over the walls and descended to him; and now on the west wind came a whisper of the eternal triumph of faith over doubt.

“How much better I am for what has come to me!” he exclaimed. “I’ll let the future take care of itself. Whatever falls, I’ll be ready.”

Venters retraced his steps along the terrace back to camp, and found Bess in the old familiar seat, waiting and watching for his return.

“I went off by myself to think a little,” he explained.

“You never looked that way before. What – what is it? Won’t you tell me?”

“Well, Bess, the fact is I’ve been dreaming a lot. This valley makes a fellow dream. So I forced myself to think. We can’t live this way much longer. Soon I’ll simply have to go to Cottonwoods. We need a whole pack train of supplies. I can get—”

“Can you go safely?” she interrupted.

“Why, I’m sure of it. I’ll ride through the Pass at night. I haven’t any fear that Wrangle isn’t where I left him. And once on him – Bess, just wait till you see that horse!”

“Oh, I want to see him – to ride him. But – but, Bern, this is what troubles me,” she said. “Will – will you come back?”

“Give me four days. If I’m not back in four days you’ll know I’m dead. For that only shall keep me.”

“Oh!”

“Bess, I’ll come back. There’s danger – I wouldn’t lie to you – but I can take care of myself.”

“Bern, I’m sure – oh, I’m sure of it! All my life I’ve watched hunted men. I can tell what’s in them. And I believe you can ride and shoot and see with any rider of the sage. It’s not – not that I – fear.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“Why – why – why should you come back at all?”

“I couldn’t leave you here alone.”

“You might change your mind when you get to the village – among old friends—”

“I won’t change my mind. As for old friends – ” He uttered a short, expressive laugh.

“Then – there – there must be a – a woman!” Dark red mantled the clear tan of temple and cheek and neck. Her eyes were eyes of shame, upheld a long moment by intense, straining search for the verification of her fear. Suddenly they drooped, her head fell to her knees, her hands flew to her hot cheeks.

“Bess – look here,” said Venters, with a sharpness due to the violence with which he checked his quick, surging emotion.

As if compelled against her will – answering to an irresistible voice – Bess raised her head, looked at him with sad, dark eyes, and tried to whisper with tremulous lips.

“There’s no woman,” went on Venters, deliberately holding her glance with his. “Nothing on earth, barring the chances of life, can keep me away.”

Her face flashed and flushed with the glow of a leaping joy; but like the vanishing of a gleam it disappeared to leave her as he had never beheld her.

“I am nothing – I am lost – I am nameless!”

“Do you want me to come back?” he asked, with sudden stern coldness. “Maybe you want to go back to Oldring!”

That brought her erect, trembling and ashy pale, with dark, proud eyes and mute lips refuting his insinuation.

“Bess, I beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have said that. But you angered me. I intend to work – to make a home for you here – to be a – a brother to you as long as ever you need me. And you must forget what you are – were – I mean, and be happy. When you remember that old life you are bitter, and it hurts me.”

“I was happy – I shall be very happy. Oh, you’re so good that – that it kills me! If I think, I can’t believe it. I grow sick with wondering why. I’m only a let me say it – only a lost, nameless – girl of the rustlers. Oldring’s Girl, they called me. That you should save me – be so good and kind – want to make me happy – why, it’s beyond belief. No wonder I’m wretched at the thought of your leaving me. But I’ll be wretched and bitter no more. I promise you. If only I could repay you even a little—”

“You’ve repaid me a hundredfold. Will you believe me?”

“Believe you! I couldn’t do else.”

“Then listen! … Saving you, I saved myself. Living here in this valley with you, I’ve found myself. I’ve learned to think while I was dreaming. I never troubled myself about God. But God, or some wonderful spirit, has whispered to me here. I absolutely deny the truth of what you say about yourself. I can’t explain it. There are things too deep to tell. Whatever the terrible wrongs you’ve suffered, God holds you blameless. I see that – feel that in you every moment you are near me. I’ve a mother and a sister ’way back in Illinois. If I could I’d take you to them – tomorrow.”

“If it were true! Oh, I might – I might lift my head!” she cried.

“Lift it then – you child. For I swear it’s true.”

She did lift her head with the singular wild grace always a part of her actions, with that old unconscious intimation of innocence which always tortured Venters, but now with something more – a spirit rising from the depths that linked itself to his brave words.

“I’ve been thinking – too,” she cried, with quivering smile and swelling breast. “I’ve discovered myself – too. I’m young – I’m alive – I’m so full – oh! I’m a woman!”

“Bess, I believe I can claim credit of that last discovery – before you,” Venters said, and laughed.

“Oh, there’s more – there’s something I must tell you.”

“Tell it, then.”

“When will you go to Cottonwoods?”

“As soon as the storms are past, or the worst of them.”

“I’ll tell you before you go. I can’t now. I don’t know how I shall then. But it must be told. I’d never let you leave me without knowing. For in spite of what you say there’s a chance you mightn’t come back.”

Day after day the west wind blew across the valley. Day after day the clouds clustered gray and purple and black. The cliffs sang and the caves rang with Oldring’s knell, and the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled, the echoes crashed and crashed, and the rains flooded the valley. Wild flowers sprang up everywhere, swaying with the lengthening grass on the terraces, smiling wanly from shady nooks, peeping wondrously from year-dry crevices of the walls. The valley bloomed into a paradise. Every single moment, from the breaking of the gold bar through the bridge at dawn on to the reddening of rays over the western wall, was one of colorful change. The valley swam in thick, transparent haze, golden at dawn, warm and white at noon, purple in the twilight. At the end of every storm a rainbow curved down into the leaf-bright forest to shine and fade and leave lingeringly some faint essence of its rosy iris in the air.

Venters walked with Bess, once more in a dream, and watched the lights change on the walls, and faced the wind from out of the west.

Always it brought softly to him strange, sweet tidings of far-off things. It blew from a place that was old and whispered of youth. It blew down the grooves of time. It brought a story of the passing hours. It breathed low of fighting men and praying women. It sang clearly the song of love. That ever was the burden of its tidings – youth in the shady woods, waders through the wet meadows, boy and girl at the hedgerow stile, bathers in the booming surf, sweet, idle hours on grassy, windy hills, long strolls down moonlit lanes – everywhere in far-off lands, fingers locked and bursting hearts and longing lips – from all the world tidings of unquenchable love.

Often, in these hours of dreams he watched the girl, and asked himself of what was she dreaming? For the changing light of the valley reflected its gleam and its color and its meaning in the changing light of her eyes. He saw in them infinitely more than he saw in his dreams. He saw thought and soul and nature – strong vision of life. All tidings the west wind blew from distance and age he found deep in those dark-blue depths, and found them mysteries solved. Under their wistful shadow he softened, and in the softening felt himself grow a sadder, a wiser, and a better man.

While the west wind blew its tidings, filling his heart full, teaching him a man’s part, the days passed, the purple clouds changed to white, and the storms were over for that summer.

“I must go now,” he said.

“When?” she asked.

“At once – tonight.”

“I’m glad the time has come. It dragged at me. Go – for you’ll come back the sooner.”

Late in the afternoon, as the ruddy sun split its last flame in the ragged notch of the western wall, Bess walked with Venters along the eastern terrace, up the long, weathered slope, under the great stone bridge. They entered the narrow gorge to climb around the fence long before built there by Venters. Farther than this she had never been. Twilight had already fallen in the gorge. It brightened to waning shadow in the wider ascent. He showed her Balancing Rock, of which he had often told her, and explained its sinister leaning over the outlet. Shuddering, she looked down the long, pale incline with its closed-in, toppling walls.

“What an awful trail! Did you carry me up here?”

“I did, surely,” replied he.

“It frightens me, somehow. Yet I never was afraid of trails. I’d ride anywhere a horse could go, and climb where he couldn’t. But there’s something fearful here. I feel as – as if the place was watching me.”

“Look at this rock. It’s balanced here – balanced perfectly. You know I told you the cliff-dwellers cut the rock, and why. But they’re gone and the rock waits. Can’t you see – feel how it waits here? I moved it once, and I’ll never dare again. A strong heave would start it. Then it would fall and bang, and smash that crag, and jar the walls, and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass!”

“Ah! When you come back I’ll steal up here and push and push with all my might to roll the rock and close forever the outlet to the Pass!” She said it lightly, but in the undercurrent of her voice was a heavier note, a ring deeper than any ever given mere play of words.

“Bess! … You can’t dare me! Wait till I come back with supplies – then roll the stone.”

“I – was – in – fun.” Her voice now throbbed low. “Always you must be free to go when you will. Go now …this place presses on me – stifles me.”

“I’m going – but you had something to tell me?”

“Yes…Will you – come back?”

“I’ll come if I live.”

“But – but you mightn’t come?”

“That’s possible, of course. It’ll take a good deal to kill me. A man couldn’t have a faster horse or keener dog. And, Bess, I’ve guns, and I’ll use them if I’m pushed. But don’t worry.”

“I’ve faith in you. I’ll not worry until after four days. Only – because you mightn’t come – I must tell you—”

She lost her voice. Her pale face, her great, glowing, earnest eyes, seemed to stand alone out of the gloom of the gorge. The dog whined, breaking the silence.

“I must tell you – because you mightn’t come back,” she whispered. “You must know what – what I think of your goodness – of you. Always I’ve been tongue-tied. I seemed not to be grateful. It was deep in my heart. Even now – if I were other than I am – I couldn’t tell you. But I’m nothing – only a rustler’s girl – nameless – infamous. You’ve saved me – and I’m – I’m yours to do with as you like. … With all my heart and soul – I love you!”

Chapter 15

Shadows on the Sage-Slope

In the cloudy, threatening, waning summer days shadows lengthened down the sage-slope, and Jane Withersteen likened them to the shadows gathering and closing in around her life.

Mrs. Larkin died, and little Fay was left an orphan with no known relative. Jane’s love redoubled. It was the saving brightness of a darkening hour. Fay turned now to Jane in childish worship. And Jane at last found full expression for the mother-longing in her heart. Upon Lassiter, too, Mrs. Larkin’s death had some subtle reaction. Before, he had often, without explanation, advised Jane to send Fay back to any Gentile family that would take her in. Passionately and reproachfully and wonderingly Jane had refused even to entertain such an idea. And now Lassiter never advised it again, grew sadder and quieter in his contemplation of the child, and infinitely more gentle and loving. Sometimes Jane had a cold, inexplicable sensation of dread when she saw Lassiter watching Fay. What did the rider see in the future? Why did he, day by day, grow more silent, calmer, cooler, yet sadder in prophetic assurance of something to be?

No doubt, Jane thought, the rider, in his almost superhuman power of foresight, saw behind the horizon the dark, lengthening shadows that were soon to crowd and gloom over him and her and little Fay. Jane Withersteen awaited the long-deferred breaking of the storm with a courage and embittered calm that had come to her in her extremity. Hope had not died. Doubt and fear, subservient to her will, no longer gave her sleepless nights and tortured days. Love remained. All that she had loved she now loved the more. She seemed to feel that she was defiantly flinging the wealth of her love in the face of misfortune and of hate. No day passed but she prayed for all – and most fervently for her enemies. It troubled her that she had lost, or had never gained, the whole control of her mind. In some measure reason and wisdom and decision were locked in a chamber of her brain, awaiting a key. Power to think of some things was taken from her. Meanwhile, abiding a day of judgment, she fought ceaselessly to deny the bitter drops in her cup, to tear back the slow, the intangibly slow growth of a hot, corrosive lichen eating into her heart.

On the morning of August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered on the meaning of the report. Revolver shots had of late cracked from different parts of the grove – spies taking snap-shots at Lassiter from a cowardly distance! But a rifle report meant more. Riders seldom used rifles. Judkins and Venters were the exceptions she called to mind. Had the men who hounded her hidden in her grove, taken to the rifle to rid her of Lassiter, her last friend? It was probable – it was likely. And she did not share his cool assumption that his death would never come at the hands of a Mormon. Long had she expected it. His constancy to her, his singular reluctance to use the fatal skill for which he was famed – both now plain to all Mormons – laid him open to inevitable assassination. Yet what charm against ambush and aim and enemy he seemed to bear about him! No, Jane reflected, it was not charm; only a wonderful training of eye and ear, and sense of impending peril. Nevertheless that could not forever avail against secret attack.

That moment a rustling of leaves attracted her attention; then the familiar clinking accompaniment of a slow, soft, measured step, and Lassiter walked into the court.

“Jane, there’s a fellow out there with a long gun,” he said, and, removing his sombrero, showed his head bound in a bloody scarf.

“I heard the shot; I knew it was meant for you. Let me see – you can’t be badly injured?”

“I reckon not. But mebbe it wasn’t a close call! … I’ll sit here in this corner where nobody can see me from the grove.” He untied the scarf and removed it to show a long, bleeding furrow above his left temple.

“It’s only a cut,” said Jane. “But how it bleeds! Hold your scarf over it just a moment till I come back.”

She ran into the house and returned with bandages; and while she bathed and dressed the wound Lassiter talked.

“That fellow had a good chance to get me. But he must have flinched when he pulled the trigger. As I dodged down I saw him run through the trees. He had a rifle. I’ve been expectin’ that kind of gun play. I reckon now I’ll have to keep a little closer hid myself. These fellers all seem to get chilly or shaky when they draw a bead on me, but one of them might jest happen to hit me.”

“Won’t you go away – leave Cottonwoods as I’ve begged you to – before some one does happen to hit you?” she appealed to him.

“I reckon I’ll stay.”

“But, oh, Lassiter – your blood will be on my hands!”

“See here, lady, look at your hands now, right now. Aren’t they fine, firm, white hands? Aren’t they bloody now? Lassiter’s blood! That’s a queer thing to stain your beautiful hands. But if you could only see deeper you’d find a redder color of blood. Heart color, Jane!”

“Oh! … My friend!”

“No, Jane, I’m not one to quit when the game grows hot, no more than you. This game, though, is new to me, an’ I don’t know the moves yet, else I wouldn’t have stepped in front of that bullet.”

“Have you no desire to hunt the man who fired at you – to find him – and – and kill him?”

“Well, I reckon I haven’t any great hankerin’ for that.”

“Oh, the wonder of it! … I knew – I prayed – I trusted. Lassiter, I almost gave – all myself to soften you to Mormons. Thank God, and thank you, my friend…But, selfish woman that I am, this is no great test. What’s the life of one of those sneaking cowards to such a man as you? I think of your great hate toward him who – I think of your life’s implacable purpose. Can it be – ”

“Wait! … Listen!” he whispered. “I hear a hoss.”

He rose noiselessly, with his ear to the breeze. Suddenly he pulled his sombrero down over his bandaged head and, swinging his gun-sheaths round in front, he stepped into the alcove.

“It s a hoss – comin’ fast,” he added.

Jane’s listening ear soon caught a faint, rapid, rhythmic beat of hoofs. It came from the sage. It gave her a thrill that she was at a loss to understand. The sound rose stronger, louder. Then came a clear, sharp difference when the horse passed from the sage trail to the hard-packed ground of the grove. It became a ringing run – swift in its bell-like clatterings, yet singular in longer pause than usual between the hoofbeats of a horse.

“It’s Wrangle! … It’s Wrangle!” cried Jane Withersteen. “I’d know him from a million horses!”

Excitement and thrilling expectancy flooded out all Jane Withersteen s calm. A tight band closed round her breast as she saw the giant sorrel flit in reddish-brown flashes across the openings in the green. Then he was pounding down the lane – thundering into the court – crashing his great iron-shod hoofs on the stone flags. Wrangle it was surely, but shaggy and wild-eyed, and sage-streaked, with dust-caked lather staining his flanks. He reared and crashed down and plunged. The rider leaped off, threw the bridle, and held hard on a lasso looped round Wrangle’s head and neck. Janet’s heart sank as she tried to recognize Venters in the rider. Something familiar struck her in the lofty stature in the sweep of powerful shoulders. But this bearded, longhaired, unkempt man, who wore ragged clothes patched with pieces of skin, and boots that showed bare legs and feet – this dusty, dark, and wild rider could not possibly be Venters.

“Whoa, Wrangle, old boy! Come down. Easy now. So – so – so. You’re home, old boy, and presently you can have a drink of water you’ll remember.”

In the voice Jane knew the rider to be Venters. He tied Wrangle to the hitching-rack and turned to the court.

“Oh, Bern! … You wild man!” she exclaimed.

“Jane – Jane, it’s good to see you! Hello, Lassiter! Yes, it’s Venters.”

Like rough iron his hard hand crushed Jane’s. In it she felt the difference she saw in him. Wild, rugged, unshorn – yet how splendid! He had gone away a boy – he had returned a man. He appeared taller, wider of shoulder, deeper-chested, more powerfully built. But was that only her fancy – he had always been a young giant – was the change one of spirit? He might have been absent for years, proven by fire and steel, grown like Lassiter, strong and cool and sure. His eyes – were they keener, more flashing than before? – met hers with clear, frank, warm regard, in which perplexity was not, nor discontent, nor pain.

“Look at me long as you like,” he said, with a laugh. “I’m not much to look at. And, Jane, neither you nor Lassiter, can brag. You’re paler than I ever saw you. Lassiter, here, he wears a bloody bandage under his hat. That reminds me. Some one took a flying shot at me down in the sage. It made Wrangle run some… Well, perhaps you’ve more to tell me than I’ve got to tell you.”

Briefly, in few words, Jane outlined the circumstances of her undoing in the weeks of his absence.

Under his beard and bronze she saw his face whiten in terrible wrath.

“Lassiter – what held you back?”

No time in the long period of fiery moments and sudden shocks had Jane Withersteen ever beheld Lassiter as calm and serene and cool as then.

“Jane had gloom enough without my addin’ to it by shootin’ up the village,” he said.

As strange as Lassiter’s coolness was Venters’s curious, intent scrutiny of them both, and under it Jane felt a flaming tide wave from bosom to temples.

“Well – you’re right,” he said, with slow pause. “It surprises me a little, that’s all.”

Jane sensed then a slight alteration in Venters, and what it was, in her own confusion, she could not tell. It had always been her intention to acquaint him with the deceit she had fallen to in her zeal to move Lassiter. She did not mean to spare herself. Yet now, at the moment, before these riders, it was an impossibility to explain.

Venters was speaking somewhat haltingly, without his former frankness. “I found Oldring’s hiding-place and your red herd. I learned – I know – I’m sure there was a deal between Tull and Oldring.” He paused and shifted his position and his gaze. He looked as if he wanted to say something that he found beyond him. Sorrow and pity and shame seemed to contend for mastery over him. Then he raised himself and spoke with effort. “Jane, I’ve cost you too much. You’ve almost ruined yourself for me. It was wrong, for I’m not worth it. I never deserved such friendship. Well, maybe it’s not too late. You must give me up. Mind, I haven’t changed. I am just the same as ever. I’ll see Tull while I’m here, and tell him to his face.”

“Bern, it’s too late,” said Jane.

“I’ll make him believe!” cried Venters, violently.

“You ask me to break our friendship?”

“Yes. If you don’t, I shall.”

“Forever?”

“Forever!”

Jane sighed. Another shadow had lengthened down the sage slope to cast further darkness upon her. A melancholy sweetness pervaded her resignation. The boy who had left her had returned a man, nobler, stronger, one in whom she divined something unbending as steel. There might come a moment later when she would wonder why she had not fought against his will, but just now she yielded to it. She liked him as well – nay, more, she thought, only her emotions were deadened by the long, menacing wait for the bursting storm.

Once before she had held out her hand to him – when she gave it; now she stretched it tremblingly forth in acceptance of the decree circumstance had laid upon them. Venters bowed over it kissed it, pressed it hard, and half stifled a sound very like a sob. Certain it was that when he raised his head tears glistened in his eyes.

“Some – women – have a hard lot,” he said, huskily. Then he shook his powerful form, and his rags lashed about him. “I’ll say a few things to Tull – when I meet him.”

“Bern – you’ll not draw on Tull? Oh, that must not be! Promise me—”

“I promise you this,” he interrupted, in stern passion that thrilled while it terrorized her. “If you say one more word for that plotter I’ll kill him as I would a mad coyote!”

Jane clasped her hands. Was this fire-eyed man the one whom she had once made as wax to her touch? Had Venters become Lassiter and Lassiter Venters?

“I’ll – say no more,” she faltered.

“Jane, Lassiter once called you blind,” said Venters. “It must be true. But I won’t upbraid you. Only don’t rouse the devil in me by praying for Tull! I’ll try to keep cool when I meet him. That’s all. Now there’s one more thing I want to ask of you – the last. I’ve found a valley down in the Pass. It’s a wonderful place. I intend to stay there. It’s so hidden I believe no one can find it. There’s good water, and browse, and game. I want to raise corn and stock. I need to take in supplies. Will you give them to me?”

“Assuredly. The more you take the better you’ll please me – and perhaps the less my – my enemies will get.”

“Venters, I reckon you’ll have trouble packin’ anythin’ away,” put in Lassiter.

“I’ll go at night.”

“Mebbe that wouldn’t be best. You’d sure be stopped. You’d better go early in the mornin’ – say, just after dawn. That’s the safest time to move round here.”

“Lassiter, I’ll be hard to stop,” returned Venters, darkly.

“I reckon so.”

“Bern,” said Jane, “go first to the riders’ quarters and get yourself a complete outfit. You’re a – a sight. Then help yourself to whatever else you need – burros, packs, grain, dried fruits, and meat. You must take coffee and sugar and flour – all kinds of supplies. Don’t forget corn and seeds. I remember how you used to starve. Please – please take all you can pack away from here. I’ll make a bundle for you, which you mustn’t open till you’re in your valley. How I’d like to see it! To judge by you and Wrangle, how wild it must be!”

Jane walked down into the outer court and approached the sorrel. Upstarting, he laid back his ears and eyed her.

“Wrangle – dear old Wrangle,” she said, and put a caressing hand on his matted mane. “Oh, he’s wild, but he knows me! Bern, can he run as fast as ever?”

“Run? Jane, he’s done sixty miles since last night at dark, and I could make him kill Black Star right now in a ten-mile race.”

“He never could,” protested Jane. “He couldn’t even if he was fresh.”

“I reckon mebbe the best hoss’ll prove himself yet,” said Lassiter, “an’, Jane, if it ever comes to that race I’d like you to be on Wrangle.”

“I’d like that, too,” rejoined Venters. “But, Jane, maybe Lassiter’s hint is extreme. Bad as your prospects are, you’ll surely never come to the running point.”

“Who knows!” she replied, with mournful smile.

“No, no, Jane, it can’t be so bad as all that. Soon as I see Tull there’ll be a change in your fortunes. I’ll hurry down to the village… Now don’t worry.”

Jane retired to the seclusion of her room. Lassiter’s subtle forecasting of disaster, Venters’s forced optimism, neither remained in mind. Material loss weighed nothing in the balance with other losses she was sustaining. She wondered dully at her sitting there, hands folded listlessly, with a kind of numb deadness to the passing of time and the passing of her riches. She thought of Venters’s friendship. She had not lost that, but she had lost him. Lassiter’s friendship – that was more than love – it would endure, but soon he, too, would be gone. Little Fay slept dreamlessly upon the bed, her golden curls streaming over the pillow. Jane had the child’s worship. Would she lose that, too? And if she did, what then would be left? Conscience thundered at her that there was left her religion. Conscience thundered that she should be grateful on her knees for this baptism of fire; that through misfortune, sacrifice, and suffering her soul might be fused pure gold. But the old, spontaneous, rapturous spirit no more exalted her. She wanted to be a woman – not a martyr. Like the saint of old who mortified his flesh, Jane Withersteen had in her the temper for heroic martyrdom, if by sacrificing herself she could save the souls of others. But here the damnable verdict blistered her that the more she sacrificed herself the blacker grew the souls of her churchmen. There was something terribly wrong with her soul, something terribly wrong with her churchmen and her religion. In the whirling gulf of her thought there was yet one shining light to guide her, to sustain her in her hope; and it was that, despite her errors and her frailties and her blindness, she had one absolute and unfaltering hold on ultimate and supreme justice. That was love. “Love your enemies as yourself!” was a divine word, entirely free from any church or creed.

Jane’s meditations were disturbed by Lassiter’s soft, tinkling step in the court. Always he wore the clinking spurs. Always he was in readiness to ride. She passed out and called him into the huge, dim hall.

“I think you’ll be safer here. The court is too open,” she said.

“I reckon,” replied Lassiter. “An’ it’s cooler here. The day’s sure muggy. Well, I went down to the village with Venters.”

“Already! Where is he?” queried Jane, in quick amaze.

“He’s at the corrals. Blake’s helpin’ him get the burros an’ packs ready. That Blake is a good fellow.”

“Did – did Bern meet Tull?”

“I guess he did,” answered Lassiter, and he laughed dryly.

“Tell me! Oh, you exasperate me! You’re so cool, so calm! For Heaven’s sake, tell me what happened!”

“First time I’ve been in the village for weeks,” went on Lassiter, mildly. “I reckon there ain’t been more of a show for a long time. Me an’ Venters walkin’ down the road! It was funny. I ain’t sayin’ anybody was particular glad to see us. I’m not much thought of hereabouts, an’ Venters he sure looks like what you called him, a wild man. Well, there was some runnin’ of folks before we got to the stores. Then everybody vamoosed except some surprised rustlers in front of a saloon. Venters went right in the stores an’ saloons, an’ of course I went along. I don’t know which tickled me the most – the actions of many fellers we met, or Venters’s nerve. Jane, I was downright glad to be along. You see that sort of thing is my element, an’ I’ve been away from it for a spell. But we didn’t find Tull in one of them places. Some Gentile feller at last told Venters he’d find Tull in that long buildin’ next to Parsons’s store. It’s a kind of meetin’-room; and sure enough, when we peeped in, it was half full of men.

“Venters yelled: ‘Don’t anybody pull guns! We ain’t come for that!’ Then he tramped in, an’ I was some put to keep alongside him. There was a hard, scrapin’ sound of feet, a loud cry, an’ then some whisperin’, an’ after that stillness you could cut with a knife. Tull was there, an’ that fat party who once tried to throw a gun on me, an’ other important-lookin’ men, an’ that little frog-legged feller who was with Tull the day I rode in here. I wish you could have seen their faces, ’specially Tull’s an’ the fat party’s. But there ain’t no use of me tryin’ to tell you how they looked.

“Well, Venters an’ I stood there in the middle of the room with that batch of men all in front of us, an’ not a blamed one of them winked an eyelash or moved a finger. It was natural, of course, for me to notice many of them packed guns. That’s a way of mine, first noticin’ them things. Venters spoke up, an’ his voice sort of chilled an’ cut, an’ he told Tull he had a few things to say.”

Here Lassiter paused while he turned his sombrero round and round, in his familiar habit, and his eyes had the look of a man seeing over again some thrilling spectacle, and under his red bronze there was strange animation.

“Like a shot, then, Venters told Tull that the friendship between you an’ him was all over, an’ he was leaving your place. He said you’d both of you broken off in the hope of propitiatin’ your people, but you hadn’t changed your mind otherwise, an’ never would.

“Next he spoke up for you. I ain’t goin’ to tell you what he said. Only – no other woman who ever lived ever had such tribute! You had a champion, Jane, an’ never fear that those thick-skulled men don’t know you now. It couldn’t be otherwise. He spoke the ringin’, lightnin’ truth… Then he accused Tull of the underhand, miserable robbery of a helpless woman. He told Tull where the red herd was, of a deal made with Oldrin’, that Jerry Card had made the deal. I thought Tull was goin’ to drop, an’ that little frog-legged cuss, he looked some limp an’ white. But Venters’s voice would have kept anybody’s legs from bucklin’. I was stiff myself. He went on an’ called Tull – called him every bad name ever known to a rider, an’ then some. He cursed Tull. I never hear a man get such a cursin’. He laughed in scorn at the idea of Tull bein’ a minister. He said Tull an’ a few more dogs of hell builded their empire out of the hearts of such innocent an’ God-fearin’ women as Jane Withersteen. He called Tull a binder of women, a callous beast who hid behind a mock mantle of righteousness – an’ the last an’ lowest coward on the face of the earth. To prey on weak women through their religion – that was the last unspeakable crime!

“Then he finished, an’ by this time he’d almost lost his voice. But his whisper was enough. ‘Tull,’ he said, ‘she begged me not to draw on you today. She would pray for you if you burned her at the stake… But listen! … I swear if you and I ever come face to face again, I’ll kill you!’

“We backed out of the door then, an’ up the road. But nobody follered us.”

Jane found herself weeping passionately. She had not been conscious of it till Lassiter ended his story, and she experienced exquisite pain and relief in shedding tears. Long had her eyes been dry, her grief deep; long had her emotions been dumb. Lassiter’s story put her on the rack; the appalling nature of Venters’s act and speech had no parallel as an outrage; it was worse than bloodshed. Men like Tull had been shot, but had one ever been so terribly denounced in public? Over-mounting her horror, an uncontrollable, quivering passion shook her very soul. It was sheer human glory in the deed of a fearless man. It was hot, primitive instinct to live – to fight. It was a kind of mad joy in Venters’s chivalry. It was close to the wrath that had first shaken her in the beginning of this war waged upon her.

“Well, well, Jane, don’t take it that way,” said Lassiter, in evident distress. “I had to tell you. There’s some things a feller jest can’t keep. It’s strange you give up on hearin’ that, when all this long time you’ve been the gamest woman I ever seen. But I don’t know women. Mebbe there’s reason for you to cry. I know this – nothin’ ever rang in my soul an’ so filled it as what Venters did. I’d like to have done it, but – I’m only good for throwin’ a gun, an’ it seems you hate that… Well, I’ll be goin’ now.”

“Where?”

“Venters took Wrangle to the stable. The sorrel’s shy a shoe, an’ I’ve got to help hold the big devil an’ put on another.”

“Tell Bern to come for the pack I want to give him – and – and to say good-by,” called Jane, as Lassiter went out.

Jane passed the rest of that day in a vain endeavor to decide what and what not to put in the pack for Venters. This task was the last she would ever perform for him, and the gifts were the last she would ever make him. So she picked and chose and rejected, and chose again, and often paused in sad revery, and began again, till at length she filled the pack.

It was about sunset, and she and Fay had finished supper and were sitting in the court, when Venters’s quick steps rang on the stones. She scarcely knew him, for he had changed the tattered garments, and she missed the dark beard and long hair. Still he was not the Venters of old. As he came up the steps she felt herself pointing to the pack, and heard herself speaking words that were meaningless to her. He said good-by; he kissed her, released her, and turned away. His tall figure blurred in her sight, grew dim through dark, streaked vision, and then he vanished.

Twilight fell around Withersteen House, and dusk and night. Little Fay slept; but Jane lay with strained, aching eyes. She heard the wind moaning in the cottonwoods and mice squeaking in the walls. The night was interminably long, yet she prayed to hold back the dawn. What would another day bring forth? The blackness of her room seemed blacker for the sad, entering gray of morning light. She heard the chirp of awakening birds, and fancied she caught a faint clatter of hoofs. Then low, dull distant, throbbed a heavy gunshot. She had expected it, was waiting for it; nevertheless, an electric shock checked her heart, froze the very living fiber of her bones. That vise-like hold on her faculties apparently did not relax for a long time, and it was a voice under her window that released her.

“Jane! … Jane!” softly called Lassiter.

She answered somehow.

“It’s all right. Venters got away. I thought mebbe you’d heard that shot, an’ I was worried some.”

“What was it – who fired?”

“Well – some fool feller tried to stop Venters out there in the sage – an’ he only stopped lead! … I think it’ll be all right. I haven’t seen or heard of any other fellers round. Venters’ll go through safe. An’, Jane, I’ve got Bells saddled, an’ I’m going to trail Venters. Mind, I won’t show myself unless he falls foul of somebody an’ needs me. I want to see if this place where he’s goin’ is safe for him. He says nobody can track him there. I never seen the place yet I couldn’t track a man to. Now, Jane, you stay indoors while I’m gone, an’ keep close watch on Fay. Will you?”

“Yes! Oh yes!”

“An’ another thing, Jane,” he continued, then paused for long – “another thing – if you ain’t here when I come back – if you’re gone – don’t fear, I’ll trail you – I’ll find you out.”

“My dear Lassiter, where could I be gone – as you put it?” asked Jane, in curious surprise.

“I reckon you might be somewhere. Mebbe tied in an old barn – or corralled in some gulch – or chained in a cave! Milly Erne was – till she give in! Mebbe that’s news to you… Well, if you’re gone I’ll hunt for you.”

“No, Lassiter,” she replied, sadly and low. “If I’m gone just forget the unhappy woman whose blinded selfish deceit you repaid with kindness and love.”

She heard a deep, muttering curse, under his breath, and then the silvery tinkling of his spurs as he moved away.

Jane entered upon the duties of that day with a settled, gloomy calm. Disaster hung in the dark clouds, in the shade, in the humid west wind. Blake, when he reported, appeared without his usual cheer; and Jerd wore a harassed look of a worn and worried man. And when Judkins put in appearance, riding a lame horse, and dismounted with the cramp of a rider, his dust-covered figure and his darkly grim, almost dazed expression told Jane of dire calamity. She had no need of words.

“Miss Withersteen, I have to report – loss of the – white herd,” said Judkins, hoarsely.

“Come, sit down, you look played out,” replied Jane, solicitously. She brought him brandy and food, and while he partook of refreshments, of which he appeared badly in need, she asked no questions.

“No one rider – could hev done more – Miss Withersteen,” he went on, presently.

“Judkins, don’t be distressed. You’ve done more than any other rider. I’ve long expected to lose the white herd. It’s no surprise. It’s in line with other things that are happening. I’m grateful for your service.”

“Miss Withersteen, I knew how you’d take it. But if anythin’, that makes it harder to tell. You see, a feller wants to do so much fer you, an’ I’d got fond of my job. We led the herd a ways off to the north of the break in the valley. There was a big level an’ pools of water an’ tip-top browse. But the cattle was in a high nervous condition. Wild – as wild as antelope! You see, they’d been so scared they never slept. I ain’t a-goin’ to tell you of the many tricks that were pulled off out there in the sage. But there wasn’t a day for weeks thet the herd didn’t get started to run. We allus managed to ride ’em close an’ drive ’em back an’ keep ’em bunched. Honest, Miss Withersteen, them steers was thin. They was thin when water and grass was everywhere. Thin at this season – thet’ll tell you how your steers was pestered. Fer instance, one night a strange runnin’ streak of fire run right through the herd. That streak was a coyote – with an oiled an’ blazin’ tail! Fer I shot it an’ found out. We had hell with the herd that night, an’ if the sage an’ grass hadn’t been wet – we, hosses, steers, an’ all would hev burned up. But I said I wasn’t goin’ to tell you any of the tricks… Strange now, Miss Withersteen, when the stampede did come it was from natural cause – jest a whirlin’ devil of dust. You’ve seen the like often. An’ this wasn’t no big whirl, fer the dust was mostly settled. It had dried out in a little swale, an’ ordinarily no steer would ever hev run fer it. But the herd was nervous an’ wild. An’ jest as Lassiter said, when that bunch of white steers got to movin’ they was as bad as buffalo. I’ve seen some buffalo stampedes back in Nebraska, an’ this bolt of the steers was the same kind.

“I tried to mill the herd jest as Lassiter did. But I wasn’t equal to it, Miss Withersteen. I don’t believe the rider lives who could hev turned thet herd. We kept along of the herd fer miles, an’ more ’n one of my boys tried to get the steers a-millin’. It wasn’t no use. We got off level ground, goin’ down, an’ then the steers ran somethin’ fierce. We left the little gullies an’ washes level-full of dead steers. Finally I saw the herd was makin’ to pass a kind of low pocket between ridges. There was a hog-back – as we used to call ’em – a pile of rocks stickin’ up, and I saw the herd was goin’ to split round it, or swing out to the left. An’ I wanted ’em to go to the right so mebbe we’d be able to drive ’em into the pocket. So, with all my boys except three, I rode hard to turn the herd a little to the right. We couldn’t budge ’em. They went on an’ split round the rocks, an’ the most of ’em was turned sharp to the left by a deep wash we hedn’t seen – hed no chance to see.

“The other three boys – Jimmy Vail, Joe Willis, an’ thet little Cairns boy – a nervy kid! they, with Cairns leadin’, tried to buck thet herd round to the pocket. It was a wild, fool idee. I couldn’t do nothin’. The boys got hemmed in between the steers an’ the wash – thet they hedn’t no chance to see, either. Vail an’ Willis was run down right before our eyes. An’ Cairns, who rode a fine hoss, he did some ridin’. I never seen equaled, an’ would hev beat the steers if there’d been any room to run in. I was high up an’ could see how the steers kept spillin’ by twos an’ threes over into the wash. Cairns put his hoss to a place thet was too wide fer any hoss, an’ broke his neck an’ the hoss’s too. We found that out after, an’ as fer Vail an’ Willis – two thousand steers ran over the poor boys. There wasn’t much left to pack home fer burying! … An’, Miss Withersteen, thet all happened yesterday, an’ I believe, if the white herd didn’t run over the wall of the Pass, it’s runnin’ yet.”