Riders of the Purple Sage
by Zane Grey
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

ZANE GREY

CHAPTER I. LASSITER

A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and
clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over
the sage.

Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and
troubled eyes. A rider had just left her and it was his message
that held her thoughtful and almost sad, awaiting the churchmen
who were coming to resent and attack her right to befriend a
Gentile.

She wondered if the unrest and strife that had lately come to the
little village of Cottonwoods was to involve her. And then she
sighed, remembering that her father had founded this remotest
border settlement of southern Utah and that he had left it to
her. She owned all the ground and many of the cottages.
Withersteen House was hers, and the great ranch, with its
thousands of cattle, and the swiftest horses of the sage. To her
belonged Amber Spring, the water which gave verdure and beauty to
the village and made living possible on that wild purple upland
waste. She could not escape being involved by whatever befell
Cottonwoods.

That year, 1871, had marked a change which had been gradually
coming in the lives of the peace-loving Mormons of the border.
Glaze--Stone Bridge--Sterling, villages to the north, had risen
against the invasion of Gentile settlers and the forays of
rustlers. There had been opposition to the one and fighting with
the other. And now Cottonwoods had begun to wake and bestir
itself and grown hard.

Jane prayed that the tranquillity and sweetness of her life would
not be permanently disrupted. She meant to do so much more for
her people than she had done. She wanted the sleepy quiet
pastoral days to last always. Trouble between the Mormons and the
Gentiles of the community would make her unhappy. She was
Mormon-born, and she was a friend to poor and unfortunate
Gentiles. She wished only to go on doing good and being happy.
And she thought of what that great ranch meant to her. She loved
it all--the grove of cottonwoods, the old stone house, the
amber-tinted water, and the droves of shaggy, dusty horses and
mustangs, the sleek, clean-limbed, blooded racers, and the
browsing herds of cattle and the lean, sun-browned riders of the
sage.

While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward
change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and
it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the
open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight
intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low
swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely
cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at
long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual
slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple
and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that
faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color
and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of
canyons from which rose an up-Hinging of the earth, not
mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and
fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments.
Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.

The rapid beat of hoofs recalled Jane Withersteen to the question
at hand. A group of riders cantered up the lane, dismounted, and
threw their bridles. They were seven in number, and Tull, the
leader, a tall, dark man, was an elder of Jane's church.

"Did you get my message?" he asked, curtly.

"Yes," replied Jane.

"I sent word I'd give that rider Venters half an hour to come
down to the village. He didn't come."

"He knows nothing of it;" said Jane. "I didn't tell him. I've
been waiting here for you."

"Where is Venters?"

"I left him in the courtyard."

"Here, Jerry," called Tull, turning to his men, "take the gang
and fetch Venters out here if you have to rope him."

The dusty-booted and long-spurred riders clanked noisily into the
grove of cottonwoods and disappeared in the shade.

"Elder Tull, what do you mean by this?" demanded Jane. "If you
must arrest Venters you might have the courtesy to wait till he
leaves my home. And if you do arrest him it will be adding insult
to injury. It's absurd to accuse Venters of being mixed up in
that shooting fray in the village last night. He was with me at
the time. Besides, he let me take charge of his guns. You're only
using this as a pretext. What do you mean to do to
Venters?"

"I'll tell you presently," replied Tull. "But first tell me why
you defend this worthless rider?"

"Worthless!" exclaimed Jane, indignantly. "He's nothing of the
kind. He was the best rider I ever had. There's not a reason why
I shouldn't champion him and every reason why I should. It's no
little shame to me, Elder Tull, that through my friendship he has
roused the enmity of my people and become an outcast. Besides I
owe him eternal gratitude for saving the life of little Fay."

"I've heard of your love for Fay Larkin and that you intend to
adopt her. But--Jane Withersteen, the child is a Gentile!"

"Yes. But, Elder, I don't love the Mormon children any less
because I love a Gentile child. I shall adopt Fay if her mother
will give her to me."

"I'm not so much against that. You can give the child Mormon
teaching," said Tull. "But I'm sick of seeing this fellow Venters
hang around you. I'm going to put a stop to it. You've so much
love to throw away on these beggars of Gentiles that I've an idea
you might love Venters."

Tull spoke with the arrogance of a Mormon whose power could not
be brooked and with the passion of a man in whom jealousy had
kindled a consuming fire.

"Maybe I do love him," said Jane. She felt both fear and anger
stir her heart. "I'd never thought of that. Poor fellow! he
certainly needs some one to love him."

"This'll be a bad day for Venters unless you deny that," returned
Tull, grimly.

Tull's men appeared under the cottonwoods and led a young man out
into the lane. His ragged clothes were those of an outcast. But
he stood tall and straight, his wide shoulders flung back, with
the muscles of his bound arms rippling and a blue flame of
defiance in the gaze he bent on Tull.

For the first time Jane Withersteen felt Venters's real spirit.
She wondered if she would love this splendid youth. Then her
emotion cooled to the sobering sense of the issue at stake.

"Venters, will you leave Cottonwoods at once and forever?" asked
Tull, tensely.

"Why?" rejoined the rider.

"Because I order it."

Venters laughed in cool disdain.

The red leaped to Tull's dark cheek.

"If you don't go it means your ruin," he said, sharply.

"Ruin!" exclaimed Venters, passionately. "Haven't you already
ruined me? What do you call ruin? A year ago I was a rider. I had
horses and cattle of my own. I had a good name in Cottonwoods.
And now when I come into the village to see this woman you set
your men on me. You hound me. You trail me as if I were a
rustler. I've no more to lose--except my life."

"Will you leave Utah?"

"Oh! I know," went on Venters, tauntingly, "it galls you, the
idea of beautiful Jane Withersteen being friendly to a poor
Gentile. You want her all yourself. You're a wiving Mormon. You
have use for her--and Withersteen House and Amber Spring and
seven thousand head of cattle!"

Tull's hard jaw protruded, and rioting blood corded the veins of
his neck.

"Once more. Will you go?"

"No."

"Then I'll have you whipped within an inch of your life," replied
Tull, harshly. "I'll turn you out in the sage. And if you ever
come back you'll get worse."

Venters's agitated face grew coldly set and the bronze changed

Jane impulsively stepped forward. "Oh! Elder Tull!" she cried.
"You won't do that!"

Tull lifted a shaking finger toward her.

"That'll do from you. Understand, you'll not be allowed to hold
this boy to a friendship that's offensive to your Bishop. Jane
Withersteen, your father left you wealth and power. It has turned
your head. You haven't yet come to see the place of Mormon women.
We've reasoned with you, borne with you. We've patiently waited.
We've let you have your fling, which is more than I ever saw
granted to a Mormon woman. But you haven't come to your senses.
Now, once for all, you can't have any further friendship with
Venters. He's going to be whipped, and he's got to leave Utah!"

"Oh! Don't whip him! It would be dastardly!" implored Jane, with
slow certainty of her failing courage.

Tull always blunted her spirit, and she grew conscious that she
had feigned a boldness which she did not possess. He loomed up
now in different guise, not as a jealous suitor, but embodying
the mysterious despotism she had known from childhood--the power
of her creed.

"Venters, will you take your whipping here or would you rather go
out in the sage?" asked Tull. He smiled a flinty smile that was
more than inhuman, yet seemed to give out of its dark aloofness a
gleam of righteousness.

"I'll take it here--if I must," said Venters. "But by God!--Tull
you'd better kill me outright. That'll be a dear whipping for you
and your praying Mormons. You'll make me another Lassiter!"

The strange glow, the austere light which radiated from Tull's
face, might have been a holy joy at the spiritual conception of
exalted duty. But there was something more in him, barely hidden,
a something personal and sinister, a deep of himself, an
engulfing abyss. As his religious mood was fanatical and
inexorable, so would his physical hate be merciless.

"Elder, I--I repent my words," Jane faltered. The religion in
her, the long habit of obedience, of humility, as well as agony
of fear, spoke in her voice. "Spare the boy!" she
whispered.

"You can't save him now," replied Tull stridently.

Her head was bowing to the inevitable. She was grasping the
truth, when suddenly there came, in inward constriction, a
hardening of gentle forces within her breast. Like a steel bar it
was stiffening all that had been soft and weak in her. She felt a
birth in her of something new and unintelligible. Once more her
strained gaze sought the sage-slopes. Jane Withersteen loved that
wild and purple wilderness. In times of sorrow it had been her
strength, in happiness its beauty was her continual delight. In
her extremity she found herself murmuring, "Whence cometh my
help!" It was a prayer, as if forth from those lonely purple
reaches and walls of red and clefts of blue might ride a fearless
man, neither creed-bound nor creed-mad, who would hold up a
restraining hand in the faces of her ruthless people.

The restless movements of Tull's men suddenly quieted down. Then
followed a low whisper, a rustle, a sharp exclamation.

"Look!" said one, pointing to the west.

"A rider!"

Jane Withersteen wheeled and saw a horseman, silhouetted against
the western sky, coming riding out of the sage. He had ridden
down from the left, in the golden glare of the sun, and had been
unobserved till close at hand. An answer to her prayer!

"Do you know him? Does any one know him?" questioned Tull,
hurriedly.

His men looked and looked, and one by one shook their heads.

"He's come from far," said one.

"Thet's a fine hoss," said another.

"A strange rider."

"Huh! he wears black leather," added a fourth.

With a wave of his hand, enjoining silence, Tull stepped forward
in such a way that he concealed Venters.

The rider reined in his mount, and with a lithe forward-slipping
action appeared to reach the ground in one long step. It was a
peculiar movement in its quickness and inasmuch that while
performing it the rider did not swerve in the slightest from a
square front to the croup before him.

"Look!" hoarsely whispered one of Tull's companions. "He packs
two black-butted guns--low down--they're hard to see--black akin
them black chaps."

"A gun-man!" whispered another. "Fellers, careful now about
movin' your hands."

The stranger's slow approach might have been a mere leisurely
manner of gait or the cramped short steps of a rider unused to
walking; yet, as well, it could have been the guarded advance of
one who took no chances with men.

"Hello, stranger!" called Tull. No welcome was in this greeting
only a gruff curiosity.

The rider responded with a curt nod. The wide brim of a black
sombrero cast a dark shade over his face. For a moment he closely
regarded Tull and his comrades, and then, halting in his slow
walk, he seemed to relax.

"Evenin', ma'am," he said to Jane, and removed his sombrero with
quaint grace.

Jane, greeting him, looked up into a face that she trusted
instinctively and which riveted her attention. It had all the
characteristics of the range rider's--the leanness, the red burn
of the sun, and the set changelessness that came from years of
silence and solitude. But it was not these which held her, rather
the intensity of his gaze, a strained weariness, a piercing
wistfulness of keen, gray sight, as if the man was forever
looking for that which he never found. Jane's subtle woman's
intuition, even in that brief instant, felt a sadness, a
hungering, a secret.

"Jane Withersteen, ma'am?" he inquired.

"Yes, she replied.

"The water here is yours?"

"Yes."

"May I water my horse?"

"Certainly. There's the trough."

"But mebbe if you knew who I was--" He hesitated, with his glance
on the listening men. "Mebbe you wouldn't let me water
him--though I ain't askin' none for myself."

"Stranger, it doesn't matter who you are. Water your horse. And
if you are thirsty and hungry come into my house."

"Thanks, ma'am. I can't accept for myself--but for my tired
horse--"

Trampling of hoofs interrupted the rider. More restless movements
on the part of Tull's men broke up the little circle, exposing
the prisoner Venters.

"Mebbe I've kind of hindered somethin'--for a few moments,
perhaps?" inquired the rider.

"Yes," replied Jane Withersteen, with a throb in her voice.

She felt the drawing power of his eyes; and then she saw him look
at the bound Venters, and at the men who held him, and their
leader.

"In this here country all the rustlers an' thieves an'
cut-throats an' gun-throwers an' all-round no-good men jest
happen to be Gentiles. Ma'am, which of the no-good class does
that young feller belong to?"

"He belongs to none of them. He's an honest boy."

"You know that, madame?"

"Yes--yes."

"Then what has he done to get tied up that way?"

His clear and distinct question, meant for Tull as well as for
Jane Withersteen, stilled the restlessness and brought a
momentary silence.

"Ask him," replied Jane, her voice rising high.

The rider stepped away from her, moving out with the same slow,
measured stride in which he had approached, and the fact that his
action placed her wholly to one side, and him no nearer to Tull
and his men, had a penetrating significance.

"Young feller, speak up," he said to Venters.

"Here stranger, this's none of your mix," began Tull. "Don't try
any interference. You've been asked to drink and eat. That's more
than you'd have got in any other village of the Utah border.
Water your horse and be on your way."

"Easy--easy--I ain't interferin' yet," replied the rider. The
tone of his voice had undergone a change. A different man had
spoken. Where, in addressing Jane, he had been mild and gentle,
now, with his first speech to Tull, he was dry, cool, biting.
"I've lest stumbled onto a queer deal. Seven Mormons all packin'
guns, an' a Gentile tied with a rope, an' a woman who swears by
his honesty! Queer, ain't that?"

"Queer or not, it's none of your business," retorted Tull.

"Where I was raised a woman's word was law. I ain't quite
outgrowed that yet."

Tull fumed between amaze and anger.

"Meddler, we have a law here something different from woman's
whim-- Mormon law!...Take care you don't transgress it."

"To hell with your Mormon law!"

The deliberate speech marked the rider's further change, this
time from kindly interest to an awakening menace. It produced a
transformation in Tull and his companions. The leader gasped and
staggered backward at a blasphemous affront to an institution he
held most sacred. The man Jerry, holding the horses, dropped the
bridles and froze in his tracks. Like posts the other men stood
watchful-eyed, arms hanging rigid, all waiting.

"Speak up now, young man. What have you done to be roped that
way?"

"It's a damned outrage!" burst out Venters. "I've done no wrong.
I've offended this Mormon Elder by being a friend to that woman."

"Ma'am, is it true--what he says?" asked the rider of Jane, but
his quiveringly alert eyes never left the little knot of quiet
men.

"True? Yes, perfectly true," she answered.

"Well, young man, it seems to me that bein' a friend to such a
woman would be what you wouldn't want to help an' couldn't
help....What's to be done to you for it?"

"They intend to whip me. You know what that means--in Utah!"

"I reckon," replied the rider, slowly.

With his gray glance cold on the Mormons, with the restive
bit-champing of the horses, with Jane failing to repress her
mounting agitations, with Venters standing pale and still, the
tension of the moment tightened. Tull broke the spell with a
laugh, a laugh without mirth, a laugh that was only a sound
betraying fear.

"Come on, men!" he called.

Jane Withersteen turned again to the rider.

"Stranger, can you do nothing to save Venters?"

"Ma'am, you ask me to save him--from your own people?"

"Ask you? I beg of you!"

"But you don't dream who you're askin'."

"Oh, sir, I pray you--save him!"

These are Mormons, en' I..."

"At--at any cost--save him. For I--I care for him!"

Tull snarled. "You love-sick fool! Tell your secrets. There'll be
a way to teach you what you've never learned....Come men out of
here!"

"Mormon, the young man stays," said the rider.

Like a shot his voice halted Tull.

"What!"

"Who'll keep him? He's my prisoner!" cried Tull, hotly.
"Stranger, again I tell you--don't mix here. You've meddled
enough. Go your way now or--"

"Listen!...He stays."

Absolute certainty, beyond any shadow of doubt, breathed in the
rider's low voice.

"Who are you? We are seven here."

The rider dropped his sombrero and made a rapid movement,
singular in that it left him somewhat crouched, arms bent and
stiff, with the big black gun-sheaths swung round to the fore.

It was Venters's wondering, thrilling cry that bridged the
fateful connection between the rider's singular position and the
dreaded name.

Tull put out a groping hand. The life of his eyes dulled to the
gloom with which men of his fear saw the approach of death. But
death, while it hovered over him, did not descend, for the rider
waited for the twitching fingers, the downward flash of hand that
did not come. Tull, gathering himself together, turned to the
horses, attended by his pale comrades.

CHAPTER II. COTTONWOODS

Venters appeared too deeply moved to speak the gratitude his face
expressed. And Jane turned upon the rescuer and gripped his
hands. Her smiles and tears seemingly dazed him. Presently as
something like calmness returned, she went to Lassiter's weary
horse.

"I will water him myself," she said, and she led the horse to a
trough under a huge old cottonwood. With nimble fingers she
loosened the bridle and removed the bit. The horse snorted and
bent his head. The trough was of solid stone, hollowed out,
moss-covered and green and wet and cool, and the clear brown
water that fed it spouted and splashed from a wooden pipe.

"He has brought you far to-day?"

"Yes, ma'am, a matter of over sixty miles, mebbe seventy."

"A long ride--a ride that--Ah, he is blind!"

"Yes, ma'am," replied Lassiter.

"What blinded him?"

"Some men once roped an' tied him, an' then held white-iron close
to his eyes."

"Oh! Men? You mean devils....Were they your
enemies--Mormons?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"To take revenge on a horse! Lassiter, the men of my creed are
unnaturally cruel. To my everlasting sorrow I confess it. They
have been driven, hated, scourged till their hearts have
hardened. But we women hope and pray for the time when our men
will soften."

"Beggin' your pardon, ma'am--that time will never come."

"Oh, it will!...Lassiter, do you think Mormon women wicked? Has
your hand been against them, too?"

"No. I believe Mormon women are the best and noblest, the most
long-sufferin', and the blindest, unhappiest women on earth."

"Ah!" She gave him a grave, thoughtful look. "Then you will break
bread with me?"

Lassiter had no ready response, and he uneasily shifted his
weight from one leg to another, and turned his sombrero round and
round in his hands. "Ma'am," he began, presently, "I reckon your
kindness of heart makes you overlook things. Perhaps I ain't well
known hereabouts, but back up North there's Mormons who'd rest
uneasy in their graves at the idea of me sittin' to table with
you."

"I dare say. But--will you do it, anyway?" she asked.

"Mebbe you have a brother or relative who might drop in an' be
offended, an' I wouldn't want to--"

"I've not a relative in Utah that I know of. There's no one with
a right to question my actions." She turned smilingly to Venters.
"You will come in, Bern, and Lassiter will come in. We'll eat and
be merry while we may."

"I'm only wonderin' if Tull an' his men'll raise a storm down in
the village," said Lassiter, in his last weakening stand.

"Yes, he'll raise the storm--after he has prayed," replied Jane.
"Come."

She led the way, with the bridle of Lassiter's horse over her
arm. Thev entered a grove and walked down a wide path shaded by
great low-branching cottonwoods. The last rays of the setting sun
sent golden bars through the leaves. The grass was deep and rich,
welcome contrast to sage-tired eyes. Twittering quail darted
across the path, and from a tree-top somewhere a robin sang its
evening song, and on the still air floated the freshness and
murmur of flowing water.

The home of Jane Withersteen stood in a circle of cottonwoods,
and was a flat, long, red-stone structure with a covered court in
the center through which flowed a lively stream of amber-colored
water. In the massive blocks of stone and heavy timbers and solid
doors and shutters showed the hand of a man who had builded
against pillage and time; and in the flowers and mosses lining
the stone-bedded stream, in the bright colors of rugs and
blankets on the court floor, and the cozy corner with hammock and
books and the clean-linened table, showed the grace of a daughter
who lived for happiness and the day at hand.

Jane turned Lassiter's horse loose in the thick grass. "You will
want him to be near you," she said, "or I'd have him taken to the
alfalfa fields." At her call appeared women who began at once to
bustle about, hurrying to and fro, setting the table. Then Jane,
excusing herself, went within.

She passed through a huge low ceiled chamber, like the inside of
a fort, and into a smaller one where a bright wood-fire blazed in
an old open fireplace, and from this into her own room. It had
the same comfort as was manifested in the home-like outer court;
moreover, it was warm and rich in soft hues.

Seldom did Jane Withersteen enter her room without looking into
her mirror. She knew she loved the reflection of that beauty
which since early childhood she had never been allowed to forget.
Her relatives and friends, and later a horde of Mormon and
Gentile suitors, had fanned the flame of natural vanity in her.
So that at twenty-eight she scarcely thought at all of her
wonderful influence for good in the little community where her
father had left her practically its beneficent landlord, but
cared most for the dream and the assurance and the allurement of
her beauty. This time, however, she gazed into her glass with
more than the usual happy motive, without the usual slight
conscious smile. For she was thinking of more than the desire to
be fair in her own eyes, in those of her friend; she wondered if
she were to seem fair in the eyes of this Lassiter, this man
whose name had crossed the long, wild brakes of stone and plains
of sage, this gentle-voiced, sad-faced man who was a hater and a
killer of Mormons. It was not now her usual half-conscious vain
obsession that actuated her as she hurriedly changed her
riding-dress to one of white, and then looked long at the stately
form with its gracious contours, at the fair face with its strong
chin and full firm lips, at the dark-blue, proud, and passionate
eyes.

"If by some means I can keep him here a few days, a week--he will
never kill another Mormon," she mused. "Lassiter!...I shudder
when I think of that name, of him. But when I look at the man I
forget who he is--I almost like him. I remember only that he
saved Bern. He has suffered. I wonder what it was--did he love a
Mormon woman once? How splendidly he championed us poor
misunderstood souls! Somehow he knows--much."

Jane Withersteen joined her guests and bade them to her board.
Dismissing her woman, she waited upon them with her own hands. It
was a bountiful supper and a strange company. On her right sat
the ragged and half-starved Venters; and though blind eyes could
have seen what he counted for in the sum of her happiness, yet he
looked the gloomy outcast his allegiance had made him, and about
him there was the shadow of the ruin presaged by Tull. On her
left sat black-leather-garbed Lassiter looking like a man in a
dream. Hunger was not with him, nor composure, nor speech, and
when he twisted in frequent unquiet movements the heavy guns that
he had not removed knocked against the table-legs. If it had been
otherwise possible to forget the presence of Lassiter those
telling little jars would have rendered it unlikely. And Jane
Withersteen talked and smiled and laughed with all the dazzling
play of lips and eyes that a beautiful, daring woman could summon
to her purpose.

When the meal ended, and the men pushed back their chairs, she
leaned closer to Lassiter and looked square into his eyes.

"Why did you come to Cottonwoods?"

Her question seemed to break a spell. The rider arose as if he
had just remembered himself and had tarried longer than his wont.

"Ma'am, I have hunted all over the southern Utah and Nevada for--
somethin'. An' through your name I learned where to find it--here
in Cottonwoods."

"My name! Oh, I remember. You did know my name when you spoke
first. Well, tell me where you heard it and from whom?"

"At the little village--Glaze, I think it's called--some fifty
miles or more west of here. An' I heard it from a Gentile, a
rider who said you'd know where to tell me to find--"

"What?" she demanded, imperiously, as Lassiter broke off.

"Milly Erne's grave," he answered low, and the words came with a
wrench.

Venters wheeled in his chair to regard Lassiter in amazement, and
Jane slowly raised herself in white, still wonder.

"Milly Erne's grave?" she echoed, in a whisper. "What do you know
of Milly Erne, my best-beloved friend--who died in my arms? What
were you to her?"

"Did I claim to be anythin'?" he inquired. "I know
people--relatives-- who have long wanted to know where she's
buried, that's all."

"Relatives? She never spoke of relatives, except a brother who
was shot in Texas. Lassiter, Milly Erne's grave is in a secret
burying-ground on my property."

"Will you take me there?...You'll be offendin' Mormons worse than
by breakin' bread with me."

"Indeed yes, but I'll do it. Only we must go unseen. To-morrow,
perhaps."

"Thank you, Jane Withersteen," replied the rider, and he bowed to
her and stepped backward out of the court.

"Will you not stay--sleep under my roof?" she asked.

"No, ma'am, an' thanks again. I never sleep indoors. An' even if
I did there's that gatherin' storm in the village below. No, no.
I'll go to the sage. I hope you won't suffer none for your
kindness to me."

"Lassiter," said Venters, with a half-bitter laugh, "my bed too,
is the sage. Perhaps we may meet out there."

"Mebbe so. But the sage is wide an' I won't be near. Good night."

At Lassiter's low whistle the black horse whinnied, and carefully
picked his blind way out of the grove. The rider did not bridle
him, but walked beside him, leading him by touch of hand and
together they passed slowly into the shade of the cottonwoods.

"Jane, I must be off soon," said Venters. "Give me my guns. If
I'd had my guns--"

"Either my friend or the Elder of my church would be lying dead,"
she interposed

"Tull would be--surely."

"Oh, you fierce-blooded, savage youth! Can't I teach you
forebearance, mercy? Bern, it's divine to forgive your enemies.
'Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath.'"

"Hush! Talk to me no more of mercy or religion--after to-day.
To-day this strange coming of Lassiter left me still a man, and
now I'll die a man!...Give me my guns."

Silently she went into the house, to return with a heavy
cartridge-belt and gun-filled sheath and a long ride; these she
handed to him, and as he buckled on the belt she stood before him
in silent eloquence.

"Jane," he said, in gentler voice, "don't look so. I'm not going
out to murder your churchman. I'll try to avoid him and all his
men. But can't you see I've reached the end of my rope? Jane,
you're a wonderful woman. Never was there a woman so unselfish
and good. Only you're blind in one way....Listen!"

From behind the grove came the clicking sound of horses in a
rapid trot.

"Some of your riders," he continued. "It's getting time for the
night shift. Let us go out to the bench in the grove and talk
there."

It was still daylight in the open, but under the spreading
cottonwoods shadows were obscuring the lanes. Venters drew Jane
off from one of these into a shrub-lined trail, just wide enough
for the two to walk abreast, and in a roundabout way led her far
from the house to a knoll on the edge of the grove. Here in a
secluded nook was a bench from which, through an opening in the
tree-tops, could be seen the sage-slope and the wall of rock and
the dim lines of canyons. Jane had not spoken since Venters had
shocked her with his first harsh speech; but all the way she had
clung to his arm, and now, as he stopped and laid his rifle
against the bench, she still clung to him.

"Jane, I'm afraid I must leave you."

"Bern!" she cried.

"Yes, it looks that way. My position is not a happy one--I can't
feel right--I've lost all--"

"I'll give you anything you--"

"Listen, please. When I say loss I don't mean what you think. I
mean loss of good-will, good name--that which would have enabled
me to stand up in this village without bitterness. Well, it's too
late....Now, as to the future, I think you'd do best to give me
up. Tull is implacable. You ought to see from his intention
to-day that--But you can't see. Your blindness--your damned
religion!...Jane, forgive me--I'm sore within and something
rankles. Well, I fear that invisible hand will turn its hidden
work to your ruin."

"Invisible hand? Bern!"

"I mean your Bishop." Venters said it deliberately and would not
release her as she started back. "He's the law. The edict went
forth to ruin me. Well, look at me! It'll now go forth to compel
you to the will of the Church."

"You wrong Bishop Dyer. Tull is hard, I know. But then he has
been in love with me for years."

"Oh, your faith and your excuses! You can't see what I know--and
if you did see it you'd not admit it to save your life. That's
the Mormon of you. These elders and bishops will do absolutely
any deed to go on building up the power and wealth of their
church, their empire. Think of what they've done to the Gentiles
here, to me--think of Milly Erne's fate!"

"What do you know of her story?"

"I know enough--all, perhaps, except the name of the Mormon who
brought her here. But I must stop this kind of talk."

She pressed his hand in response. He helped her to a seat beside
him on the bench. And he respected a silence that he divined was
full of woman's deep emotion beyond his understanding.

It was the moment when the last ruddy rays of the sunset
brightened momentarily before yielding to twilight. And for
Venters the outlook before him was in some sense similar to a
feeling of his future, and with searching eyes he studied the
beautiful purple, barren waste of sage. Here was the unknown and
the perilous. The whole scene impressed Venters as a wild,
austere, and mighty manifestation of nature. And as it somehow
reminded him of his prospect in life, so it suddenly resembled
the woman near him, only in her there were greater beauty and
peril, a mystery more unsolvable, and something nameless that
numbed his heart and dimmed his eye.

"Look! A rider!" exclaimed Jane, breaking the silence. "Can that
be Lassiter?"

Venters moved his glance once more to the west. A horseman showed
dark on the sky-line, then merged into the color of the sage.

"It might be. But I think not--that fellow was coming in. One of
your riders, more likely. Yes, I see him clearly now. And there's
another."

"I see them, too."

"Jane, your riders seem as many as the bunches of sage. I ran
into five yesterday 'way down near the trail to Deception Pass.
They were with the white herd."

"You still go to that canyon? Bern, I wish you wouldn't. Oldring
and his rustlers live somewhere down there."

"Well, what of that?"

"Tull has already hinted to your frequent trips into Deception
Pass."

"I know." Venters uttered a short laugh. "He'll make a rustler of
me next. But, Jane, there's no water for fifty miles after I
leave here, and the nearest is in the canyon. I must drink and
water my horse. There! I see more riders. They are going out."

"The red herd is on the slope, toward the Pass."

Twilight was fast falling. A group of horsemen crossed the dark
line of low ground to become more distinct as they climbed the
slope. The silence broke to a clear call from an incoming rider,
and, almost like the peal of a hunting-horn, floated back the
answer. The outgoing riders moved swiftly, came sharply into
sight as they topped a ridge to show wild and black above the
horizon, and then passed down, dimming into the purple of the
sage.

"I hope they don't meet Lassiter," said Jane.

"So do I," replied Venters. "By this time the riders of the night
shift know what happened to-day. But Lassiter will likely keep
out of their way."

"Bern, who is Lassiter? He's only a name to me--a terrible name."

"Who is he? I don't know, Jane. Nobody I ever met knows him. He
talks a little like a Texan, like Milly Erne. Did you note that?"

"Yes. How strange of him to know of her! And she lived here ten
years and has been dead two. Bern, what do you know of Lassiter?
Tell me what he has done--why you spoke of him to
Tull--threatening to become another Lassiter yourself?"

"Jane, I only heard things, rumors, stories, most of which I
disbelieved. At Glaze his name was known, but none of the riders
or ranchers I knew there ever met him. At Stone Bridge I never
heard him mentioned. But at Sterling and villages north of there
he was spoken of often. I've never been in a village which he had
been known to visit. There were many conflicting stories about
him and his doings. Some said he had shot up this and that Mormon
village, and others denied it. I'm inclined to believe he has,
and you know how Mormons hide the truth. But there was one
feature about Lassiter upon which all agree--that he was what
riders in this country call a gun-man. He's a man with a
marvelous quickness and accuracy in the use of a Colt. And now
that I've seen him I know more. Lassiter was born without fear. I
watched him with eyes which saw him my friend. I'll never forget
the moment I recognized him from what had been told me of his
crouch before the draw. It was then I yelled his name. I believe
that yell saved Tull's life. At any rate, I know this, between
Tull and death then there was not the breadth of the littlest
hair. If he or any of his men had moved a finger downward--"

Venters left his meaning unspoken, but at the suggestion Jane
shuddered.

The pale afterglow in the west darkened with the merging of
twilight into night. The sage now spread out black and gloomy.
One dim star glimmered in the southwest sky. The sound of
trotting horses had ceased, and there was silence broken only by
a faint, dry pattering of cottonwood leaves in the soft night
wind.

Into this peace and calm suddenly broke the high-keyed yelp of a
coyote, and from far off in the darkness came the faint answering
note of a trailing mate.

"Hello! the sage-dogs are barking," said Venters.

"I don't like to hear them," replied Jane. "At night, sometimes
when I lie awake, listening to the long mourn or breaking bark or
wild howl, I think of you asleep somewhere in the sage, and my
heart aches."

"Jane, you couldn't listen to sweeter music, nor could I have a
better bed."

"Just think! Men like Lassiter and you have no home, no comfort,
no rest, no place to lay your weary heads. Well!...Let us be
patient. Tull's anger may cool, and time may help us. You might
do some service to the village--who can tell? Suppose you
discovered the long-unknown hiding-place of Oldring and his band,
and told it to my riders? That would disarm Tull's ugly hints and
put you in favor. For years my riders have trailed the tracks of
stolen cattle. You know as well as I how dearly we've paid for
our ranges in this wild country. Oldring drives our cattle down
into the network of deceiving canyons, and somewhere far to the
north or east he drives them up and out to Utah markets. If you
will spend time in Deception Pass try to find the trails."

"Jane, I've thought of that. I'll try."

"I must go now. And it hurts, for now I'll never be sure of
seeing you again. But to-morrow, Bern?"

"To-morrow surely. I'll watch for Lassiter and ride in with him."

"Good night."

Then she left him and moved away, a white, gliding shape that
soon vanished in the shadows.

Venters waited until the faint slam of a door assured him she had
reached the house, and then, taking up his rifle, he noiselessly
slipped through the bushes, down the knoll, and on under the dark
trees to the edge of the grove. The sky was now turning from gray
to blue; stars had begun to lighten the earlier blackness; and
from the wide flat sweep before him blew a cool wind, fragrant
with the breath of sage. Keeping close to the edge of the
cottonwoods, he went swiftly and silently westward. The grove was
long, and he had not reached the end when he heard something that
brought him to a halt. Low padded thuds told him horses were
coming this way. He sank down in the gloom, waiting, listening.
Much before he had expected, judging from sound, to his amazement
he descried horsemen near at hand. They were riding along the
border of the sage, and instantly he knew the hoofs of the horses
were muffled. Then the pale starlight afforded him indistinct
sight of the riders. But his eyes were keen and used to the dark,
and by peering closely he recognized the huge bulk and
black-bearded visage of Oldring and the lithe, supple form of the
rustler's lieutenant, a masked rider. They passed on; the
darkness swallowed them. Then, farther out on the sage, a dark,
compact body of horsemen went by, almost without sound, almost
like specters, and they, too, melted into the night.

CHAPTER III. AMBER SPRING

No unusual circumstances was it for Oldring and some of his men
to visit Cottonwoods in the broad light of day, but for him to
prowl about in the dark with the hoofs of his horses muffled
meant that mischief was brewing. Moreover, to Venters the
presence of the masked rider with Oldring seemed especially
ominous. For about this man there was mystery, he seldom rode
through the village, and when he did ride through it was swiftly;
riders seldom met by day on the sage, but wherever he rode there
always followed deeds as dark and mysterious as the mask he wore.
Oldring's band did not confine themselves to the rustling of
cattle.

Venters lay low in the shade of the cottonwoods, pondering this
chance meeting, and not for many moments did he consider it safe
to move on. Then, with sudden impulse, he turned the other way
and went back along the grove. When he reached the path leading
to Jane's home he decided to go down to the village. So he
hurried onward, with quick soft steps. Once beyond the grove he
entered the one and only street. It was wide, lined with tall
poplars, and under each row of trees, inside the foot-path, were
ditches where ran the water from Jane Withersteen's spring.

Between the trees twinkled lights of cottage candles, and far
down flared bright windows of the village stores. When Venters
got closer to these he saw knots of men standing together in
earnest conversation. The usual lounging on the corners and
benches and steps was not in evidence. Keeping in the shadow
Venters went closer and closer until he could hear voices. But he
could not distinguish what was said. He recognized many Mormons,
and looked hard for Tull and his men, but looked in vain.

Venters concluded that the rustlers had not passed along the
village street. No doubt these earnest men were discussing
Lassiter's coming. But Venters felt positive that Tull's
intention toward himself that day had not been and would not be
revealed.

So Venters, seeing there was little for him to learn, began
retracing his steps. The church was dark, Bishop Dyer's home next
to it was also dark, and likewise Tull's cottage. Upon almost any
night at this hour there would be lights here, and Venters marked
the unusual omission.

As he was about to pass out of the street to skirt the grove, he
once more slunk down at the sound of trotting horses. Presently
he descried two mounted men riding toward him. He hugged the
shadow of a tree. Again the starlight, brighter now, aided him,
and he made out Tull's stalwart figure, and beside him the short,
froglike shape of the rider Jerry. They were silent, and they
rode on to disappear.

Venters went his way with busy, gloomy mind, revolving events of
the day, trying to reckon those brooding in the night. His
thoughts overwhelmed him. Up in that dark grove dwelt a woman who
had been his friend. And he skulked about her home, gripping a
gun stealthily as an Indian, a man without place or people or
purpose. Above her hovered the shadow of grim, hidden, secret
power. No queen could have given more royally out of a bounteous
store than Jane Withersteen gave her people, and likewise to
those unfortunates whom her people hated. She asked only the
divine right of all women--freedom; to love and to live as her
heart willed. And yet prayer and her hope were vain.

"For years I've seen a storm clouding over her and the village of
Cottonwoods," muttered Venters, as he strode on. "Soon it'll
burst. I don't like the prospects." That night the villagers
whispered in the street--and night-riding rustlers muffled
horses--and Tull was at work in secret--and out there in the sage
hid a man who meant something terrible--Lassiter!

Venters passed the black cottonwoods, and, entering the sage,
climbed the gradual slope. He kept his direction in line with a
western star. From time to time he stopped to listen and heard
only the usual familiar bark of coyote and sweep of wind and
rustle of sage. Presently a low jumble of rocks loomed up darkly
somewhat to his right, and, turning that way, he whistled softly.

Out of the rocks glided a dog that leaped and whined about him.
He climbed over rough, broken rock, picking his way carefully,
and then went down. Here it was darker, and sheltered from the
wind. A white object guided him. It was another dog, and this one
was asleep, curled up between a saddle and a pack. The animal
awoke and thumped his tail in greeting. Venters placed the saddle
for a pillow, rolled in his blankets, with his face upward to the
stars. The white dog snuggled close to him. The other whined and
pattered a few yards to the rise of ground and there crouched on
guard. And in that wild covert Venters shut his eyes under the
great white stars and intense vaulted blue, bitterly comparing
their loneliness to his own, and fell asleep.

When he awoke, day had dawned and all about him was bright
steel-gray. The air had a cold tang. Arising, he greeted the
fawning dogs and stretched his cramped body, and then, gathering
together bunches of dead sage sticks, he lighted a fire. Strips
of dried beef held to the blaze for a moment served him and the
dogs. He drank from a canteen. There was nothing else in his
outfit; he had grown used to a scant fire. Then he sat over the
fire, palms outspread, and waited. Waiting had been his chief
occupation for months, and he scarcely knew what he waited for
unless it was the passing of the hours. But now he sensed action
in the immediate present; the day promised another meeting with
Lassiter and Lane, perhaps news of the rustlers; on the morrow he
meant to take the trail to Deception Pass.

And while he waited he talked to his dogs. He called them Ring
and Whitie; they were sheep-dogs, half collie, half deerhound,
superb in build, perfectly trained. It seemed that in his fallen
fortunes these dogs understood the nature of their value to him,
and governed their affection and faithfulness accordingly. Whitie
watched him with somber eyes of love, and Ring, crouched on the
little rise of ground above, kept tireless guard. When the sun
rose, the white dog took the place of the other, and Ring went to
sleep at his master's feet.

By and by Venters rolled up his blankets and tied them and his
meager pack together, then climbed out to look for his horse. He
saw him, presently, a little way off in the sage, and went to
fetch him. In that country, where every rider boasted of a fine
mount and was eager for a race, where thoroughbreds dotted the
wonderful grazing ranges, Venters rode a horse that was sad proof
of his misfortunes.

Then, with his back against a stone, Venters faced the east, and,
stick in hand and idle blade, he waited. The glorious sunlight
filled the valley with purple fire. Before him, to left, to
right, waving, rolling, sinking, rising, like low swells of a
purple sea, stretched the sage. Out of the grove of cottonwoods,
a green patch on the purple, gleamed the dull red of Jane
Withersteen's old stone house. And from there extended the wide
green of the village gardens and orchards marked by the graceful
poplars; and farther down shone the deep, dark richness of the
alfalfa fields. Numberless red and black and white dots speckled
the sage, and these were cattle and horses.

So, watching and waiting, Venters let the time wear away. At
length he saw a horse rise above a ridge, and he knew it to be
Lassiter's black. Climbing to the highest rock, so that he would
show against the sky-line, he stood and waved his hat. The almost
instant turning of Lassiter's horse attested to the quickness of
that rider's eye. Then Venters climbed down, saddled his horse,
tied on his pack, and, with a word to his dogs, was about to ride
out to meet Lassiter, when he concluded to wait for him there, on
higher ground, where the outlook was commanding.

It had been long since Venters had experienced friendly greeting
from a man. Lassiter's warmed in him something that had grown
cold from neglect. And when he had returned it, with a strong
grip of the iron hand that held his, and met the gray eyes, he
knew that Lassiter and he were to be friends.

"Venters, let's talk awhile before we go down there," said
Lassiter, slipping his bridle. "I ain't in no hurry. Them's sure
fine dogs you've got." With a rider's eye he took in the points
of Venter's horse, but did not speak his thought. "Well, did
anythin' come off after I left you last night?"

Venters told him about the rustlers.

"I was snug hid in the sage," replied Lassiter, "an' didn't see
or hear no one. Oldrin's got a high hand here, I reckon. It's no
news up in Utah how he holes in canyons an' leaves no track."
Lassiter was silent a moment. "Me an' Oldrin' wasn't exactly
strangers some years back when he drove cattle into Bostil's
Ford, at the head of the Rio Virgin. But he got harassed there
an' now he drives some place else."

"Lassiter, you knew him? Tell me, is he Mormon or Gentile?"

"I can't say. I've knowed Mormons who pretended to be Gentiles."

"No Mormon ever pretended that unless he was a rustler" declared
Venters.

"Mebbe so."

"It's a hard country for any one, but hardest for Gentiles. Did
you ever know or hear of a Gentile prospering in a Mormon
community?"

"I never did."

"Well, I want to get out of Utah. I've a mother living in
Illinois. I want to go home. It's eight years now."

The older man's sympathy moved Venters to tell his story. He had
left Quincy, run off to seek his fortune in the gold fields had
never gotten any farther than Salt Lake City, wandered here and
there as helper, teamster, shepherd, and drifted southward over
the divide and across the barrens and up the rugged plateau
through the passes to the last border settlements. Here he became
a rider of the sage, had stock of his own, and for a time
prospered, until chance threw him in the employ of Jane
Withersteen.

"Lassiter, I needn't tell you the rest."

"Well, it'd be no news to me. I know Mormons. I've seen their
women's strange love en' patience en' sacrifice an' silence en'
whet I call madness for their idea of God. An' over against that
I've seen the tricks of men. They work hand in hand, all
together, an' in the dark. No man can hold out against them,
unless he takes to packin' guns. For Mormons are slow to kill.
That's the only good I ever seen in their religion. Venters, take
this from me, these Mormons ain't just right in their minds. Else
could a Mormon marry one woman when he already has a wife, an'
call it duty?"

"Lassiter, you think as I think," returned Venters.

"How'd it come then that you never throwed a gun on Tull or some
of them?" inquired the rider, curiously.

"Jane pleaded with me, begged me to be patient, to overlook. She
even took my guns from me. I lost all before I knew it," replied
Venters, with the red color in his face. "But, Lassiter,
listen.

"Out of the wreck I saved a Winchester, two Colts, and plenty of
shells. I packed these down into Deception Pass. There, almost
every day for six months, I have practiced with my rifle till the
barrel burnt my hands. Practised the draw--the firing of a Colt,
hour after hour!"

"Now that's interestin' to me," said Lassiter, with a quick
uplift of his head and a concentration of his gray gaze on
Venters. "Could you throw a gun before you began that
practisin'?"

"Yes. And now..." Venters made a lightning-swift movement.

Lassiter smiled, and then his bronzed eyelids narrowed till his
eyes seemed mere gray slits. "You'll kill Tull!" He did not
question; he affirmed.

"I promised Jane Withersteen I'd try to avoid Tull. I'll keep my
word. But sooner or later Tull and I will meet. As I feel now, if
he even looks at me I'll draw!"

"I reckon so. There'll be hell down there, presently." He paused
a moment and flicked a sage-brush with his quirt. "Venters,
seein' as you're considerable worked up, tell me Milly Erne's
story."

Venters's agitation stilled to the trace of suppressed eagerness
in Lassiter's query.

"Milly Erne's story? Well, Lassiter, I'll tell you what I know.
Milly Erne had been in Cottonwoods years when I first arrived
there, and most of what I tell you happened before my arrival. I
got to know her pretty well. She was a slip of a woman, and crazy
on religion. I conceived an idea that I never mentioned--I
thought she was at heart more Gentile than Mormon. But she passed
as a Mormon, and certainly she had the Mormon woman's locked
lips. You know, in every Mormon village there are women who seem
mysterious to us, but about Milly there was more than the
ordinary mystery. When she came to Cottonwoods she had a
beautiful little girl whom she loved passionately. Milly was not
known openly in Cottonwoods as a Mormon wife. That she really was
a Mormon wife I have no doubt. Perhaps the Mormon's other wife or
wives would not acknowledge Milly. Such things happen in these
villages. Mormon wives wear yokes, but they get jealous. Well,
whatever had brought Milly to this country-- love or madness of
religion--she repented of it. She gave up teaching the village
school. She quit the church. And she began to fight Mormon
upbringing for her baby girl. Then the Mormons put on the
screws-- slowly, as is their way. At last the child disappeared.
'Lost' was the report. The child was stolen, I know that. So do
you. That wrecked Milly Erne. But she lived on in hope. She
became a slave. She worked her heart and soul and life out to get
back her child. She never heard of it again. Then she sank....I
can see her now, a frail thing, so transparent you could almost
look through her--white like ashes--and her eyes!...Her eyes have
always haunted me. She had one real friend--Jane Withersteen. But
Jane couldn't mend a broken heart, and Milly died."

For moments Lassiter did not speak, or turn his head.

"The man!" he exclaimed, presently, in husky accents.

"I haven't the slightest idea who the Mormon was," replied
Venters; "nor has any Gentile in Cottonwoods."

"Does Jane Withersteen know?"

"Yes. But a red-hot running-iron couldn't burn that name out of
her!"

Without further speech Lassiter started off, walking his horse
and Venters followed with his dogs. Half a mile down the slope
they entered a luxuriant growth of willows, and soon came into an
open space carpeted with grass like deep green velvet. The
rushing of water and singing of birds filled their ears. Venters
led his comrade to a shady bower and showed him Amber Spring. It
was a magnificent outburst of clear, amber water pouring from a
dark, stone-lined hole. Lassiter knelt and drank, lingered there
to drink again. He made no comment, but Venters did not need
words. Next to his horse a rider of the sage loved a spring. And
this spring was the most beautiful and remarkable known to the
upland riders of southern Utah. It was the spring that made old
Withersteen a feudal lord and now enabled his daughter to return
the toll which her father had exacted from the toilers of the
sage.

The spring gushed forth in a swirling torrent, and leaped down
joyously to make its swift way along a willow-skirted channel.
Moss and ferns and lilies overhung its green banks. Except for
the rough-hewn stones that held and directed the water, this
willow thicket and glade had been left as nature had made it.

Below were artificial lakes, three in number, one above the other
in banks of raised earth, and round about them rose the lofty
green-foliaged shafts of poplar trees. Ducks dotted the glassy
surface of the lakes; a blue heron stood motionless on a
water-gate; kingfishers darted with shrieking flight along the
shady banks; a white hawk sailed above; and from the trees and
shrubs came the song of robins and cat-birds. It was all in
strange contrast to the endless slopes of lonely sage and the
wild rock environs beyond. Venters thought of the woman who loved
the birds and the green of the leaves and the murmur of the
water.

Next on the slope, just below the third and largest lake, were
corrals and a wide stone barn and open sheds and coops and pens.
Here were clouds of dust, and cracking sounds of hoofs, and
romping colts and heehawing burros. Neighing horses trampled to
the corral fences. And on the little windows of the barn
projected bobbing heads of bays and blacks and sorrels. When the
two men entered the immense barnyard, from all around the din
increased. This welcome, however, was not seconded by the several
men and boys who vanished on sight.

Venters and Lassiter were turning toward the house when Jane
appeared in the lane leading a horse. In riding-skirt and blouse
she seemed to have lost some of her statuesque proportions, and
looked more like a girl rider than the mistress of Withersteen.
She was brightly smiling, and her greeting was warmly cordial.

"Good news," she announced. "I've been to the village. All is
quiet. I expected--I don't know what. But there's no excitement.
And Tull has ridden out on his way to Glaze."

"Tull gone?" inquired Venters, with surprise. He was wondering
what could have taken Tull away. Was it to avoid another meeting
with Lassiter that he went? Could it have any connection with the
probable nearness of Oldring and his gang?

"Gone, yes, thank goodness," replied Jane. "Now I'll have peace
for a while. Lassiter, I want you to see my horses. You are a
rider, and you must be a judge of horseflesh. Some of mine have
Arabian blood. My father got his best strain in Nevada from
Indians who claimed their horses were bred down from the original
stock left by the Spaniards."

"Well, ma'am, the one you've been ridin' takes my eye," said
Lassiter, as he walked round the racy, clean-limbed, and
fine-pointed roan.

"Where are the boys?" she asked, looking about. "Jerd, Paul,
where are you? Here, bring out the horses."

Lee sound of dropping bars inside the barn was the signal for the
horses to jerk their heads in the windows, to snort and stamp.
Then they came pounding out of the door, a file of thoroughbreds,
to plunge about the barnyard, heads and tails up, manes flying.
They halted afar off, squared away to look, came slowly forward
with whinnies for their mistress, and doubtful snorts for the
strangers and their horses.

"Come--come--come," called Jane, holding out her hands. "Why,
Bells-- Wrangle, where are your manners? Come, Black Star--come,
Night. Ah, you beauties! My racers of the sage!"

Only two came up to her; those she called Night and Black Star.
Venters never looked at them without delight. The first was soft
dead black, the other glittering black, and they were perfectly
matched in size, both being high and long-bodied, wide through
the shoulders, with lithe, powerful legs. That they were a
woman's pets showed in the gloss of skin, the fineness of mane.
It showed, too, in the light of big eyes and the gentle reach of
eagerness.

"I never seen their like," was Lassiter's encomium, "an' in my
day I've seen a sight of horses. Now, ma'am, if you was wantin'
to make a long an' fast ride across the sage--say to
elope--"

Lassiter ended there with dry humor, yet behind that was meaning.
Jane blushed and made arch eyes at him.

"Take care, Lassiter, I might think that a proposal," she
replied, gaily. "It's dangerous to propose elopement to a Mormon
woman. Well, I was expecting you. Now will be a good hour to show
you Milly Erne's grave. The day-riders have gone, and the
night-riders haven't come in. Bern, what do you make of that?
Need I worry? You know I have to be made to worry."

"Well, it's not usual for the night shift to ride in so late,"
replied Venters, slowly, and his glance sought Lassiter's.
"Cattle are usually quiet after dark. Still, I've known even a
coyote to stampede your white herd."

"I refuse to borrow trouble. Come," said Jane.

They mounted, and, with Jane in the lead, rode down the lane,
and, turning off into a cattle trail, proceeded westward.
Venters's dogs trotted behind them. On this side of the ranch the
outlook was different from that on the other; the immediate
foreground was rough and the sage more rugged and less colorful;
there were no dark-blue lines of canyons to hold the eye, nor any
uprearing rock walls. It was a long roll and slope into gray
obscurity. Soon Jane left the trail and rode into the sage, and
presently she dismounted and threw her bridle. The men did
likewise. Then, on foot, they followed her, coming out at length
on the rim of a low escarpment. She passed by several little
ridges of earth to halt before a faintly defined mound. It lay in
the shade of a sweeping sage-brush close to the edge of the
promontory; and a rider could have jumped his horse over it
without recognizing a grave.

"Here!"

She looked sad as she spoke, but she offered no explanation for
the neglect of an unmarked, uncared-for grave. There was a little
bunch of pale, sweet lavender daisies, doubtless planted there by
Jane.

"I only come here to remember and to pray," she said. "But I
leave no trail!"

A grave in the sage! How lonely this resting-place of Milly Erne!
The cottonwoods or the alfalfa fields were not in sight, nor was
there any rock or ridge or cedar to lend contrast to the
monotony. Gray slopes, tinging the purple, barren and wild, with
the wind waving the sage, swept away to the dim
horizon.

Lassiter looked at the grave and then out into space. At that
moment he seemed a figure of bronze.

Jane touched Venters's arm and led him back to the horses.

"Bern!" cried Jane, when they were out of hearing. "Suppose
Lassiter were Milly's husband--the father of that little girl
lost so long ago!"

"It might be, Jane. Let us ride on. If he wants to see us again
he'll come."

So they mounted and rode out to the cattle trail and began to
climb. From the height of the ridge, where they had started down,
Venters looked back. He did not see Lassiter, but his glance,
drawn irresistibly farther out on the gradual slope, caught sight
of a moving cloud of dust.

"Hello, a rider!"

"Yes, I see," said Jane.

"That fellow's riding hard. Jane, there's something wrong."

"Oh yes, there must be....How he rides!"

The horse disappeared in the sage, and then puffs of dust marked
his course.

"He's short-cut on us--he's making straight for the corrals."

Venters and Jane galloped their steeds and reined in at the
turning of the lane. This lane led down to the right of the
grove. Suddenly into its lower entrance flashed a bay horse. Then
Venters caught the fast rhythmic beat of pounding hoofs. Soon his
keen eye recognized the swing of the rider in his saddle.

"It's Judkins, your Gentile rider!" he cried. "Jane, when Judkins
rides like that it means hell!"

CHAPTER IV. DECEPTION PASS

The rider thundered up and almost threw his foam-flecked horse in
the sudden stop. He was a giant form, and with fearless eyes.

"Judkins, you're all bloody!" cried Jane, in affright. "Oh,
you've been shot!"

"Nothin' much Miss Withersteen. I got a nick in the shoulder. I'm
some wet an' the hoss's been throwin' lather, so all this ain't
blood."

"What's up?" queried Venters, sharply.

"Rustlers sloped off with the red herd."

"Where are my riders?" demanded Jane.

"Miss Withersteen, I was alone all night with the herd. At
daylight this mornin' the rustlers rode down. They began to shoot
at me on sight. They chased me hard an' far, burnin' powder all
the time, but I got away."

"Jud, they meant to kill you," declared Venters.

"Now I wonder," returned Judkins. "They wanted me bad. An' it
ain't regular for rustlers to waste time chasin' one rider."

"Thank heaven you got away," said Jane. "But my riders--where are
they?"

"I don't know. The night-riders weren't there last night when I
rode down, en' this mornin' I met no day-riders."

"Judkins! Bern, they've been set upon--killed by Oldring's men!"

"I don't think so," replied Venters, decidedly. "Jane, your
riders haven't gone out in the sage."

"Bern, what do you mean?" Jane Withersteen turned deathly pale.

"You remember what I said about the unseen hand?"

"Oh!...Impossible!"

"I hope so. But I fear--" Venters finished, with a shake of his
head.

"Bern, you're bitter; but that's only natural. We'll wait to see
what's happened to my riders. Judkins, come to the house with me.
Your wound must be attended to."

"Jane, I'll find out where Oldring drives the herd," vowed
Venters.

"No, no! Bern, don't risk it now--when the rustlers are in such
shooting mood."

"I'm going. Jud, how many cattle in that red herd?"

"Twenty-five hundred head."

"Whew! What on earth can Oldring do with so many cattle? Why, a
hundred head is a big steal. I've got to find out."

"Don't go," implored Jane.

"Bern, you want a hoss thet can run. Miss Withersteen, if it's
not too bold of me to advise, make him take a fast hoss or don't
let him go."

"Yes, yes, Judkins. He must ride a horse that can't be caught.
Which one--Black Star--Night?"

"Jane, I won't take either," said Venters, emphatically. "I
wouldn't risk losing one of your favorites."

"Wrangle, then?"

"Thet's the hoss," replied Judkins. "Wrangle can outrun Black
Star an' Night. You'd never believe it, Miss Withersteen, but I
know. Wrangle's the biggest en' fastest hoss on the sage."

"Oh no, Wrangle can't beat Black Star. But, Bern, take Wrangle if
you will go. Ask Jerd for anything you need. Oh, be watchful
careful.... God speed you."

She clasped his hand, turned quickly away, and went down a lane
with the rider.

Venters rode to the barn, and, leaping off, shouted for Jerd. The
boy came running. Venters sent him for meat, bread, and dried
fruits, to be packed in saddlebags. His own horse he turned loose
into the nearest corral. Then he went for Wrangle. The giant
sorrel had earned his name for a trait the opposite of
amiability. He came readily out of the barn, but once in the yard
he broke from Venters, and plunged about with ears laid back.
Venters had to rope him, and then he kicked down a section of
fence, stood on his hind legs, crashed down and fought the rope.
Jerd returned to lend a hand.

"Wrangle don't git enough work," said Jerd, as the big saddle
went on. "He's unruly when he's corralled, an' wants to run. Wait
till he smells the sage!"

"Jerd, this horse is an iron-jawed devil. I never straddled him
but once. Run? Say, he's swift as wind!"

When Venters's boot touched the stirrup the sorrel bolted, giving
him the rider's flying mount. The swing of this fiery horse
recalled to Venters days that were not really long past, when he
rode into the sage as the leader of Jane Withersteen's riders.
Wrangle pulled hard on a tight rein. He galloped out of the lane,
down the shady border of the grove, and hauled up at the
watering-trough, where he pranced and champed his bit. Venters
got off and filled his canteen while the horse drank. The dogs,
Ring and Whitie, came trotting up for their drink. Then Venters
remounted and turned Wrangle toward the sage.

A wide, white trail wound away down the slope. One keen, sweeping
glance told Venters that there was neither man nor horse nor
steer within the limit of his vision, unless they were lying down
in the sage. Ring loped in the lead and Whitie loped in the rear.
Wrangle settled gradually into an easy swinging canter, and
Venters's thoughts, now that the rush and flurry of the start
were past, and the long miles stretched before him, reverted to a
calm reckoning of late singular coincidences.

There was the night ride of Tull's, which, viewed in the light of
subsequent events, had a look of his covert machinations; Oldring
and his Masked Rider and his rustlers riding muffled horses; the
report that Tull had ridden out that morning with his man Jerry
on the trail to Glaze, the strange disappearance of Jane
Withersteen's riders, the unusually determined attempt to kill
the one Gentile still in her employ, an intention frustrated, no
doubt, only by Judkin's magnificent riding of her racer, and
lastly the driving of the red herd. These events, to Venters's
color of mind, had a dark relationship. Remembering Jane's
accusation of bitterness, he tried hard to put aside his rancor
in judging Tull. But it was bitter knowledge that made him see
the truth. He had felt the shadow of an unseen hand; he had
watched till he saw its dim outline, and then he had traced it to
a man's hate, to the rivalry of a Mormon Elder, to the power of a
Bishop, to the long, far-reaching arm of a terrible creed. That
unseen hand had made its first move against Jane Withersteen. Her
riders had been called in, leaving her without help to drive
seven thousand head of cattle. But to Venters it seemed
extraordinary that the power which had called in these riders had
left so many cattle to be driven by rustlers and harried by
wolves. For hand in glove with that power was an insatiate greed;
they were one and the same.

"What can Oldring do with twenty-five hundred head of cattle?"
muttered Venters. "Is he a Mormon? Did he meet Tull last night?
It looks like a black plot to me. But Tull and his churchmen
wouldn't ruin Jane Withersteen unless the Church was to profit by
that ruin. Where does Oldring come in? I'm going to find out
about these things."

Wrangle did the twenty-five miles in three hours and walked
little of the way. When he had gotten warmed up he had been
allowed to choose his own gait. The afternoon had well advanced
when Venters struck the trail of the red herd and found where it
had grazed the night before. Then Venters rested the horse and
used his eyes. Near at hand were a cow and a calf and several
yearlings, and farther out in the sage some straggling steers. He
caught a glimpse of coyotes skulking near the cattle. The slow
sweeping gaze of the rider failed to find other living things
within the field of sight. The sage about him was breast-high to
his horse, oversweet with its warm, fragrant breath, gray where
it waved to the light, darker where the wind left it still, and
beyond the wonderful haze-purple lent by distance. Far across
that wide waste began the slow lift of uplands through which
Deception Pass cut its tortuous many-canyoned way.

Venters raised the bridle of his horse and followed the broad
cattle trail. The crushed sage resembled the path of a monster
snake. In a few miles of travel he passed several cows and calves
that had escaped the drive. Then he stood on the last high bench
of the slope with the floor of the valley beneath. The opening of
the canyon showed in a break of the sage, and the cattle trail
paralleled it as far as he could see. That trail led to an
undiscovered point where Oldring drove cattle into the pass, and
many a rider who had followed it had never returned. Venters
satisfied himself that the rustlers had not deviated from their
usual course, and then he turned at right angles off the cattle
trail and made for the head of the pass.

The sun lost its heat and wore down to the western horizon, where
it changed from white to gold and rested like a huge ball about
to roll on its golden shadows down the slope. Venters watched the
lengthening of the rays and bars, and marveled at his own
league-long shadow. The sun sank. There was instant shading of
brightness about him, and he saw a kind of cold purple bloom
creep ahead of him to cross the canyon, to mount the opposite
slope and chase and darken and bury the last golden flare of
sunlight.

Venters rode into a trail that he always took to get down into
the canyon. He dismounted and found no tracks but his own made
days previous. Nevertheless he sent the dog Ring ahead and
waited. In a little while Ring returned. Whereupon Venters led
his horse on to the break in the ground.

The opening into Deception Pass was one of the remarkable natural
phenomena in a country remarkable for vast slopes of sage,
uplands insulated by gigantic red walls, and deep canyons of
mysterious source and outlet. Here the valley floor was level,
and here opened a narrow chasm, a ragged vent in yellow walls of
stone. The trail down the five hundred feet of sheer depth always
tested Venters's nerve. It was bad going for even a burro. But
Wrangle, as Venters led him, snorted defiance or disgust rather
than fear, and, like a hobbled horse on the jump, lifted his
ponderous iron-shod fore hoofs and crashed down over the first
rough step. Venters warmed to greater admiration of the sorrel;
and, giving him a loose bridle, he stepped down foot by foot.
Oftentimes the stones and shale started by Wrangle buried Venters
to his knees; again he was hard put to it to dodge a rolling
boulder, there were times when he could not see Wrangle for dust,
and once he and the horse rode a sliding shelf of yellow,
weathered cliff. It was a trail on which there could be no stops,
and, therefore, if perilous, it was at least one that did not
take long in the descent.

Venters breathed lighter when that was over, and felt a sudden
assurance in the success of his enterprise. For at first it had
been a reckless determination to achieve something at any cost,
and now it resolved itself into an adventure worthy of all his
reason and cunning, and keenness of eye and ear.

Pinyon pines clustered in little clumps along the level floor of
the pass. Twilight had gathered under the walls. Venters rode
into the trail and up the canyon. Gradually the trees and caves
and objects low down turned black, and this blackness moved up
the walls till night enfolded the pass, while day still lingered
above. The sky darkened; and stars began to show, at first pale
and then bright. Sharp notches of the rim-wall, biting like teeth
into the blue, were landmarks by which Venters knew where his
camping site lay. He had to feel his way through a thicket of
slender oaks to a spring where he watered Wrangle and drank
himself. Here he unsaddled and turned Wrangle loose, having no
fear that the horse would leave the thick, cool grass adjacent to
the spring. Next he satisfied his own hunger, fed Ring and Whitie
and, with them curled beside him, composed himself to await
sleep.

There had been a time when night in the high altitude of these
Utah uplands had been satisfying to Venters. But that was before
the oppression of enemies had made the change in his mind. As a
rider guarding the herd he had never thought of the night's
wildness and loneliness; as an outcast, now when the full silence
set in, and the deep darkness, and trains of radiant stars shone
cold and calm, he lay with an ache in his heart. For a year he
had lived as a black fox, driven from his kind. He longed for the
sound of a voice, the touch of a hand. In the daytime there was
riding from place to place, and the gun practice to which
something drove him, and other tasks that at least necessitated
action, at night, before he won sleep, there was strife in his
soul. He yearned to leave the endless sage slopes, the wilderness
of canyons, and it was in the lonely night that this yearning
grew unbearable. It was then that he reached forth to feel Ring
or Whitie, immeasurably grateful for the love and companionship
of two dogs.

On this night the same old loneliness beset Venters, the old
habit of sad thought and burning unquiet had its way. But from it
evolved a conviction that his useless life had undergone a subtle
change. He had sensed it first when Wrangle swung him up to the
high saddle, he knew it now when he lay in the gateway of
Deception Pass. He had no thrill of adventure, rather a gloomy
perception of great hazard, perhaps death. He meant to find
Oldring's retreat. The rustlers had fast horses, but none that
could catch Wrangle. Venters knew no rustler could creep upon him
at night when Ring and Whitie guarded his hiding-place. For the
rest, he had eyes and ears, and a long rifle and an unerring aim,
which he meant to use. Strangely his foreshadowing of change did
not hold a thought of the killing of Tull. It related only to
what was to happen to him in Deception Pass; and he could no more
lift the veil of that mystery than tell where the trails led to
in that unexplored canyon. Moreover, he did not care. And at
length, tired out by stress of thought, he fell asleep.

When his eyes unclosed, day had come again, and he saw the rim of
the opposite wall tipped with the gold of sunrise. A few moments
sufficed for the morning's simple camp duties. Near at hand he
found Wrangle, and to his surprise the horse came to him. Wrangle
was one of the horses that left his viciousness in the home
corral. What he wanted was to be free of mules and burros and
steers, to roll in dust-patches, and then to run down the wide,
open, windy sage-plains, and at night browse and sleep in the
cool wet grass of a springhole. Jerd knew the sorrel when he said
of him, "Wait till he smells the sage!"

Venters saddled and led him out of the oak thicket, and, leaping
astride, rode up the canyon, with Ring and Whitie trotting
behind. An old grass-grown trail followed the course of a shallow
wash where flowed a thin stream of water. The canyon was a
hundred rods wide, its yellow walls were perpendicular; it had
abundant sage and a scant growth of oak and pinon. For five miles
it held to a comparatively straight bearing, and then began a
heightening of rugged walls and a deepening of the floor. Beyond
this point of sudden change in the character of the canyon
Venters had never explored, and here was the real door to the
intricacies of Deception Pass.

He reined Wrangle to a walk, halted now and then to listen, and
then proceeded cautiously with shifting and alert gaze. The
canyon assumed proportions that dwarfed those of its first ten
miles. Venters rode on and on, not losing in the interest of his
wide surroundings any of his caution or keen search for tracks or
sight of living thing. If there ever had been a trail here, he
could not find it. He rode through sage and clumps of pinon trees
and grassy plots where long-petaled purple lilies bloomed. He
rode through a dark constriction of the pass no wider than the
lane in the grove at Cottonwoods. And he came out into a great
amphitheater into which jutted huge towering corners of a
confluences of intersecting canyons.

Venters sat his horse, and, with a rider's eye, studied this wild
cross-cut of huge stone gullies. Then he went on, guided by the
course of running water. If it had not been for the main stream
of water flowing north he would never have been able to tell
which of those many openings was a continuation of the pass. In
crossing this amphitheater he went by the mouths of five canyons,
fording little streams that flowed into the larger one. Gaining
the outlet which he took to be the pass, he rode on again under
over hanging walls. One side was dark in shade, the other light
in sun. This narrow passageway turned and twisted and opened into
a valley that amazed Venters.

Here again was a sweep of purple sage, richer than upon the
higher levels. The valley was miles long, several wide, and
inclosed by unscalable walls. But it was the background of this
valley that so forcibly struck him. Across the sage-flat rose a
strange up-flinging of yellow rocks. He could not tell which were
close and which were distant. Scrawled mounds of stone, like
mountain waves, seemed to roll up to steep bare slopes and
towers.

In this plain of sage Venters flushed birds and rabbits, and when
he had proceeded about a mile he caught sight of the bobbing
white tails of a herd of running antelope. He rode along the edge
of the stream which wound toward the western end of the slowly
looming mounds of stone. The high slope retreated out of sight
behind the nearer protection. To Venters the valley appeared to
have been filled in by a mountain of melted stone that had
hardened in strange shapes of rounded outline. He followed the
stream till he lost it in a deep cut. Therefore Venters quit the
dark slit which baffled further search in that direction, and
rode out along the curved edge of stone where it met the sage. It
was not long before he came to a low place, and here Wrangle
readily climbed up.

All about him was ridgy roll of wind-smoothed, rain-washed rock
Not a tuft of grass or a bunch of sage colored the dull
rust-yellow. He saw where, to the right, this uneven flow of
stone ended in a blunt wall. Leftward, from the hollow that lay
at his feet, mounted a gradual slow-swelling slope to a great
height topped by leaning, cracked, and ruined crags. Not for some
time did he grasp the wonder of that acclivity. It was no less
than a mountain-side, glistening in the sun like polished
granite, with cedar-trees springing as if by magic out of the
denuded surface. Winds had swept it clear of weathered shale, and
rains had washed it free of dust. Far up the curved slope its
beautiful lines broke to meet the vertical rim-wall, to lose its
grace in a different order and color of rock, a stained yellow
cliff of cracks and caves and seamed crags. And straight before
Venters was a scene less striking but more significant to his
keen survey. For beyond a mile of the bare, hummocky rock began
the valley of sage, and the mouths of canyons, one of which
surely was another gateway into the pass.

He got off his horse, and, giving the bridle to Ring to hold, he
commenced a search for the cleft where the stream ran. He was not
successful and concluded the water dropped into an underground
passage. Then he returned to where he had left Wrangle, and led
him down off the stone to the sage. It was a short ride to the
opening canyons. There was no reason for a choice of which one to
enter. The one he rode into was a clear, sharp shaft in yellow
stone a thousand feet deep, with wonderful wind-worn caves low
down and high above buttressed and turreted ramparts. Farther on
Venters came into a region where deep indentations marked the
line of canyon walls. These were huge, cove-like blind pockets
extending back to a sharp corner with a dense growth of
underbrush and trees.

Venters penetrated into one of these offshoots, and, as he had
hoped, he found abundant grass. He had to bend the oak saplings
to get his horse through. Deciding to make this a hiding-place if
he could find water, he worked back to the limit of the shelving
walls. In a little cluster of silver spruces he found a spring.
This inclosed nook seemed an ideal place to leave his horse and
to camp at night, and from which to make stealthy trips on foot.
The thick grass hid his trail; the dense growth of oaks in the
opening would serve as a barrier to keep Wrangle in, if, indeed,
the luxuriant browse would not suffice for that. So Venters,
leaving Whitie with the horse, called Ring to his side, and,
rifle in hand, worked his way out to the open. A careful
photographing in mind of the formation of the bold outlines of
rimrock assured him he would be able to return to his retreat
even in the dark.

Bunches of scattered sage covered the center of the canyon, and
among these Venters threaded his way with the step of an Indian.
At intervals he put his hand on the dog and stopped to listen.
There was a drowsy hum of insects, but no other sound disturbed
the warm midday stillness. Venters saw ahead a turn, more abrupt
than any yet. Warily he rounded this corner, once again to halt
bewildered.

The canyon opened fan-shaped into a great oval of green and gray
growths. It was the hub of an oblong wheel, and from it, at
regular distances, like spokes, ran the outgoing canyons. Here a
dull red color predominated over the fading yellow. The corners
of wall bluntly rose, scarred and scrawled, to taper into towers
and serrated peaks and pinnacled domes.

Venters pushed on more heedfully than ever. Toward the center of
this circle the sage-brush grew smaller and farther apart He was
about to sheer off to the right, where thickets and jumbles of
fallen rock would afford him cover, when he ran right upon a
broad cattle trail. Like a road it was, more than a trail, and
the cattle tracks were fresh. What surprised him more, they were
wet! He pondered over this feature. It had not rained. The only
solution to this puzzle was that the cattle had been driven
through water, and water deep enough to wet their legs.

Suddenly Ring growled low. Venters rose cautiously and looked
over the sage. A band of straggling horsemen were riding across
the oval. He sank down, startled and trembling. "Rustlers!" he
muttered. Hurriedly he glanced about for a place to hide. Near at
hand there was nothing but sage-brush. He dared not risk crossing
the open patches to reach the rocks. Again he peeped over the
sage. The rustlers--four--five--seven--eight in all, were
approaching, but not directly in line with him. That was relief
for a cold deadness which seemed to be creeping inward along his
veins. He crouched down with bated breath and held the bristling
dog.

He heard the click of iron-shod hoofs on stone, the coarse
laughter of men, and then voices gradually dying away. Long
moments passed. Then he rose. The rustlers were riding into a
canyon. Their horses were tired, and they had several pack
animals; evidently they had traveled far. Venters doubted that
they were the rustlers who had driven the red herd. Olding's band
had split. Venters watched these horsemen disappear under a bold
canyon wall.

The rustlers had come from the northwest side of the oval.
Venters kept a steady gaze in that direction, hoping, if there
were more, to see from what canyon they rode. A quarter of an
hour went by. Reward for his vigilance came when he descried
three more mounted men, far over to the north. But out of what
canyon they had ridden it was too late to tell. He watched the
three ride across the oval and round the jutting red corner where
the others had gone.

"Up that canyon!" exclaimed Venters. "Oldring's den! I've found
it!"

A knotty point for Venters was the fact that the cattle tracks
all pointed west. The broad trail came from the direction of the
canyon into which the rustlers had ridden, and undoubtedly the
cattle had been driven out of it across the oval. There were no
tracks pointing the other way. It had been in his mind that
Oldring had driven the red herd toward the rendezvous, and not
from it. Where did that broad trail come down into the pass, and
where did it lead? Venters knew he wasted time in pondering the
question, but it held a fascination not easily dispelled. For
many years Oldring's mysterious entrance and exit to Deception
Pass had been all-absorbing topics to sage-riders.

All at once the dog put an end to Venters's pondering. Ring
sniffed the air, turned slowly in his tracks with a whine, and
then growled. Venters wheeled. Two horsemen were within a hundred
yards, coming straight at him. One, lagging behind the other, was
Oldring's Masked Rider.

Venters cunningly sank, slowly trying to merge into sage-brush.
But, guarded as his action was, the first horse detected it. He
stopped short, snorted, and shot up his ears. The rustler bent
forward, as if keenly peering ahead. Then, with a swift sweep, he
jerked a gun from its sheath and fired.

The bullet zipped through the sage-brush. Flying bits of wood
struck Venters, and the hot, stinging pain seemed to lift him in
one leap. Like a flash the blue barrel of his rifle gleamed level
and he shot once--twice.

The foremost rustler dropped his weapon and toppled from his
saddle, to fall with his foot catching in a stirrup. The horse
snorted wildly and plunged away, dragging the rustler through the
sage.

The Masked Rider huddled over his pommel slowly swaying to one
side, and then, with a faint, strange cry, slipped out of the
saddle.

CHAPTER V. THE MASKED RIDER

Venters looked quickly from the fallen rustlers to the canyon
where the others had disappeared. He calculated on the time
needed for running horses to return to the open, if their riders
heard shots. He waited breathlessly. But the estimated time
dragged by and no riders appeared. Venters began presently to
believe that the rifle reports had not penetrated into the
recesses of the canyon, and felt safe for the immediate present.

He hurried to the spot where the first rustler had been dragged
by his horse. The man lay in deep grass, dead, jaw fallen, eyes
protruding--a sight that sickened Venters. The first man at whom
he had ever aimed a weapon he had shot through the heart. With
the clammy sweat oozing from every pore Venters dragged the
rustler in among some boulders and covered him with slabs of
rock. Then he smoothed out the crushed trail in grass and sage.
The rustler's horse had stopped a quarter of a mile off and was
grazing.

When Venters rapidly strode toward the Masked Rider not even the
cold nausea that gripped him could wholly banish curiosity. For
he had shot Oldring's infamous lieutenant, whose face had never
been seen. Venters experienced a grim pride in the feat. What
would Tull say to this achievement of the outcast who rode too
often to Deception Pass?

Venters's curious eagerness and expectation had not prepared him
for the shock he received when he stood over a slight, dark
figure. The rustler wore the black mask that had given him his
name, but he had no weapons. Venters glanced at the drooping
horse, there were no gun-sheaths on the saddle.

"A rustler who didn't pack guns!" muttered Venters. "He wears no
belt. He couldn't pack guns in that rig....Strange!"

A low, gasping intake of breath and a sudden twitching of body
told Venters the rider still lived.

"He's alive!...I've got to stand here and watch him die. And I
shot an unarmed man."

Shrinkingly Venters removed the rider's wide sombrero and the
black cloth mask. This action disclosed bright chestnut hair,
inclined to curl, and a white, youthful face. Along the lower
line of cheek and jaw was a clear demarcation, where the brown of
tanned skin met the white that had been hidden from the sun.

"Oh, he's only a boy!...What! Can he be Oldring's Masked Rider?"

The boy showed signs of returning consciousness. He stirred; his
lips moved; a small brown hand clenched in his blouse.

Venters knelt with a gathering horror of his deed. His bullet had
entered the rider's right breast, high up to the shoulder. With
hands that shook, Venters untied a black scarf and ripped open
the blood-wet blouse.

First he saw a gaping hole, dark red against a whiteness of skin,
from which welled a slender red stream. Then the graceful,
beautiful swell of a woman's breast!

"A woman!" he cried. "A girl!...I've killed a girl!"

She suddenly opened eyes that transfixed Venters. They were
fathomless blue. Consciousness of death was there, a blended
terror and pain, but no consciousness of sight. She did not see
Venters. She stared into the unknown.

Then came a spasm of vitality. She writhed in a torture of
reviving strength, and in her convulsions she almost tore from
Ventner's grasp. Slowly she relaxed and sank partly back. The
ungloved hand sought the wound, and pressed so hard that her
wrist half buried itself in her bosom. Blood trickled between her
spread fingers. And she looked at Venters with eyes that saw him.

He cursed himself and the unerring aim of which he had been so
proud. He had seen that look in the eyes of a crippled antelope
which he was about to finish with his knife. But in her it had
infinitely more--a revelation of mortal spirit. The instinctive
bringing to life was there, and the divining helplessness and the
terrible accusation of the stricken.

"Torgive me! I didn't know!" burst out Venters.

"You shot me--you've killed me!" she whispered, in panting gasps.
Upon her lips appeared a fluttering, bloody froth. By that
Venters knew the air in her lungs was mixing with blood. "Oh, I
knew--it would--come--some day!...Oh, the burn!...Hold me--I'm
sinking--it's all dark....Ah, God!...Mercy--"

Her rigidity loosened in one long quiver and she lay back limp,
still, white as snow, with closed eyes.

Venters thought then that she died. But the faint pulsation of
her breast assured him that life yet lingered. Death seemed only
a matter of moments, for the bullet had gone clear through her.
Nevertheless, he tore sageleaves from a bush, and, pressing them
tightly over her wounds, he bound the black scarf round her
shoulder, tying it securely under her arm. Then he closed the
blouse, hiding from his sight that blood-stained, accusing
breast.

"What--now?" he questioned, with flying mind. "I must get out of
here. She's dying--but I can't leave her."

He rapidly surveyed the sage to the north and made out no animate
object. Then he picked up the girl's sombrero and the mask. This
time the mask gave him as great a shock as when he first removed
it from her face. For in the woman he had forgotten the rustler,
and this black strip of felt-cloth established the identity of
Oldring's Masked Rider. Venters had solved the mystery. He
slipped his rifle under her, and, lifting her carefully upon it,
he began to retrace his steps. The dog trailed in his shadow. And
the horse, that had stood drooping by, followed without a call.
Venters chose the deepest tufts of grass and clumps of sage on
his return. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder. He
did not rest. His concern was to avoid jarring the girl and to
hide his trail. Gaining the narrow canyon, he turned and held
close to the wall till he reached his hiding-place. When he
entered the dense thicket of oaks he was hard put to it to force
a way through. But he held his burden almost upright, and by
slipping side wise and bending the saplings he got in. Through
sage and grass he hurried to the grove of silver spruces.

He laid the girl down, almost fearing to look at her. Though
marble pale and cold, she was living. Venters then appreciated
the tax that long carry had been to his strength. He sat down to
rest. Whitie sniffed at the pale girl and whined and crept to
Venters's feet. Ring lapped the water in the runway of the
spring.

Presently Venters went out to the opening, caught the horse and,
leading him through the thicket, unsaddled him and tied him with
a long halter. Wrangle left his browsing long enough to whinny
and toss his head. Venters felt that he could not rest easily
till he had secured the other rustler's horse; so, taking his
rifle and calling for Ring, he set out. Swiftly yet watchfully he
made his way through the canyon to the oval and out to the cattle
trail. What few tracks might have betrayed him he obliterated, so
only an expert tracker could have trailed him. Then, with many a
wary backward glance across the sage, he started to round up the
rustler's horse. This was unexpectedly easy. He led the horse to
lower ground, out of sight from the opposite side of the oval
along the shadowy western wall, and so on into his canyon and
secluded camp.

The girl's eyes were open; a feverish spot burned in her cheeks
she moaned something unintelligible to Venters, but he took the
movement of her lips to mean that she wanted water. Lifting her
head, he tipped the canteen to her lips. After that she again
lapsed into unconsciousness or a weakness which was its
counterpart. Venters noted, however, that the burning flush had
faded into the former pallor.

The rustler's sun set behind the high canyon rim, and a cool
shade darkened the walls. Venters fed the dogs and put a halter
on the dead rustlers horse. He allowed Wrangle to browse free.
This done, he cut spruce boughs and made a lean-to for the girl.
Then, gently lifting her upon a blanket, he folded the sides over
her. The other blanket he wrapped about his shoulders and found a
comfortable seat against a spruce-tree that upheld the little
shack. Ring and Whitie lay near at hand, one asleep, the other
watchful.

Venters dreaded the night's vigil. At night his mind was active,
and this time he had to watch and think and feel beside a dying
girl whom he had all but murdered. A thousand excuses he invented
for himself, yet not one made any difference in his act or his
self-reproach.

It seemed to him that when night fell black he could see her
white face so much more plainly.

"She'll go, presently," he said, "and be out of agony--thank
God!"

Every little while certainty of her death came to him with a
shock; and then he would bend over and lay his ear on her breast.
Her heart still beat.

The early night blackness cleared to the cold starlight. The
horses were not moving, and no sound disturbed the deathly
silence of the canyon.

"I'll bury her here," thought Venters, "and let her grave be as
much a mystery as her life was."

For the girl's few words, the look of her eyes, the prayer, had
strangely touched Venters.

"She was only a girl," he soliloquized. "What was she to Oldring?
Rustlers don't have wives nor sisters nor daughters. She was
bad--that's all. But somehow...well, she may not have willingly
become the companion of rustlers. That prayer of hers to God for
mercy!...Life is strange and cruel. I wonder if other members of
Oldring's gang are women? Likely enough. But what was his game?
Oldring's Mask Rider! A name to make villagers hide and lock
their doors. A name credited with a dozen murders, a hundred
forays, and a thousand stealings of cattle. What part did the
girl have in this? It may have served Oldring to create
mystery."

Hours passed. The white stars moved across the narrow strip of
dark-blue sky above. The silence awoke to the low hum of insects.
Venters watched the immovable white face, and as he watched, hour
by hour waiting for death, the infamy of her passed from his
mind. He thought only of the sadness, the truth of the moment.
Whoever she was--whatever she had done--she was young and she was
dying.

The after-part of the night wore on interminably. The starlight
failed and the gloom blackened to the darkest hour. "She'll die
at the gray of dawn," muttered Venters, remembering some old
woman's fancy. The blackness paled to gray, and the gray
lightened and day peeped over the eastern rim. Venters listened
at the breast of the girl. She still lived. Did he only imagine
that her heart beat stronger, ever so slightly, but stronger? He
pressed his ear closer to her breast. And he rose with his own
pulse quickening.

"If she doesn't die soon--she's got a chance--the barest chance
to live," he said.

He wondered if the internal bleeding had ceased. There was no
more film of blood upon her lips. But no corpse could have been
whiter. Opening her blouse, he untied the scarf, and carefully
picked away the sage leaves from the wound in her shoulder. It
had closed. Lifting her lightly, he ascertained that the same was
true of the hole where the bullet had come out. He reflected on
the fact that clean wounds closed quickly in the healing upland
air. He recalled instances of riders who had been cut and shot
apparently to fatal issues; yet the blood had clotted, the wounds
closed, and they had recovered. He had no way to tell if internal
hemorrhage still went on, but he believed that it had stopped.
Otherwise she would surely not have lived so long. He marked the
entrance of the bullet, and concluded that it had just touched
the upper lobe of her lung. Perhaps the wound in the lung had
also closed. As he began to wash the blood stains from her breast
and carefully rebandage the wound, he was vaguely conscious of a
strange, grave happiness in the thought that she might live.

Broad daylight and a hint of sunshine high on the cliff-rim to
the west brought him to consideration of what he had better do.
And while busy with his few camp tasks he revolved the thing in
his mind. It would not be wise for him to remain long in his
present hiding-place. And if he intended to follow the cattle
trail and try to find the rustlers he had better make a move at
once. For he knew that rustlers, being riders, would not make
much of a day's or night's absence from camp for one or two of
their number; but when the missing ones failed to show up in
reasonable time there would be a search. And Venters was afraid
of that.

"A good tracker could trail me," he muttered. "And I'd be
cornered here. Let's see. Rustlers are a lazy set when they're
not on the ride. I'll risk it. Then I'll change my hiding-place."

He carefully cleaned and reloaded his guns. When he rose to go he
bent a long glance down upon the unconscious girl. Then ordering
Whitie and Ring to keep guard, he left the camp

The safest cover lay close under the wall of the canyon, and here
through the dense thickets Venters made his slow, listening
advance toward the oval. Upon gaining the wide opening he decided
to cross it and follow the left wall till he came to the cattle
trail.

He scanned the oval as keenly as if hunting for antelope. Then,
stooping, he stole from one cover to another, taking advantage of
rocks and bunches of sage, until he had reached the thickets
under the opposite wall. Once there, he exercised extreme caution
in his surveys of the ground ahead, but increased his speed when
moving. Dodging from bush to bush, he passed the mouths of two
canyons, and in the entrance of a third canyon he crossed a wash
of swift clear water, to come abruptly upon the cattle trail.

It followed the low bank of the wash, and, keeping it in sight,
Venters hugged the line of sage and thicket. Like the curves of a
serpent the canyon wound for a mile or more and then opened into
a valley. Patches of red showed clear against the purple of sage,
and farther out on the level dotted strings of red led away to
the wall of rock.

"Ha, the red herd!" exclaimed Venters.

Then dots of white and black told him there were cattle of other
colors in this inclosed valley. Oldring, the rustler, was also a
rancher. Venters's calculating eye took count of stock that
outnumbered the red herd.

"What a range!" went on Venters. "Water and grass enough for
fifty thousand head, and no riders needed!"

After his first burst of surprise and rapid calculation Venters
lost no time there, but slunk again into the sage on his back
trail. With the discovery of Oldring's hidden cattle-range had
come enlightenment on several problems. Here the rustler kept his
stock, here was Jane Withersteen's red herd; here were the few
cattle that had disappeared from the Cottonwoods slopes during
the last two years. Until Oldring had driven the red herd his
thefts of cattle for that time had not been more than enough to
supply meat for his men. Of late no drives had been reported from
Sterling or the villages north. And Venters knew that the riders
had wondered at Oldring's inactivity in that particular field. He
and his band had been active enough in their visits to Glaze and
Cottonwoods; they always had gold; but of late the amount gambled
away and drunk and thrown away in the villages had given rise to
much conjecture. Oldring's more frequent visits had resulted in
new saloons, and where there had formerly been one raid or
shooting fray in the little hamlets there were now many. Perhaps
Oldring had another range farther on up the pass, and from
theredrove the cattle to distant Utah towns where he was little
known But Venters came finally to doubt this. And, from what he
had learned in the last few days, a belief began to form in
Venters's mind that Oldring's intimidations of the villages and
the mystery of the Masked Rider, with his alleged evil deeds, and
the fierce resistance offered any trailing riders, and the
rustling of cattle-- these things were only the craft of the
rustler-chief to conceal his real life and purpose and work in
Deception Pass.

And like a scouting Indian Venters crawled through the sage of
the oval valley, crossed trail after trail on the north side, and
at last entered the canyon out of which headed the cattle trail,
and into which he had watched the rustlers disappear.

If he had used caution before, now he strained every nerve to
force himself to creeping stealth and to sensitiveness of ear. He
crawled along so hidden that he could not use his eyes except to
aid himself in the toilsome progress through the brakes and ruins
of cliff-wall. Yet from time to time, as he rested, he saw the
massive red walls growing higher and wilder, more looming and
broken. He made note of the fact that he was turning and
climbing. The sage and thickets of oak and brakes of alder gave
place to pinyon pine growing out of rocky soil. Suddenly a low,
dull murmur assailed his ears. At first he thought it was
thunder, then the slipping of a weathered slope of rock. But it
was incessant, and as he progressed it filled out deeper and from
a murmur changed into a soft roar.

"Falling water," he said. "There's volume to that. I wonder if
it's the stream I lost."

The roar bothered him, for he could hear nothing else. Likewise,
however, no rustlers could hear him. Emboldened by this and sure
that nothing but a bird could see him, he arose from his hands
and knees to hurry on. An opening in the pinyons warned him that
he was nearing the height of slope.

He gained it, and dropped low with a burst of astonishment.
Before him stretched a short canyon with rounded stone floor bare
of grass or sage or tree, and with curved, shelving walls. A
broad rippling stream flowed toward him, and at the back of the
canyon waterfall burst from a wide rent in the cliff, and,
bounding down in two green steps, spread into a long white sheet.

If Venters had not been indubitably certain that he had entered
the right canyon his astonishment would not have been so great.
There had been no breaks in the walls, no side canyons entering
this one where the rustlers' tracks and the cattle trail had
guided him, and, therefore, he could not be wrong. But here the
canyon ended, and presumably the trails also.

"That cattle trail headed out of here," Venters kept saying to
himself. "It headed out. Now what I want to know is how on earth
did cattle ever get in here?"

If he could be sure of anything it was of the careful scrutiny he
had given that cattle track, every hoofmark of which headed
straight west. He was now looking east at an immense round boxed
corner of canyon down which tumbled a thin, white veil of water,
scarcely twenty yards wide. Somehow, somewhere, his calculations
had gone wrong. For the first time in years he found himself
doubting his rider's skill in finding tracks, and his memory of
what he had actually seen. In his anxiety to keep under cover he
must have lost himself in this offshoot of Deception Pass, and
thereby in some unaccountable manner, missed the canyon with the
trails. There was nothing else for him to think. Rustlers could
not fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices. He was
only proving what the sage-riders had long said of this
labyrinthine system of deceitful canyons and valleys--trails led
down into Deception Pass, but no rider had ever followed them.

On a sudden he heard above the soft roar of the waterfall an
unusual sound that he could not define. He dropped flat behind a
stone and listened. From the direction he had come swelled
something that resembled a strange muffled pounding and splashing
and ringing. Despite his nerve the chill sweat began to dampen
his forehead. What might not be possible in this stonewalled maze
of mystery? The unnatural sound passed beyond him as he lay
gripping his rifle and fighting for coolness. Then from the open
came the sound, now distinct and different. Venters recognized a
hobble-bell of a horse, and the cracking of iron on submerged
stones, and the hollow splash of hoofs in water.

Relief surged over him. His mind caught again at realities, and
curiosity prompted him to peep from behind the rock.

In the middle of the stream waded a long string of packed burros
driven by three superbly mounted men. Had Venters met these
dark-clothed, dark-visaged, heavily armed men anywhere in Utah,
let alone in this robbers' retreat, he would have recognized them
as rustlers. The discerning eye of a rider saw the signs of a
long, arduous trip. These men were packing in supplies from one
of the northern villages. They were tired, and their horses were
almost played out, and the burros plodded on, after the manner of
their kind when exhausted, faithful and patient, but as if every
weary, splashing, slipping step would be their last.

All this Venters noted in one glance. After that he watched with
a thrilling eagerness. Straight at the waterfall the rustlers
drove the burros, and straight through the middle, where the
water spread into a fleecy, thin film like dissolving smoke.
Following closely, the rustlers rode into this white mist,
showing in bold black relief for an instant, and then they
vanished.

Venters drew a full breath that rushed out in brief and sudden
utterance.

"Good Heaven! Of all the holes for a rustler!...There's a cavern
under that waterfall, and a passageway leading out to a canyon
beyond. Oldring hides in there. He needs only to guard a trail
leading down from the sage-flat above. Little danger of this
outlet to the pass being discovered. I stumbled on it by luck,
after I had given up. And now I know the truth of what puzzled me
most--why that cattle trail was wet!"

He wheeled and ran down the slope, and out to the level of the
sage-brush. Returning, he had no time to spare, only now and
then, between dashes, a moment when he stopped to cast sharp eyes
ahead. The abundant grass left no trace of his trail. Short work
he made of the distance to the circle of canyons. He doubted that
he would ever see it again; he knew he never wanted to; yet he
looked at the red corners and towers with the eyes of a rider
picturing landmarks never to be forgotten.

Here he spent a panting moment in a slow-circling gaze of the
sage-oval and the gaps between the bluffs. Nothing stirred except
the gentle wave of the tips of the brush. Then he pressed on past
the mouths of several canyons and over ground new to him, now
close under the eastern wall. This latter part proved to be easy
traveling, well screened from possible observation from the north
and west, and he soon covered it and felt safer in the deepening
shade of his own canyon. Then the huge, notched bulge of red rim
loomed over him, a mark by which he knew again the deep cove
where his camp lay hidden. As he penetrated the thicket, safe
again for the present, his thoughts reverted to the girl he had
left there. The afternoon had far advanced. How would he find
her? He ran into camp, frightening the dogs.

The girl lay with wide-open, dark eyes, and they dilated when he
knelt beside her. The flush of fever shone in her cheeks. He
lifted her and held water to her dry lips, and felt an
inexplicable sense of lightness as he saw her swallow in a slow,
choking gulp. Gently he laid her back.

"Who--are--you?" she whispered, haltingly.

"I'm the man who shot you," he replied.

"You'll--not--kill me--now?"

"No, no."

"What--will--you--do--with me?"

"When you get better--strong enough--I'll take you back to the
canyon where the rustlers ride through the waterfall."

As with a faint shadow from a flitting wing overhead, the marble
whiteness of her face seemed to change.

"Don't--take--me--back--there!"

CHAPTER VI. THE MILL-WHEEL OF STEERS

Meantime, at the ranch, when Judkins's news had sent Venters on
the trail of the rustlers, Jane Withersteen led the injured man
to her house and with skilled fingers dressed the gunshot wound
in his arm.

"Judkins, what do you think happened to my riders?"

"I--I d rather not say," he replied.

"Tell me. Whatever you'll tell me I'll keep to myself. I'm
beginning to worry about more than the loss of a herd of cattle.
Venters hinted of-- but tell me, Judkins."

"Well, Miss Withersteen, I think as Venters thinks--your riders
have been called in."

"Judkins!...By whom?"

"You know who handles the reins of your Mormon riders."

"Do you dare insinuate that my churchmen have ordered in my
riders?"

"I ain't insinuatin' nothin', Miss Withersteen," answered
Judkins, with spirit. "I know what I'm talking about. I didn't
want to tell you."

"Oh, I can't believe that! I'll not believe it! Would Tull leave
my herds at the mercy of rustlers and wolves just
because--because--? No, no! It's unbelievable."

"Yes, thet particular thing's onheard of around Cottonwoods But,
beggin' pardon, Miss Withersteen, there never was any other rich
Mormon woman here on the border, let alone one thet's taken the
bit between her teeth."

That was a bold thing for the reserved Judkins to say, but it did
not anger her. This rider's crude hint of her spirit gave her a
glimpse of what others might think. Humility and obedience had
been hers always. But had she taken the bit between her teeth?
Still she wavered. And then, with quick spurt of warm blood along
her veins, she thought of Black Star when he got the bit fast
between his iron jaws and ran wild in the sage. If she ever
started to run! Jane smothered the glow and burn within her,
ashamed of a passion for freedom that opposed her duty.

"Judkins, go to the village," she said, "and when you have
learned anything definite about my riders please come to me at
once."

When he had gone Jane resolutely applied her mind to a number of
tasks that of late had been neglected. Her father had trained her
in the management of a hundred employees and the working of
gardens and fields; and to keep record of the movements of cattle
and riders. And beside the many duties she had added to this work
was one of extreme delicacy, such as required all her tact and
ingenuity. It was an unobtrusive, almost secret aid which she
rendered to the Gentile families of the village. Though Jane
Withersteen never admitted so to herself, it amounted to no less
than a system of charity. But for her invention of numberless
kinds of employment, for which there was no actual need, these
families of Gentiles, who had failed in a Mormon community, would
have starved.

In aiding these poor people Jane thought she deceived her keen
churchmen, but it was a kind of deceit for which she did not pray
to be forgiven. Equally as difficult was the task of deceiving
the Gentiles, for they were as proud as they were poor. It had
been a great grief to her to discover how these people hated her
people; and it had been a source of great joy that through her
they had come to soften in hatred. At any time this work called
for a clearness of mind that precluded anxiety and worry; but
under the present circumstances it required all her vigor and
obstinate tenacity to pin her attention upon her task.

Sunset came, bringing with the end of her labor a patient
calmness and power to wait that had not been hers earlier in the
day. She expected Judkins, but he did not appear. Her house was
always quiet; to-night, however, it seemed unusually so. At
supper her women served her with a silent assiduity; it spoke
what their sealed lips could not utter--the sympathy of Mormon
women. Jerd came to her with the key of the great door of the
stone stable, and to make his daily report about the horses. One
of his daily duties was to give Black Star and Night and the
other racers a ten-mile run. This day it had been omitted, and
the boy grew confused in explanations that she had not asked for.
She did inquire if he would return on the morrow, and Jerd, in
mingled surprise and relief, assured her he would always work for
her. Jane missed the rattle and trot, canter and gallop of the
incoming riders on the hard trails. Dusk shaded the grove where
she walked; the birds ceased singing; the wind sighed through the
leaves of the cottonwoods, and the running water murmured down
its stone-bedded channel. The glimmering of the first star was
like the peace and beauty of the night. Her faith welled up in
her heart and said that all would soon be right in her little
world. She pictured Venters about his lonely camp-fire sitting
between his faithful dogs. She prayed for his safety, for the
success of his undertaking.

Early the next morning one of Jane's women brought in word that
Judkins wished to speak to her. She hurried out, and in her
surprise to see him armed with rifle and revolver, she forgot her
intention to inquire about his wound.

"Judkins! Those guns? You never carried guns."

"It's high time, Miss Withersteen," he replied. "Will you come
into the grove? It ain't jest exactly safe for me to be seen
here."

She walked with him into the shade of the cottonwoods.

"What do you mean?"

"Miss Withersteen, I went to my mother's house last night. While
there, some one knocked, an' a man asked for me. I went to the
door. He wore a mask. He said I'd better not ride any more for
Jane Withersteen. His voice was hoarse an' strange, disguised I
reckon, like his face. He said no more, an' ran off in the
dark."

"Did you know who he was?" asked Jane, in a low voice.

Jane did not ask to know; she did not want to know; she feared to
know. All her calmness fled at a single thought

"Thet's why I'm packin' guns," went on Judkins. "For I'll never
quit ridin' for you, Miss Withersteen, till you let me
go."

"Judkins, do you want to leave me?"

"Do I look thet way? Give me a hoss--a fast hoss, an' send me out
on the sage."

"Oh, thank you, Judkins! You're more faithful than my own people.
I ought not accept your loyalty--you might suffer more through
it. But what in the world can I do? My head whirls. The wrong to
Venters--the stolen herd--these masks, threats, this coil in the
dark! I can't understand! But I feel something dark and terrible
closing in around me."

"Miss Withersteen, it's all simple enough," said Judkins,
earnestly. "Now please listen--an' beggin' your pardon--jest turn
thet deaf Mormon ear aside, an' let me talk clear an' plain in
the other. I went around to the saloons an' the stores an' the
loafin' places yesterday. All your riders are in. There's talk of
a vigilance band organized to hunt down rustlers. They call
themselves 'The Riders.' Thet's the report--thet's the reason
given for your riders leavin' you. Strange thet only a few riders
of other ranchers joined the band! An' Tull's man, Jerry Card--
he's the leader. I seen him en' his hoss. He 'ain't been to
Glaze. I'm not easy to fool on the looks of a hoss thet's
traveled the sage. Tull an' Jerry didn't ride to Glaze!...Well, I
met Blake en' Dorn, both good friends of mine, usually, as far as
their Mormon lights will let 'em go. But these fellers couldn't
fool me, an' they didn't try very hard. I asked them, straight
out like a man, why they left you like thet. I didn't forget to
mention how you nursed Blake's poor old mother when she was sick,
an' how good you was to Dorn's kids. They looked ashamed, Miss
Withersteen. An' they jest froze up--thet dark set look thet
makes them strange an' different to me. But I could tell the
difference between thet first natural twinge of conscience an'
the later look of some secret thing. An' the difference I caught
was thet they couldn't help themselves. They hadn't no say in the
matter. They looked as if their bein' unfaithful to you was bein'
faithful to a higher duty. An' there's the secret. Why it's as
plain as--as sight of my gun here."

"Plain!...My herds to wander in the sage--to be stolen! Jane
Withersteen a poor woman! Her head to be brought low and her
spirit broken!...Why, Judkins, it's plain enough."

"Miss Withersteen, let me get what boys I can gather, an' hold
the white herd. It's on the slope now, not ten miles out--three
thousand head, an' all steers. They're wild, an' likely to
stampede at the pop of a jack-rabbit's ears. We'll camp right
with them, en' try to hold them."

"Judkins, I'll reward you some day for your service, unless all
is taken from me. Get the boys and tell Jerd to give you pick of
my horses, except Black Star and Night. But--do not shed blood
for my cattle nor heedlessly risk your lives."

Jane Withersteen rushed to the silence and seclusion of her room,
and there could not longer hold back the bursting of her wrath.
She went stone-blind in the fury of a passion that had never
before showed its power. Lying upon her bed, sightless,
voiceless, she was a writhing, living flame. And she tossed there
while her fury burned and burned, and finally burned itself out.

Then, weak and spent, she lay thinking, not of the oppression
that would break her, but of this new revelation of self. Until
the last few days there had been little in her life to rouse
passions. Her forefathers had been Vikings, savage chieftains who
bore no cross and brooked no hindrance to their will. Her father
had inherited that temper; and at times, like antelope fleeing
before fire on the slope, his people fled from his red rages.
Jane Withersteen realized that the spirit of wrath and war had
lain dormant in her. She shrank from black depths hitherto
unsuspected. The one thing in man or woman that she scorned above
all scorn, and which she could not forgive, was hate. Hate headed
a flaming pathway straight to hell. All in a flash, beyond her
control there had been in her a birth of fiery hate. And the man
who had dragged her peaceful and loving spirit to this
degradation was a minister of God's word, an Elder of her church,
the counselor of her beloved Bishop.

The loss of herds and ranges, even of Amber Spring and the Old
Stone House, no longer concerned Jane Withersteen, she faced the
foremost thought of her life, what she now considered the
mightiest problem--the salvation of her soul.

She knelt by her bedside and prayed; she prayed as she had never
prayed in all her life--prayed to be forgiven for her sin to be
immune from that dark, hot hate; to love Tull as her minister,
though she could not love him as a man; to do her duty by her
church and people and those dependent upon her bounty; to hold
reverence of God and womanhood inviolate.

When Jane Withersteen rose from that storm of wrath and prayer
for help she was serene, calm, sure--a changed woman. She would
do her duty as she saw it, live her life as her own truth guided
her. She might never be able to marry a man of her choice, but
she certainly never would become the wife of Tull. Her churchmen
might take her cattle and horses, ranges and fields, her corrals
and stables, the house of Withersteen and the water that
nourished the village of Cottonwoods; but they could not force
her to marry Tull, they could not change her decision or break
her spirit. Once resigned to further loss, and sure of herself,
Jane Withersteen attained a peace of mind that had not been hers
for a year. She forgave Tull, and felt a melancholy regret over
what she knew he considered duty, irrespective of his personal
feeling for her. First of all, Tull, as he was a man, wanted her
for himself; and secondly, he hoped to save her and her riches
for his church. She did not believe that Tull had been actuated
solely by his minister's zeal to save her soul. She doubted her
interpretation of one of his dark sayings--that if she were lost
to him she might as well be lost to heaven. Jane Withersteen's
common sense took arms against the binding limits of her
religion; and she doubted that her Bishop, whom she had been
taught had direct communication with God--would damn her soul for
refusing to marry a Mormon. As for Tull and his churchmen, when
they had harassed her, perhaps made her poor, they would find her
unchangeable, and then she would get back most of what she had
lost. So she reasoned, true at last to her faith in all men, and
in their ultimate goodness.

The clank of iron hoofs upon the stone courtyard drew her
hurriedly from her retirement. There, beside his horse, stood
Lassiter, his dark apparel and the great black gun-sheaths
contrasting singularly with his gentle smile. Jane's active mind
took up her interest in him and her half-determined desire to use
what charm she had to foil his evident design in visiting
Cottonwoods. If she could mitigate his hatred of Mormons, or at
least keep him from killing more of them, not only would she be
saving her people, but also be leading back this bloodspiller to
some semblance of the human.

"Mornin', ma'am," he said, black sombrero in hand.

"Lassiter I'm not an old woman, or even a madam," she replied,
with her bright smile. "If you can't say Miss Withersteen--call
me Jane."

"I reckon Jane would be easier. First names are always handy for
me."

"Well, use mine, then. Lassiter, I'm glad to see you. I'm in
trouble."

Then she told him of Judkins's return, of the driving of the red
herd, of Venters's departure on Wrangle, and the calling-in of
her riders.

"'Pears to me you're some smilin' an' pretty for a woman with so
much trouble," he remarked.

"Lassiter! Are you paying me compliments? But, seriously I've
made up my mind not to be miserable. I've lost much, and I'll
lose more. Nevertheless, I won't be sour, and I hope I'll never
be unhappy--again."

Lassiter twisted his hat round and round, as was his way, and
took his time in replying.

"Women are strange to me. I got to back-trailin' myself from them
long ago. But I'd like a game woman. Might I ask, seein' as how
you take this trouble, if you're goin' to fight?"

"Fight! How? Even if I would, I haven't a friend except that boy
who doesn't dare stay in the village."

"I make bold to say, ma'am--Jane--that there's another, if you
want him."

"Lassiter!...Thank you. But how can I accept you as a friend?
Think! Why, you'd ride down into the village with those terrible
guns and kill my enemies--who are also my churchmen."

"I reckon I might be riled up to jest about that," he replied,
dryly.

She held out both hands to him.

"Lassiter! I'll accept your friendship--be proud of it--return
it--if I may keep you from killing another Mormon."

"I'll tell you one thing," he said, bluntly, as the gray
lightning formed in his eyes. "You're too good a woman to be
sacrificed as you're goin' to be....No, I reckon you an' me can't
be friends on such terms."

In her earnestness she stepped closer to him, repelled yet
fascinated by the sudden transition of his moods. That he would
fight for her was at once horrible and wonderful.

"You came here to kill a man--the man whom Milly Erne--"

"The man who dragged Milly Erne to hell--put it that way!...Jane
Withersteen, yes, that's why I came here. I'd tell so much to no
other livin' soul....There're things such a woman as you'd never
dream of-- so don't mention her again. Not till you tell me the
name of the man!"

"Tell you! I? Never!"

"I reckon you will. An' I'll never ask you. I'm a man of strange
beliefs an' ways of thinkin', an' I seem to see into the future
an' feel things hard to explain. The trail I've been followin'
for so many years was twisted en' tangled, but it's straightenin'
out now. An', Jane Withersteen, you crossed it long ago to ease
poor Milly's agony. That, whether you want or not, makes Lassiter
your friend. But you cross it now strangely to mean somethin to
me--God knows what!--unless by your noble blindness to incite me
to greater hatred of Mormon men."

Jane felt swayed by a strength that far exceeded her own. In a
clash of wills with this man she would go to the wall. If she
were to influence him it must be wholly through womanly
allurement. There was that about Lassiter which commanded her
respect. She had abhorred his name; face to face with him, she
found she feared only his deeds. His mystic suggestion, his
foreshadowing of something that she was to mean to him, pierced
deep into her mind. She believed fate had thrown in her way the
lover or husband of Milly Erne. She believed that through her an
evil man might be reclaimed. His allusion to what he called her
blindness terrified her. Such a mistaken idea of his might
unleash the bitter, fatal mood she sensed in him. At any cost she
must placate this man; she knew the die was cast, and that if
Lassiter did not soften to a woman's grace and beauty and wiles,
then it would be because she could not make him.

"I reckon you'll hear no more such talk from me," Lassiter went
on, presently. "Now, Miss Jane, I rode in to tell you that your
herd of white steers is down on the slope behind them big ridges.
An' I seen somethin' goin' on that'd be mighty interestin' to
you, if you could see it. Have you a field-glass?"

"Yes, I have two glasses. I'll get them and ride out with you.
Wait, Lassiter, please," she said, and hurried within. Sending
word to Jerd to saddle Black Star and fetch him to the court, she
then went to her room and changed to the riding-clothes she
always donned when going into the sage. In this male attire her
mirror showed her a jaunty, handsome rider. If she expected some
little need of admiration from Lassiter, she had no cause for
disappointment. The gentle smile that she liked, which made of
him another person, slowly overspread his face.

"If I didn't take you for a boy!" he exclaimed. "It's powerful
queer what difference clothes make. Now I've been some scared of
your dignity, like when the other night you was all in white but
in this rig--"

Black Star came pounding into the court, dragging Jerd half off
his feet, and he whistled at Lassiter's black. But at sight of
Jane all his defiant lines seemed to soften, and with tosses of
his beautiful head he whipped his bridle.

"Down, Black Star, down," said Jane.

He dropped his head, and, slowly lengthening, he bent one
foreleg, then the other, and sank to his knees. Jane slipped her
left foot in the stirrup, swung lightly into the saddle, and
Black Star rose with a ringing stamp. It was not easy for Jane to
hold him to a canter through the grove. and like the wind he
broke when he saw the sage. Jane let him have a couple of miles
of free running on the open trail, and then she coaxed him in and
waited for her companion. Lassiter was not long in catching up,
and presently they were riding side by side. It reminded her how
she used to ride with Venters. Where was he now? She gazed far
down the slope to the curved purple lines of Deception Pass and
involuntarily shut her eyes with a trembling stir of nameless
fear.

"We'll turn off here," Lassiter said, "en' take to the sage a
mile or so. The white herd is behind them big ridges."

"What are you going to show me?" asked Jane. "I'm prepared--don't
be afraid."

He smiled as if he meant that bad news came swiftly enough
without being presaged by speech.

When they reached the lee of a rolling ridge Lassiter dismounted,
motioning to her to do likewise. They left the horses standing,
bridles down. Then Lassiter, carrying the field-glasses began to
lead the way up the slow rise of ground. Upon nearing the summit
he halted her with a gesture.

"I reckon we'd see more if we didn't show ourselves against the
sky," he said. "I was here less than an hour ago. Then the herd
was seven or eight miles south, an' if they ain't bolted yet--"

"Lassiter!...Bolted?"

"That's what I said. Now let's see."

Jane climbed a few more paces behind him and then peeped over the
ridge. Just beyond began a shallow swale that deepened and
widened into a valley and then swung to the left. Following the
undulating sweep of sage, Jane saw the straggling lines and then
the great body of the white herd. She knew enough about st hers,
even at a distance of four or five miles, to realize that
something was in the wind. Bringing her field-glass into use, she
moved it slowly from left to right, which action swept the whole
herd into range. The stragglers were restless; the more compactly
massed steers were browsing. Jane brought the glass back to the
big sentinels of the herd, and she saw them trot with quick
steps, stop short and toss wide horns, look everywhere, and then
trot in another direction.

"Judkins hasn't been able to get his boys together yet," said
Jane. "But he'll be there soon. I hope not too late. Lassiter,
what's frightening those big leaders?"

"Nothin' jest on the minute," replied Lassiter. "Them steers are
quietin' down. They've been scared, but not bad yet. I reckon the
whole herd has moved a few miles this way since I was here."

"They didn't browse that distance--not in less than an hour.
Cattle aren't sheep."

"No, they jest run it, en' that looks bad."

"Lassiter, what frightened them?" repeated Jane, impatiently.

"Put down your glass. You'll see at first better with a naked
eye. Now look along them ridges on the other side of the herd,
the ridges where the sun shines bright on the sage....That's
right. Now look en' look hard en' wait."

Long-drawn moments of straining sight rewarded Jane with nothing
save the low, purple rim of ridge and the shimmering sage.

"It's begun again!" whispered Lassiter, and he gripped her arm.
"watch....There, did you see that?"

"No, no. Tell me what to look for?"

"A white flash--a kind of pin-point of quick light--a gleam as
from sun shinin' on somethin' white."

Suddenly Jane's concentrated gaze caught a fleeting glint.
Quickly she brought her glass to bear on the spot. Again the
purple sage, magnified in color and size and wave, for long
moments irritated her with its monotony. Then from out of the
sage on the ridge flew up a broad, white object, flashed in the
sunlight and vanished. Like magic it was, and bewildered
Jane.

"What on earth is that?"

"I reckon there's some one behind that ridge throwin' up a sheet
or a white blanket to reflect the sunshine."

"Why?" queried Jane, more bewildered than ever.

"To stampede the herd," replied Lassiter, and his teeth
clicked.

"Ah!' She made a fierce, passionate movement, clutched the glass
tightly, shook as with the passing of a spasm, and then dropped
her head. Presently she raised it to greet Lassiter with
something like a smile. "My righteous brethren are at work
again," she said, in scorn. She had stifled the leap of her
wrath, but for perhaps the first time in her life a bitter
derision curled her lips. Lassiter's cool gray eyes seemed to
pierce her. "I said I was prepared for anything; but that was
hardly true. But why would they--anybody stampede my
cattle?"

"That's a Mormon's godly way of bringin' a woman to her
knees."

"Lassiter, I'll die before I ever bend my knees. I might be led I
won't be driven. Do you expect the herd to bolt?"

"I don't like the looks of them big steers. But you can never
tell. Cattle sometimes stampede as easily as buffalo. Any little
flash or move will start them. A rider gettin' down an' walkin'
toward them sometimes will make them jump an' fly. Then again
nothin' seems to scare them. But I reckon that white flare will
do the biz. It's a new one on me, an' I've seen some ridin' an'
rustlin'. It jest takes one of them God-fearin' Mormons to think
of devilish tricks."

"Lassiter, might not this trick be done by Oldring's men?" asked
Jane, ever grasping at straws.

"It might be, but it ain't," replied Lassiter. "Oldring's an
honest thief. He don't skulk behind ridges to scatter your cattle
to the four winds. He rides down on you, an' if you don't like it
you can throw a gun."

Jane bit her tongue to refrain from championing men who at the
very moment were proving to her that they were little and mean
compared even with rustlers.

"Look!...Jane, them leadin' steers have bolted. They're drawin'
the stragglers, an' that'll pull the whole herd."

Jane was not quick enough to catch the details called out by
Lassiter, but she saw the line of cattle lengthening. Then, like
a stream of white bees pouring from a huge swarm, the steers
stretched out from the main body. In a few moments, with
astonishing rapidity, the whole herd got into motion. A faint
roar of trampling hoofs came to Jane's ears, and gradually
swelled; low, rolling clouds of dust began to rise above the
sage.

"It's a stampede, an' a hummer," said Lassiter.

"Oh, Lassiter! The herd's running with the valley! It leads into
the canyon! There's a straight jump-off!"

"I reckon they'll run into it, too. But that's a good many miles
yet. An', Jane, this valley swings round almost north before it
goes east. That stampede will pass within a mile of us."

The long, white, bobbing line of steers streaked swiftly through
the sage, and a funnel-shaped dust-cloud arose at a low angle. A
dull rumbling filled Jane's ears.

"I'm thinkin' of millin' that herd," said Lassiter. His gray
glance swept up the slope to the west. "There's some specks an'
dust way off toward the village. Mebbe that's Judkins an' his
boys. It ain't likely he'll get here in time to help. You'd
better hold Black Star here on this high ridge."

He ran to his horse and, throwing off saddle-bags and tightening
the cinches, he leaped astride and galloped straight down across
the valley.

Jane went for Black Star and, leading him to the summit of the
ridge, she mounted and faced the valley with excitement and
expectancy. She had heard of milling stampeded cattle, and knew
it was a feat accomplished by only the most daring riders.

The white herd was now strung out in a line two miles long. The
dull rumble of thousands of hoofs deepened into continuous low
thunder, and as the steers swept swiftly closer the thunder
became a heavy roll. Lassiter crossed in a few moments the level
of the valley to the eastern rise of ground and there waited the
coming of the herd. Presently, as the head of the white line
reached a point opposite to where Jane stood, Lassiter spurred
his black into a run

Jane saw him take a position on the off side of the leaders of
the stampede, and there he rode. It was like a race. They swept
on down the valley, and when the end of the white line neared
Lassiter's first stand the head had begun to swing round to the
west. It swung slowly and stubbornly, yet surely, and gradually
assumed a long, beautiful curve of moving white. To Jane's amaze
she saw the leaders swinging, turning till they headed back
toward her and up the valley. Out to the right of these wild
plunging steers ran Lassiter's black, and Jane's keen eye
appreciated the fleet stride and sure-footedness of the blind
horse. Then it seemed that the herd moved in a great curve, a
huge half-moon with the points of head and tail almost opposite,
and a mile apart But Lassiter relentlessly crowded the leaders,
sheering them to the left, turning them little by little. And the
dust-blinded wild followers plunged on madly in the tracks of
their leaders. This ever-moving, ever-changing curve of steers
rolled toward Jane and when below her, scarce half a mile, it
began to narrow and close into a circle. Lassiter had ridden
parallel with her position, turned toward her, then aside, and
now he was riding directly away from her, all the time pushing
the head of that bobbing line inward.

It was then that Jane, suddenly understanding Lassiter's feat
stared and gasped at the riding of this intrepid man. His horse
was fleet and tireless, but blind. He had pushed the leaders
around and around till they were about to turn in on the inner
side of the end of that line of steers. The leaders were already
running in a circle; the end of the herd was still running almost
straight. But soon they would be wheeling. Then, when Lassiter
had the circle formed, how would he escape? With Jane Withersteen
prayer was as ready as praise; and she prayed for this man's
safety. A circle of dust began to collect. Dimly, as through a
yellow veil, Jane saw Lassiter press the leaders inward to close
the gap in the sage. She lost sight of him in the dust, again she
thought she saw the black, riderless now, rear and drag himself
and fall. Lassiter had been thrown--lost! Then he reappeared
running out of the dust into the sage. He had escaped, and she
breathed again.

Spellbound, Jane Withersteen watched this stupendous millwheel of
steers. Here was the milling of the herd. The white running
circle closed in upon the open space of sage. And the dust
circles closed above into a pall. The ground quaked and the
incessant thunder of pounding hoofs rolled on. Jane felt
deafened, yet she thrilled to a new sound. As the circle of sage
lessened the steers began to bawl, and when it closed entirely
there came a great upheaval in the center, and a terrible
thumping of heads and clicking of horns. Bawling, climbing,
goring, the great mass of steers on the inside wrestled in a
crashing din, heaved and groaned under the pressure. Then came a
deadlock. The inner strife ceased, and the hideous roar and
crash. Movement went on in the outer circle, and that, too,
gradually stilled. The white herd had come to a stop, and the
pall of yellow dust began to drift away on the wind.

Jane Withersteen waited on the ridge with full and grateful
heart. Lassiter appeared, making his weary way toward her through
the sage. And up on the slope Judkins rode into sight with his
troop of boys. For the present, at least, the white herd would be
looked after.

When Lassiter reached her and laid his hand on Black Star's mane,
Jane could not find speech.

"Killed--my--hoss," he panted.

"Oh! I'm sorry," cried Jane. "Lassiter! I know you can't replace
him, but I'll give you any one of my racers--Bells, or Night,
even Black Star."

"I'll take a fast hoss, Jane, but not one of your favorites," he
replied. "Only--will you let me have Black Star now an' ride him
over there an' head off them fellers who stampeded the herd?"

He pointed to several moving specks of black and puffs of dust in
the purple sage.

"I can head them off with this hoss, an' then--"

"Then, Lassiter?"

"They'll never stampede no more cattle."

"Oh! No! No!...Lassiter, I won't let you go!"

But a flush of fire flamed in her cheeks, and her trembling hands
shook Black Star's bridle, and her eyes fell before Lassiter's.

CHAPTER VII. THE DAUGHTER OF WITHERSTEEN

"Lassiter, will you be my rider?" Jane had asked him.

"I reckon so," he had replied.

Few as the words were, Jane knew how infinitely much they
implied. She wanted him to take charge of her cattle and horse
and ranges, and save them if that were possible. Yet, though she
could not have spoken aloud all she meant, she was perfectly
honest with herself. Whatever the price to be paid, she must keep
Lassiter close to her; she must shield from him the man who had
led Milly Erne to Cottonwoods. In her fear she so controlled mind
that she did not whisper this Mormon's name to her own soul, she
did not even think it. Besides, beyond this thing she regarded as
a sacred obligation thrust upon her, was the need of a helper, of
a friend, of a champion in this critical time. If she could rule
this gun-man, as Venters had called him, if she could even keep
him from shedding blood, what strategy to play his flame and his
presence against the game of oppression her churchmen were waging
against her? Never would she forget the effect on Tull and his
men when Venters shouted Lassiter's name. If she could not wholly
control Lassiter, then what she could do night put off the fatal
day.

One of her safe racers was a dark bay, and she called him Bells
because of the way he struck his iron shoes on the stones. When
Jerd led out this slender, beautifully built horse Lassiter
suddenly became all eyes. A rider's love of a thoroughbred shone
in them. Round and round Bells he walked, plainly weakening all
the time in his determination not to take one of Jane's favorite
racers.

"Lassiter, you're half horse, and Bells sees it already," said
Jane, laughing. "Look at his eyes. He likes you. He'll love you,
too. How can you resist him? Oh, Lassiter, but Bells can run!
It's nip and tuck between him and Wrangle, and only Black Star
can beat him. He's too spirited a horse for a woman. Take him.
He's yours."

"I jest am weak where a hoss's concerned," said Lassiter. "I'll
take him, an' I'll take your orders, ma'am."

"Well, I'm glad, but never mind the ma'am. Let it still be Jane."

From that hour, it seemed, Lassiter was always in the saddle,
riding early and late, and coincident with his part in Jane's
affairs the days assumed their old tranquillity. Her intelligence
told her this was only the lull before the storm, but her faith
would not have it so.

She resumed her visits to the village, and upon one of these she
encountered Tull. He greeted her as he had before any trouble
came between them, and she, responsive to peace if not quick to
forget, met him halfway with manner almost cheerful. He regretted
the loss of her cattle; he assured her that the vigilantes which
had been organized would soon rout the rustlers; when that had
been accomplished her riders would likely return to her.

"You've done a headstrong thing to hire this man Lassiter," Tull
went on, severely. "He came to Cottonwoods with evil intent."

"I had to have somebody. And perhaps making him my rider may turn
out best in the end for the Mormons of Cottonwoods."

"You mean to stay his hand?"

"I do--if I can."

"A woman like you can do anything with a man. That would be well,
and would atone in some measure for the errors you have made."

He bowed and passed on. Jane resumed her walk with conflicting
thoughts. She resented Elder Tull's cold, impassive manner that
looked down upon her as one who had incurred his just
displeasure. Otherwise he would have been the same calm,
dark-browed, impenetrable man she had known for ten years. In
fact, except when he had revealed his passion in the matter of
the seizing of Venters, she had never dreamed he could be other
than the grave, reproving preacher. He stood out now a strange,
secretive man. She would have thought better of him if he had
picked up the threads of their quarrel where they had parted. Was
Tull what he appeared to be? The question flung itself in
voluntarily over Jane Withersteen's inhibitive habit of faith
without question. And she refused to answer it. Tull could not
fight in the open Venters had said, Lassiter had said, that her
Elder shirked fight and worked in the dark. Just now in this
meeting Tull had ignored the fact that he had sued, exhorted,
demanded that she marry him. He made no mention of Venters. His
manner was that of the minister who had been outraged, but who
overlooked the frailties of a woman. Beyond question he seemed
unutterably aloof from all knowledge of pressure being brought to
bear upon her, absolutely guiltless of any connection with secret
power over riders, with night journeys, with rustlers and
stampedes of cattle. And that convinced her again of unjust
suspicions. But it was convincement through an obstinate faith.
She shuddered as she accepted it, and that shudder was the
nucleus of a terrible revolt.

Jane turned into one of the wide lanes leading from the main
street and entered a huge, shady yard. Here were sweet-smelling
clover, alfalfa, flowers, and vegetables, all growing in happy
confusion. And like these fresh green things were the dozens of
babies, tots, toddlers, noisy urchins, laughing girls, a whole
multitude of children of one family. For Collier Brandt, the
father of all this numerous progeny, was a Mormon with four
wives.

The big house where they lived was old, solid, picturesque the
lower part built of logs, the upper of rough clapboards, with
vines growing up the outside stone chimneys. There were many
wooden-shuttered windows, and one pretentious window of glass
proudly curtained in white. As this house had four mistresses, it
likewise had four separate sections, not one of which
communicated with another, and all had to be entered from the
outside.

In the shade of a wide, low, vine-roofed porch Jane found
Brandt's wives entertaining Bishop Dyer. They were motherly
women, of comparatively similar ages, and plain-featured, and
just at this moment anything but grave. The Bishop was rather
tall, of stout build, with iron-gray hair and beard, and eyes of
light blue. They were merry now; but Jane had seen them when they
were not, and then she feared him as she had feared her father.

The women flocked around her in welcome.

"Daughter of Withersteen," said the Bishop, gaily, as he took her
hand, "you have not been prodigal of your gracious self of late.
A Sabbath without you at service! I shall reprove Elder Tull."

"Bishop, the guilt is mine. I'll come to you and confess," Jane
replied, lightly; but she felt the undercurrent of her words.

"Mormon love-making!" exclaimed the Bishop, rubbing his hands.
"Tull keeps you all to himself."

"No. He is not courting me."

"What? The laggard! If he does not make haste I'll go a-courting
myself up to Withersteen House."

There was laughter and further bantering by the Bishop, and then
mild talk of village affairs, after which he took his leave, and
Jane was left with her friend, Mary Brandt.

"Jane, you're not yourself. Are you sad about the rustling of the
cattle? But you have so many, you are so rich."

Then Jane confided in her, telling much, yet holding back her
doubts of fear.

"Oh, why don't you marry Tull and be one of us?

"But, Mary, I don't love Tull," said Jane, stubbornly.

"I don't blame you for that. But, Jane Withersteen, you've got to
choose between the love of man and love of God. Often we Mormon
women have to do that. It's not easy. The kind of happiness you
want I wanted once. I never got it, nor will you, unless you
throw away your soul. We've all watched your affair with Venters
in fear and trembling. Some dreadful thing will come of it. You
don't want him hanged or shot--or treated worse, as that Gentile
boy was treated in Glaze for fooling round a Mormon woman. Marry
Tull. It's your duty as a Mormon. You'll feel no rapture as his
wife--but think of Heaven! Mormon women don't marry for what they
expect on earth. Take up the cross, Jane. Remember your father
found Amber Spring, built these old houses, brought Mormons here,
and fathered them. You are the daughter of Withersteen!"

Jane left Mary Brandt and went to call upon other friends. They
received her with the same glad welcome as had Mary, lavished
upon her the pent-up affection of Mormon women, and let her go
with her ears ringing of Tull, Venters, Lassiter, of duty to God
and glory in Heaven.

"Verily," murmured Jane, "I don't know myself when, through all
this, I remain unchanged--nay, more fixed of purpose."

She returned to the main street and bent her thoughtful steps
toward the center of the village. A string of wagons drawn by
oxen was lumbering along. These "sage-freighters," as they were
called, hauled grain and flour and merchandise from Sterling, and
Jane laughed suddenly in the midst of her humility at the thought
that they were her property, as was one of the three stores for
which they freighted goods. The water that flowed along the path
at her feet, and turned into each cottage-yard to nourish garden
and orchard, also was hers, no less her private property because
she chose to give it free. Yet in this village of Cottonwoods,
which her father had founded and which she maintained she was not
her own mistress; she was not able to abide by her own choice of
a husband. She was the daughter of Withersteen. Suppose she
proved it, imperiously! But she quelled that proud temptation at
its birth.

Nothing could have replaced the affection which the village
people had for her; no power could have made her happy as the
pleasure her presence gave. As she went on down the street past
the stores with their rude platform entrances, and the saloons
where tired horses stood with bridles dragging, she was again
assured of what was the bread and wine of life to her--that she
was loved. Dirty boys playing in the ditch, clerks, teamsters,
riders, loungers on the corners, ranchers on dusty horses little
girls running errands, and women hurrying to the stores all
looked up at her coming with glad eyes.

Jane's various calls and wandering steps at length led her to the
Gentile quarter of the village. This was at the extreme southern
end, and here some thirty Gentile families lived in huts and
shacks and log-cabins and several dilapidated cottages. The
fortunes of these inhabitants of Cottonwoods could be read in
their abodes. Water they had in abundance, and therefore grass
and fruit-trees and patches of alfalfa and vegetable gardens.
Some of the men and boys had a few stray cattle, others obtained
such intermittent employment as the Mormons reluctantly tendered
them. But none of the families was prosperous, many were very
poor, and some lived only by Jane Withersteen's beneficence.

As it made Jane happy to go among her own people, so it saddened
her to come in contact with these Gentiles. Yet that was not
because she was unwelcome; here she was gratefully received by
the women, passionately by the children. But poverty and
idleness, with their attendant wretchedness and sorrow, always
hurt her. That she could alleviate this distress more now than
ever before proved the adage that it was an ill wind that blew
nobody good. While her Mormon riders were in her employ she had
found few Gentiles who would stay with her, and now she was able
to find employment for all the men and boys. No little shock was
it to have man after man tell her that he dare not accept her
kind offer.

"It won't do," said one Carson, an intelligent man who had seen
better days. "We've had our warning. Plain and to the point! Now
there's Judkins, he packs guns, and he can use them, and so can
the daredevil boys he's hired. But they've little responsibility.
Can we risk having our homes burned in our absence?"

Jane felt the stretching and chilling of the skin of her face as
the blood left it.

"Carson, you and the others rent these houses?" she asked.

"You ought to know, Miss Withersteen. Some of them are yours."

"I know?...Carson, I never in my life took a day's labor for rent
or a yearling calf or a bunch of grass, let alone gold."

"Bivens, your store-keeper, sees to that."

"Look here, Carson," went on Jane, hurriedly, and now her cheeks
were burning. "You and Black and Willet pack your goods and move
your families up to my cabins in the grove. They're far more
comfortable than these. Then go to work for me. And if aught
happens to you there I'll give you money--gold enough to leave
Utah!"

The man choked and stammered, and then, as tears welled into his
eyes, he found the use of his tongue and cursed. No gentle speech
could ever have equaled that curse in eloquent expression of what
he felt for Jane Withersteen. How strangely his look and tone
reminded her of Lassiter!

"No, it won't do," he said, when he had somewhat recovered
himself. "Miss Withersteen, there are things that you don't know,
and there's not a soul among us who can tell you."

"I seem to be learning many things, Carson. Well, then, will you
let me aid you--say till better times?"

"Yes, I will," he replied, with his face lighting up. "I see what
it means to you, and you know what it means to me. Thank you! And
if better times ever come, I'll be only too happy to work for
you."

"Better times will come. I trust God and have faith in man. Good
day, Carson."

The lane opened out upon the sage-inclosed alfalfa fields, and
the last habitation, at the end of that lane of hovels, was the
meanest. Formerly it had been a shed; now it was a home. The
broad leaves of a wide-spreading cottonwood sheltered the sunken
roof of weathered boards. Like an Indian hut, it had one floor.
Round about it were a few scanty rows of vegetables, such as the
hand of a weak woman had time and strength to cultivate. This
little dwelling-place was just outside the village limits, and
the widow who lived there had to carry her water from the nearest
irrigation ditch. As Jane Withersteen entered the unfenced yard a
child saw her, shrieked with joy, and came tearing toward her
with curls flying. This child was a little girl of four called
Fay. Her name suited her, for she was an elf, a sprite, a
creature so fairy-like and beautiful that she seemed
unearthly.

"Muvver sended for oo," cried Fay, as Jane kissed her, "an' oo
never tome."

"I didn't know, Fay; but I've come now."

Fay was a child of outdoors, of the garden and ditch and field,
and she was dirty and ragged. But rags and dirt did not hide her
beauty. The one thin little bedraggled garment she wore half
covered her fine, slim body. Red as cherries were her cheeks and
lips; her eyes were violet blue, and the crown of her childish
loveliness was the curling golden hair. All the children of
Cottonwoods were Jane Withersteen's friends, she loved them all.
But Fay was dearest to her. Fay had few playmates, for among the
Gentile children there were none near her age, and the Mormon
children were forbidden to play with her. So she was a shy, wild,
lonely child.

"Muvver's sick," said Fay, leading Jane toward the door of the
hut.

Jane went in. There was only one room, rather dark and bare, but
it was clean and neat. A woman lay upon a bed.

"Mrs. Larkin, how are you?" asked Jane, anxiously.

"I've been pretty bad for a week, but I'm better now."

"You haven't been here all alone--with no one to wait on you?"

"Oh no! My women neighbors are kind. They take turns coming in."

"Did you send for me?"

"Yes, several times."

"But I had no word--no messages ever got to me."

"I sent the boys, and they left word with your women that I was
ill and would you please come."

A sudden deadly sickness seized Jane. She fought the weakness, as
she fought to be above suspicious thoughts, and it passed,
leaving her conscious of her utter impotence. That, too, passed
as her spirit rebounded. But she had again caught a glimpse of
dark underhand domination, running its secret lines this time
into her own household. Like a spider in the blackness of night
an unseen hand had begun to run these dark lines, to turn and
twist them about her life, to plait and weave a web. Jane
Withersteen knew it now, and in the realization further coolness
and sureness came to her, and the fighting courage of her
ancestors.

"Mrs. Larkin, you're better, and I'm so glad," said Jane. "But
may I not do something for you--a turn at nursing, or send you
things, or take care of Fay?"

"You're so good. Since my husband's been gone what would have
become of Fay and me but for you? It was about Fay that I wanted
to speak to you. This time I thought surely I'd die, and I was
worried about Fay. Well, I'll be around all right shortly, but my
strength's gone and I won't live long. So I may as well speak
now. You remember you've been asking me to let you take Fay and
bring her up as your daughter?"

"Indeed yes, I remember. I'll be happy to have her. But I hope
the day- -"

"Never mind that. The day'll come--sooner or later. I refused
your offer, and now I'll tell you why."

"I know why," interposed Jane. "It's because you don't want her
brought up as a Mormon."

"No, it wasn't altogether that." Mrs. Larkin raised her thin hand
and laid it appealingly on Jane's. "I don't like to tell you.
But--it's this: I told all my friends what you wanted. They know
you, care for you, and they said for me to trust Fay to you.
Women will talk, you know. It got to the ears of Mormons--gossip
of your love for Fay and your wanting her. And it came straight
back to me, in jealousy, perhaps, that you wouldn't take Fay as
much for love of her as because of your religious duty to bring
up another girl for some Mormon to marry."

"That's a damnable lie!" cried Jane Withersteen.

"It was what made me hesitate," went on Mrs. Larkin, "but I never
believed it at heart. And now I guess I'll let you--"

"Wait! Mrs. Larkin, I may have told little white lies in my life,
but never a lie that mattered, that hurt any one. Now believe me.
I love little Fay. If I had her near me I'd grow to worship her.
When I asked for her I thought only of that love....Let me prove
this. You and Fay come to live with me. I've such a big house,
and I'm so lonely. I'll help nurse you, take care of you. When
you're better you can work for me. I'll keep little Fay and bring
her up--without Mormon teaching. When she's grown, if she should
want to leave me, I'll send her, and not empty-handed, back to
Illinois where you came from. I promise you."

"I knew it was a lie," replied the mother, and she sank back upon
her pillow with something of peace in her white, worn face. "Jane
Withersteen, may Heaven bless you! I've been deeply grateful to
you. But because you're a Mormon I never felt close to you till
now. I don't know much about religion as religion, but your God
and my God are the same."

CHAPTER VIII. SURPRISE VALLEY

Back in that strange canyon, which Venters had found indeed a
valley of surprises, the wounded girl's whispered appeal, almost
a prayer, not to take her back to the rustlers crowned the events
of the last few days with a confounding climax. That she should
not want to return to them staggered Venters. Presently, as
logical thought returned, her appeal confirmed his first
impression--that she was more unfortunate than bad-- and he
experienced a sensation of gladness. If he had known before that
Oldring's Masked Rider was a woman his opinion would have been
formed and he would have considered her abandoned. But his first
knowledge had come when he lifted a white face quivering in a
convulsion of agony; he had heard God's name whispered by
blood-stained lips; through her solemn and awful eyes he had
caught a glimpse of her soul. And just now had come the entreaty
to him, "Don't--take--me--back--there!"

Once for all Venters's quick mind formed a permanent conception
of this poor girl. He based it, not upon what the chances of life
had made her, but upon the revelation of dark eyes that pierced
the infinite, upon a few pitiful, halting words that betrayed
failure and wrong and misery, yet breathed the truth of a tragic
fate rather than a natural leaning to evil.

"What's your name?" he inquired.

"Bess," she answered.

"Bess what?"

"That's enough--just Bess."

The red that deepened in her cheeks was not all the flush of
fever. Venters marveled anew, and this time at the tint of shame
in her face, at the momentary drooping of long lashes. She might
be a rustler's girl, but she was still capable of shame, she
might be dying, but she still clung to some little remnant of
honor.

"Very well, Bess. It doesn't matter," he said. "But this
matters--what shall I do with you?"

"Are--you--a rider?" she whispered.

"Not now. I was once. I drove the Withersteen herds. But T lost
my place--lost all I owned--and now I'm--I'm a sort of outcast.
My name's Bern Venters."

"You won't--take me--to Cottonwoods--or Glaze? I'd be--hanged."

"No, indeed. But I must do something with you. For it's not safe
for me here. I shot that rustler who was with you. Sooner or
later he'll be found, and then my tracks. I must find a safer
hiding-place where I can't be trailed."

"Leave me--here."

"Alone--to die!"

"Yes."

"I will not." Venters spoke shortly with a kind of ring in his
voice.

"What--do you want--to do--with me?" Her whispering grew
difficult, so low and faint that Venters had to stoop to hear
her.

"Why, let's see," he replied, slowly. "I'd like to take you some
place where I could watch by you, nurse you, till you're all
right."

"And--then?"

"Well, it'll be time to think of that when you're cured of your
wound. It's a bad one. And--Bess, if you don't want to live--if
you don't fight for life--you'll never--"

"Oh! I want--to live! I'm afraid--to die. But I'd
rather--die--than go back--to--to--"

"To Oldring?" asked Venters, interrupting her in turn.

Her lips moved in an affirmative.

"I promise not to take you back to him or to Cottonwoods or to
Glaze."

The mournful earnestness of her gaze suddenly shone with
unutterable gratitude and wonder. And as suddenly Venters found
her eyes beautiful as he had never seen or felt beauty. They were
as dark blue as the sky at night. Then the flashing changed to a
long, thoughtful look, in which there was a wistful, unconscious
searching of his face, a look that trembled on the verge of hope
and trust.

"I'll try--to live," she said. The broken whisper just reached
his ears. "Do what--you want--with me."

"Rest then--don't worry--sleep," he replied.

Abruptly he arose, as if words had been decision for him, and
with a sharp command to the dogs he strode from the camp. Venters
was conscious of an indefinite conflict of change within him. It
seemed to be a vague passing of old moods, a dim coalescing of
new forces, a moment of inexplicable transition. He was both cast
down and uplifted. He wanted to think and think of the meaning,
but he resolutely dispelled emotion. His imperative need at
present was to find a safe retreat, and this called for
action.

So he set out. It still wanted several hours before dark. This
trip he turned to the left and wended his skulking way southward
a mile or more to the opening of the valley, where lay the
strange scrawled rocks. He did not, however, venture boldly out
into the open sage, but clung to the right-hand wall and went
along that till its perpendicular line broke into the long
incline of bare stone.

Before proceeding farther he halted, studying the strange
character of this slope and realizing that a moving black object
could be seen far against such background. Before him ascended a
gradual swell of smooth stone. It was hard, polished, and full of
pockets worn by centuries of eddying rain-water. A hundred yards
up began a line of grotesque cedar-trees, and they extended along
the slope clear to its most southerly end. Beyond that end
Venters wanted to get, and he concluded the cedars, few as they
were, would afford some cover.

Therefore he climbed swiftly. The trees were farther up than he
had estimated, though he had from long habit made allowance for
the deceiving nature of distances in that country. When he gained
the cover of cedars he paused to rest and look, and it was then
he saw how the trees sprang from holes in the bare rock. Ages of
rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions,
wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons,
accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose
wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful
cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if
growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old.
Theirs had been a bitter fight, and Venters felt a strange
sympathy for them. This country was hard on trees--and men.

He slipped from cedar to cedar, keeping them between him and the
open valley. As he progressed, the belt of trees widened and he
kept to its upper margin. He passed shady pockets half full of
water, and, as he marked the location for possible future need,
he reflected that there had been no rain since the winter snows.
From one of these shady holes a rabbit hopped out and squatted
down, laying its ears flat.

Venters wanted fresh meat now more than when he had only himself
to think of. But it would not do to fire his rifle there. So he
broke off a cedar branch and threw it. He crippled the rabbit,
which started to flounder up the slope. Venters did not wish to
lose the meat, and he never allowed crippled game to escape, to
die lingeringly in some covert. So after a careful glance below,
and back toward the canyon, he began to chase the rabbit.

The fact that rabbits generally ran uphill was not new to him.
But it presently seemed singular why this rabbit, that might have
escaped downward, chose to ascend the slope. Venters knew then
that it had a burrow higher up. More than once he jerked over to
seize it, only in vain, for the rabbit by renewed effort eluded
his grasp. Thus the chase continued on up the bare slope. The
farther Venters climbed the more determined he grew to catch his
quarry. At last, panting and sweating, he captured the rabbit at
the foot of a steeper grade. Laying his rifle on the bulge of
rising stone, he killed the animal and slung it from his belt.

Before starting down he waited to catch his breath. He had
climbed far up that wonderful smooth slope, and had almost
reached the base of yellow cliff that rose skyward, a huge
scarred and cracked bulk. It frowned down upon him as if to
forbid further ascent. Venters bent over for his rifle, and, as
he picked it up from where it leaned against the steeper grade,
he saw several little nicks cut in the solid stone.

They were only a few inches deep and about a foot apart. Venters
began to count them--one--two--three--four--on up to sixteen.
That number carried his glance to the top of his first bulging
bench of cliff-base. Above, after a more level offset, was still
steeper slope, and the line of nicks kept on, to wind round a
projecting corner of wall.

A casual glance would have passed by these little dents; if
Venters had not known what they signified he would never have
bestowed upon them the second glance. But he knew they had been
cut there by hand, and, though age-worn, he recognized them as
steps cut in the rock by the cliff-dwellers. With a pulse
beginning to beat and hammer away his calmness, he eyed that
indistinct line of steps, up to where the buttress of wall hid
further sight of them. He knew that behind the corner of stone
would be a cave or a crack which could never be suspected from
below. Chance, that had sported with him of late, now directed
him to a probable hiding-place. Again he laid aside his rifle,
and, removing boots and belt, he began to walk up the steps. Like
a mountain goat, he was agile, sure-footed, and he mounted the
first bench without bending to use his hands. The next ascent
took grip of fingers as well as toes, but he climbed steadily,
swiftly, to reach the projecting corner, and slipped around it.
Here he faced a notch in the cliff. At the apex he turned
abruptly into a ragged vent that split the ponderous wall clear
to the top, showing a narrow streak of blue sky.

At the base this vent was dark, cool, and smelled of dry, musty
dust. It zigzagged so that he could not see ahead more than a few
yards at a time. He noticed tracks of wildcats and rabbits in the
dusty floor. At every turn he expected to come upon a huge cavern
full of little square stone houses, each with a small aperture
like a staring dark eye. The passage lightened and widened, and
opened at the foot of a narrow, steep, ascending chute.

Venters had a moment's notice of the rock, which was of the same
smoothness and hardness as the slope below, before his gaze went
irresistibly upward to the precipitous walls of this wide ladder
of granite. These were ruined walls of yellow sandstone, and so
split and splintered, so overhanging with great sections of
balancing rim, so impending with tremendous crumbling crags, that
Venters caught his breath sharply, and, appalled, he
instinctively recoiled as if a step upward might jar the
ponderous cliffs from their foundation. Indeed, it seemed that
these ruined cliffs were but awaiting a breath of wind to
collapse and come tumbling down. Venters hesitated. It would be a
foolhardy man who risked his life under the leaning, waiting
avalanches of rock in that gigantic split. Yet how many years had
they leaned there without falling! At the bottom of the incline
was an immense heap of weathered sandstone all crumbling to dust,
but there were no huge rocks as large as houses, such as rested
so lightly and frightfully above, waiting patiently and
inevitably to crash down. Slowly split from the parent rock by
the weathering process, and carved and sculptured by ages of wind
and rain, they waited their moment. Venters felt how foolish it
was for him to fear these broken walls; to fear that, after they
had endured for thousands of years, the moment of his passing
should be the one for them to slip. Yet he feared it.

"What a place to hide!" muttered Venters. "I'll climb--I'll see
where this thing goes. If only I can find water!"

With teeth tight shut he essayed the incline. And as he climbed
he bent his eyes downward. This, however, after a little grew
impossible; he had to look to obey his eager, curious mind. He
raised his glance and saw light between row on row of shafts and
pinnacles and crags that stood out from the main wall. Some
leaned against the cliff, others against each other; many stood
sheer and alone; all were crumbling, cracked, rotten. It was a
place of yellow, ragged ruin. The passage narrowed as he went up;
it became a slant, hard for him to stick on; it was smooth as
marble. Finally he surmounted it, surprised to find the walls
still several hundred feet high, and a narrow gorge leading down
on the other side. This was a divide between two inclines, about
twenty yards wide. At one side stood an enormous rock. Venters
gave it a second glance, because it rested on a pedestal. It
attracted closer attention. It was like a colossal pear of stone
standing on its stem. Around the bottom were thousands of little
nicks just distinguishable to the eye. They were marks of stone
hatchets. The cliff-dwellers had chipped and chipped away at this
boulder fill it rested its tremendous bulk upon a mere pin-point
of its surface. Venters pondered. Why had the little stone-men
hacked away at that big boulder? It bore no semblance to a statue
or an idol or a godhead or a sphinx. Instinctively he put his
hands on it and pushed; then his shoulder and heaved. The stone
seemed to groan, to stir, to grate, and then to move. It tipped a
little downward and hung balancing for a long instant, slowly
returned, rocked slightly, groaned, and settled back to its
former position. Venters divined its significance. It had been
meant for defense. The cliff-dwellers, driven by dreaded enemies
to this last stand, had cunningly cut the rock until it balanced
perfectly, ready to be dislodged by strong hands. Just below it
leaned a tottering crag that would have toppled, starting an
avalanche on an acclivity where no sliding mass could stop. Crags
and pinnacles, splintered cliffs, and leaning shafts and
monuments, would have thundered down to block forever the outlet
to Deception Pass.

"That was a narrow shave for me," said Venters, soberly. "A
balancing rock! The cliff-dwellers never had to roll it. They
died, vanished, and here the rock stands, probably little
changed....But it might serve another lonely dweller of the
cliffs. I'll hide up here somewhere, if I can only find water."

He descended the gorge on the other side. The slope was gradual,
the space narrow, the course straight for many rods. A gloom hung
between the up-sweeping walls. In a turn the passage narrowed to
scarce a dozen feet, and here was darkness of night. But light
shone ahead; another abrupt turn brought day again, and then wide
open space.

Above Venters loomed a wonderful arch of stone bridging the
canyon rims, and through the enormous round portal gleamed and
glistened a beautiful valley shining under sunset gold reflected
by surrounding cliffs. He gave a start of surprise. The valley
was a cove a mile long, half that wide, and its enclosing walls
were smooth and stained, and curved inward, forming great caves.
He decided that its floor was far higher than the level of
Deception Pass and the intersecting canyons. No purple sage
colored this valley floor. Instead there were the white of
aspens, streaks of branch and slender trunk glistening from the
green of leaves, and the darker green of oaks, and through the
middle of this forest, from wall to wall, ran a winding line of
brilliant green which marked the course of cottonwoods and
willows.

"There's water here--and this is the place for me," said Venters.
"Only birds can peep over those walls, I've gone Oldring one
better."

Venters waited no longer, and turned swiftly to retrace his
steps. He named the canyon Surprise Valley and the huge boulder
that guarded the outlet Balancing Rock. Going down he did not
find himself attended by such fears as had beset him in the
climb; still, he was not easy in mind and could not occupy
himself with plans of moving the girl and his outfit until he had
descended to the notch. There he rested a moment and looked about
him. The pass was darkening with the approach of night. At the
corner of the wall, where the stone steps turned, he saw a spur
of rock that would serve to hold the noose of a lasso. He needed
no more aid to scale that place. As he intended to make the move
under cover of darkness, he wanted most to be able to tell where
to climb up. So, taking several small stones with him, he stepped
and slid down to the edge of the slope where he had left his
rifle and boots. He placed the stones some yards apart. He left
the rabbit lying upon the bench where the steps began. Then he
addressed a keen-sighted, remembering gaze to the rim-wall above.
It was serrated, and between two spears of rock, directly in line
with his position, showed a zigzag crack that at night would let
through the gleam of sky. This settled, he put on his belt and
boots and prepared to descend. Some consideration was necessary
to decide whether or not to leave his rifle there. On the return,
carrying the girl and a pack, it would be added encumbrance; and
after debating the matter he left the rifle leaning against the
bench. As he went straight down the slope he halted every few
rods to look up at his mark on the rim. It changed, but he fixed
each change in his memory. When he reached the first cedar-tree,
he tied his scarf upon a dead branch, and then hurried toward
camp, having no more concern about finding his trail upon the
return trip.

Darkness soon emboldened and lent him greater speed. It occurred
to him, as he glided into the grassy glade near camp and head the
whinny of a horse, that he had forgotten Wrangle. The big sorrel
could not be gotten into Surprise Valley. He would have to be
left here.

Venters determined at once to lead the other horses out through
the thicket and turn them loose. The farther they wandered from
this canyon the better it would suit him. He easily descried
Wrangle through the gloom, but the others were not in
sight.

Venters whistled low for the dogs, and when they came trotting to
him he sent them out to search for the horses, and followed. It
soon developed that they were not in the glade nor the thicket.

Venters grew cold and rigid at the thought of rustlers having
entered his retreat. But the thought passed, for the demeanor of
Ring and Whitie reassured him. The horses had wandered away.

Under the clump of silver spruces a denser mantle of darkness,
yet not so thick that Venter's night-practiced eyes could not
catch the white oval of a still face. He bent over it with a
slight suspension of breath that was both caution lest he
frighten her and chill uncertainty of feeling lest he find her
dead. But she slept, and he arose to renewed activity.

He packed his saddle-bags. The dogs were hungry, they whined
about him and nosed his busy hands; but he took no time to feed
them nor to satisfy his own hunger. He slung the saddlebags over
his shoulders and made them secure with his lasso. Then he
wrapped the blankets closer about the girl and lifted her in his
arms. Wrangle whinnied and thumped the ground as Venters passed
him with the dogs. The sorrel knew he was being left behind, and
was not sure whether he liked it or not. Venters went on and
entered the thicket. Here he had to feel his way in pitch
blackness and to wedge his progress between the close saplings.
Time meant little to him now that he had started, and he edged
along with slow side movement till he got clear of the thicket.
Ring and Whitie stood waiting for him. Taking to the open aisles
and patches of the sage, he walked guardedly, careful not to
stumble or step in dust or strike against spreading
sage-branches.

If he were burdened he did not feel it. From time to time, when
he passed out of the black lines of shade into the wan starlight,
he glanced at the white face of the girl lying in his arms. She
had not awakened from her sleep or stupor. He did not rest until
he cleared the black gate of the canyon. Then he leaned against a
stone breast-high to him and gently released the girl from his
hold. His brow and hair and the palms of his hands were wet, and
there was a kind of nervous contraction of his muscles. They
seemed to ripple and string tense. He had a desire to hurry and
no sense of fatigue. A wind blew the scent of sage in his face.
The first early blackness of night passed with the brightening of
the stars. Somewhere back on his trail a coyote yelped, splitting
the dead silence. Venters's faculties seemed singularly
acute.

He lifted the girl again and pressed on. The valley better
traveling than the canyon. It was lighter, freer of sage, and
there were no rocks. Soon, out of the pale gloom shone a still
paler thing, and that was the low swell of slope. Venters mounted
it and his dogs walked beside him. Once upon the stone he slowed
to snail pace, straining his sight to avoid the pockets and
holes. Foot by foot he went up. The weird cedars, like great
demons and witches chained to the rock and writhing in silent
anguish, loomed up with wide and twisting naked arms. Venters
crossed this belt of cedars, skirted the upper border, and
recognized the tree he had marked, even before he saw his waving
scarf.

Here he knelt and deposited the girl gently, feet first and
slowly laid her out full length. What he feared was to reopen one
of her wounds. If he gave her a violent jar, or slipped and fell!
But the supreme confidence so strangely felt that night admitted
no such blunders.

The slope before him seemed to swell into obscurity to lose its
definite outline in a misty, opaque cloud that shaded into the
over-shadowing wall. He scanned the rim where the serrated points
speared the sky, and he found the zigzag crack. It was dim, only
a shade lighter than the dark ramparts, but he distinguished it,
and that served.

Lifting the girl, he stepped upward, closely attending to the
nature of the path under his feet. After a few steps he stopped
to mark his line with the crack in the rim. The dogs clung closer
to him. While chasing the rabbit this slope had appeared
interminable to him; now, burdened as he was, he did not think of
length or height or toil. He remembered only to avoid a misstep
and to keep his direction. He climbed on, with frequent stops to
watch the rim, and before he dreamed of gaining the bench he
bumped his knees into it, and saw, in the dim gray light, his
rifle and the rabbit. He had come straight up without mishap or
swerving off his course, and his shut teeth unlocked.

As he laid the girl down in the shallow hollow of the little
ridge with her white face upturned, she opened her eyes. Wide,
staring black, at once like both the night and the stars, they
made her face seem still whiter.

"Is--it--you?" she asked, faintly.

"Yes," replied Venters.

"Oh! Where--are we?"

"I'm taking you to a safe place where no one will ever find you.
I must climb a little here and call the dogs. Don't be afraid.
I'll soon come for you."

She said no more. Her eyes watched him steadily for a moment and
then closed. Venters pulled off his boots and then felt for the
little steps in the rock. The shade of the cliff above obscured
the point he wanted to gain, but he could see dimly a few feet
before him. What he had attempted with care he now went at with
surpassing lightness. Buoyant, rapid, sure, he attained the
corner of wall and slipped around it. Here he could not see a
hand before his face, so he groped along, found a little flat
space, and there removed the saddle-bags. The lasso he took back
with him to the corner and looped the noose over the spur of
rock.

"Ring--Whitie--come," he called, softly.

Low whines came up from below.

"Here! Come, Whitie--Ring," he repeated, this time sharply.

Then followed scraping of claws and pattering of feet; and out of
the gray gloom below him swiftly climbed the dogs to reach his
side and pass beyond.

Venters descended, holding to the lasso. He tested its strength
by throwing all his weight upon it. Then he gathered the girl up,
and, holding her securely in his left arm, he began to climb, at
every few steps jerking his right hand upward along the lasso. It
sagged at each forward movement he made, but he balanced himself
lightly during the interval when he lacked the support of a taut
rope. He climbed as if he had wings, the strength of a giant, and
knew not the sense of fear. The sharp corner of cliff seemed to
cut out of the darkness. He reached it and the protruding shelf,
and then, entering the black shade of the notch, he moved blindly
but surely to the place where he had left the saddle-bags. He
heard the dogs, though he could not see them. Once more he
carefully placed the girl at his feet. Then, on hands and knees,
he went over the little flat space, feeling for stones. He
removed a number, and, scraping the deep dust into a heap, he
unfolded the outer blanket from around the girl and laid her upon
this bed. Then he went down the slope again for his boots, rifle,
and the rabbit, and, bringing also his lasso with him, he made
short work of that trip.

"Are--you--there?" The girl's voice came low from the blackness.

"Yes," he replied, and was conscious that his laboring breast
made speech difficult.

"Are we--in a cave?"

"Yes."

"Oh, listen!...The waterfall!...I hear it! You've brought me
back!"

Venters heard a murmuring moan that one moment swelled to a pitch
almost softly shrill and the next lulled to a low, almost
inaudible sigh.

"That's--wind blowing--in the--cliffs," he panted. "You're far
from Oldring's--canyon."

The effort it cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme
lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he
lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last
before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body
one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting
veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he
had begun to rest.

Rest came to him that night, but no sleep. Sleep he did not want.
The hours of strained effort were now as if they had never been,
and he wanted to think. Earlier in the day he had dismissed an
inexplicable feeling of change; but now, when there was no longer
demand on his cunning and strength and he had time to think, he
could not catch the illusive thing that had sadly perplexed as
well as elevated his spirit.

Above him, through a V-shaped cleft in the dark rim of the cliff,
shone the lustrous stars that had been his lonely accusers for a
long, long year. To-night they were different. He studied them.
Larger, whiter, more radiant they seemed; but that was not the
difference he meant. Gradually it came to him that the
distinction was not one he saw, but one he felt. In this he
divined as much of the baffling change as he thought would be
revealed to him then. And as he lay there, with the singing of
the cliff-winds in his ears, the white stars above the dark, bold
vent, the difference which he felt was that he was no longer
alone.

CHAPTER IX. SILVER SPRUCE AND ASPENS

The rest of that night seemed to Venters only a few moments of
starlight, a dark overcasting of sky, an hour or so of gray
gloom, and then the lighting of dawn.

When he had bestirred himself, feeding the hungry dogs and
breaking his long fast, and had repacked his saddle-bags, it was
clear daylight, though the sun had not tipped the yellow wall in
the east. He concluded to make the climb and descent into
Surprise Valley in one trip. To that end he tied his blanket upon
Ring and gave Whitie the extra lasso and the rabbit to carry.
Then, with the rifle and saddle-bags slung upon his back, he took
up the girl. She did not awaken from heavy slumber.

That climb up under the rugged, menacing brows of the broken
cliffs, in the face of a grim, leaning boulder that seemed to be
weary of its age-long wavering, was a tax on strength and nerve
that Venters felt equally with something sweet and strangely
exulting in its accomplishment. He did not pause until he gained
the narrow divide and there he rested. Balancing Rock loomed
huge, cold in the gray light of dawn, a thing without life, yet
it spoke silently to Venters: "I am waiting to plunge down, to
shatter and crash, roar and boom, to bury your trail, and close
forever the outlet to Deception Pass!"

On the descent of the other side Venters had easy going, but was
somewhat concerned because Whitie appeared to have succumbed to
temptation, and while carrying the rabbit was also chewing on it.
And Ring evidently regarded this as an injury to himself,
especially as he had carried the heavier load. Presently he
snapped at one end of the rabbit and refused to let go. But his
action prevented Whitie from further misdoing, and then the two
dogs pattered down, carrying the rabbit between them.

Venters turned out of the gorge, and suddenly paused stock-still,
astounded at the scene before him. The curve of the great stone
bridge had caught the sunrise, and through the magnificent arch
burst a glorious stream of gold that shone with a long slant down
into the center of Surprise Valley. Only through the arch did any
sunlight pass, so that all the rest of the valley lay still
asleep, dark green, mysterious, shadowy, merging its level into
walls as misty and soft as morning clouds.

Venters then descended, passing through the arch, looking up at
its tremendous height and sweep. It spanned the opening to
Surprise Valley, stretching in almost perfect curve from rim to
rim. Even in his hurry and concern Venters could not but feel its
majesty, and the thought came to him that the cliff-dwellers must
have regarded it as an object of worship.

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 X. 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 Dot 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 XI. 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 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
protegee. 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
builded better than she knew. Lassiter, though kinder and gentler
than ever, had parted with his quaint humor and his coldness and
his tranquillity 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
some one 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.

"Tor 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, en' let me make it clear en' 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' to-day 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 XII. 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, en' then quick-like make a move for the door en' 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 'moss 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, en' then at night strange whistles en' 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 to-night."

"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 en' 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 en' 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 hitter 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 soles 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 en' ranch--en' 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 en' 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 XIII. 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. To-day 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?"

"Tor 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 to-day.
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 XIV. 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. Tranquillity 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--to-morrow."