CHAPTER II. COTTONWOODS
CHAPTER III. AMBER SPRING
CHAPTER IV. DECEPTION PASS
CHAPTER V. THE MASKED RIDER
CHAPTER VI. THE MILL-WHEEL OF STEERS
CHAPTER VII. THE DAUGHTER OF WITHERSTEEN
CHAPTER VIII. SURPRISE VALLEY
CHAPTER IX. SILVER SPRUCE AND ASPENS
CHAPTER X. LOVE
CHAPTER XI. FAITH AND UNFAITH
CHAPTER XII. THE INVISIBLE HAND
CHAPTER XIII. SOLITUDE AND STORM
CHAPTER XIV. WEST WIND
CHAPTER XV. SHADOWS ON THE SAGE-SLOPE
CHAPTER XVI. GOLD
CHAPTER XVII. WRANGLE’S RACE RUN
CHAPTER XVIII. OLDRING’S KNELL
CHAPTER XIX. FAY
CHAPTER XX. LASSITER’S WAY
CHAPTER XXI. BLACK STAR AND NIGHT
CHAPTER XXII. RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE
CHAPTER XXIII. THE FALL OF BALANCING ROCK
ILLUSTRATIONS
“He has brought you far to-day?”
Like a flash the blue barrel of his rifle gleamed level and he shot once—twice.
“Oh, he’s only a boy!... What! Can he be Oldring’s Masked Rider?”
“What on earth is that?”
He did not pause until he gained the narrow divide
“Bess, I’ll not go again”
It was Jane’s gaze riveted upon the rider that made Bishop Dyer turn.
Venters and Bess finished their simple meal—then faced the open terrace, to watch and await the approaching storm.
just as Wrangle plunged again he caught the whizz of a leaden missile
and Venters shot him through the heart
“Don’t—look—back!”
When he and Bess rode up out of the hollow the sun was low.
CHAPTER I.
LASSITER
A sharp clip-clop 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 cañons from
which rose an up-flinging 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 to gray.
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 group
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, ma’am?”
“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, an’ 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.
“_Lassiter!_”
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.