Riders of the Purple Sage

INTRODUCTION

William R. Handley

No American writer in the first half of the twentieth century sold as many books as did Zane Grey, whose work had a major influence on the development of the Western. Among the fifty-six Westerns Zane Grey wrote, one of his earliest, Riders of the Purple Sage, is still his most popular; within a year of its publication in 1912, it had sold one million copies. Considering the formula it shaped, however, it is a surprising book: the villain is a Mormon polygamist, and while there are shoot-ups, the central hero, Lassiter, gives up his guns and learns to love a child and believe in God. Indeed, the novel’s most curious characteristic, if one approaches it with expectations that later Westerns have raised regarding the genre, is that it is intensely concerned with religion, marriage, and family, the very things the cowboy hero of Hollywood film so often wants to escape.

Grey’s choice of villain sets in motion the novel’s plot and is one reason why the book was so popular in 1912. While most contemporary criticism of Riders of the Purple Sage has given the Mormon polygamy in it relatively little attention, the novel’s first reviewers noted the historical distinctiveness of the antagonist, as Grey’s readers would also have done. (The ruthlessness of Mormonism in that period of Western development is laid bare with great accuracy, one reviewer wrote in 1912.) In contrast to Riders, Grey’s first novel to deal with Mormons, The Heritage of the Desert (1910), and the sequel to Riders, The Rainbow Trail (1915), are sympathetic toward and understanding of Mormons, presumably as a result of Grey’s personal experience among them in trips he made to Utah and Arizona beginning in 1907. The immediate cultural catalyst for Grey’s choice of villain, which was a key to the novel’s huge success, was an anti-Mormon magazine crusade in 1911 that Grey was well aware of and that revived national paranoia about polygamy.

It is difficult today to appreciate just how obsessively, even pruriently, interested many Americans were, and for how long (from the 1850s to the 1910s), in excoriating Mormonism and polygamy. (Recent media attention to the polygamy of some fundamentalist Mormons in contemporary Utah does not approach the level of interest in the earlier era; contemporary battles against same-sex marriage come closer.) Though not uniformly, journalists, reformers, federal officials, members of Congress, and ordinary Americans considered polygamy a barbaric threat to civilization. The polygamous Mormon man was a repository for Grey’s readers, as he had been for decades for Americans, of the contradictions and anxieties in American beliefs about racial and sexual identity. The Mormons figured negatively in these categories’ relation to American nation-building not simply as an other but as a group that was not quite ethnically other. Indeed, the Mormon distinction, which made Mormons a much demonized group in American politics and culture up to the time of Grey’s novel, came eventually to make little difference in American cultural debates once the end of polygamy—and an end to rumors of polygamy’s continued practice— allowed the Mormons to become identifiably white, in the period’s moral and ethnic senses, and thus American. Set forty years before it was published, Grey’s novel records this transition: I’ve known many good Mormons, says the hero Lassiter. But some are blacker than hell.

Yet the function of Grey’s formula—and another key to its popularity—is not simply to demonize an other but also to cast the American heroes and Mormon villains in distinct but oddly similar roles in which they enact a family drama, and in which the whiteness and womanhood of Grey’s heroines are at stake. That family drama is in its largest cultural significance the drama of America justifying to itself its own history of conquest in the West, since the designs of the nation are to a large degree predicated upon the idea that the conquered are other (racially, sexually, religiously) and yet culturally made familiar or assimilable for the national majority. Mormons were a transitional object in American identity-formation (Indians and blacks served as others consistently and with catastrophic consequences). Through much of the later nineteenth century, Americans shifted from viewing Mormons, primarily based on their polygamous practices, as a semiethnic other to viewing them as white Americans once they adopted monogamy. In 1876, one British observer, William Hepworth Dixon, expressed a view common in the United States when he called Mormons White Indians because they shared with Indian tribes polygamous and communitarian practices and because the groups shared other social and religious beliefs on which Red men differ from White—from all White men except Latter-day Saints. In this family compact, Dixon wrote, Mormons and Indians joined in hostile conspiracies, leaning on each other for support against a common foe. When Grey published his novel, he helped revive and resolve an old American fear in a manner that would ensure the disappearance of Mormon villains from the Western formula after 1920, once the Mormon distinction was no longer freighted with as much difference. Grey wrote his novel at just the right moment for a popular reception: when nostalgia about the distinctiveness of Mormon polygamy coexisted with revived paranoia about it; when it seemed that Mormons still threatened whiteness, womanhood, Christian civilization, and the American nation.

Though the Mormons officially gave up polygamy in 1890 and Utah joined the Union in 1896, in the first decade of the twentieth century many Americans doubted whether Mormons could be trusted morally and politically, as rumors of polygamy’s continued practice circulated in the press and the federal government continued to investigate the church. Eager to put the past behind them, but scarred by years of antipolygamy rhetoric, Mormons feared further governmental scrutiny, even as they sought to prove themselves changed and trustworthy. Yet some Mormon leaders continued to practice polygamy after 1890, which helped to set the cultural stage for the reception of Grey’s novel. In defense of the American family, seven million Americans signed petitions in 1900 imploring the U.S. House of Representatives to exclude one such polygamist, Brigham H. Roberts, from his elected office. When a coalition of protesters wrote in 1904 that Utah’s senator Reed Smoot should be barred from holding office because he was also an apostle in the Mormon church, Congress embarked on an investigation into Smoot and the church that may have been the longest and most exhaustive of any religious body in U.S. history. Following the investigation of Senator Smoot, who ultimately kept his seat, rumors that polygamy was still being practiced circulated in a steady stream of articles in the years up through 1911 in publications such as The Independent, Collier’s, McClure’s, Pearson’s, Cosmopolitan, and Everybody’s magazine. Theodore Roosevelt echoed in 1911 a long-standing American sentiment when he warned that the continuation of polygamy would secure the destruction of the Mormon church itself. That same year, Maude Radford Warren wrote of her travels in Utah for The Saturday Evening Post. A Mormon woman named Mrs. Finley, who gave stump speeches in 1904 for the Democratic Party, told a number of Mormon women that if the Republicans got in there would be another Smoot investigation, and that all of them might be haled into court again. One woman got up and said she could not go through such agony a second time.

In the midst of this renewed antipolygamy fever, Grey wrote his most popular novel. While preparing for his 1911 trip to Utah, during which he did his research for Riders, Grey wrote to his Mormon guide, David Dexter Rust, I shall not write anything about the Mormons that would hurt anybody’s feelings. . . . I see them as a wonderful people, and so I shall write of them. Relative to his first Mormon novel, his treatment of Mormonism in Riders proved to be harsh enough that at first Harper’s demurred to publish it, but it was not harsh relative to the tone of the anti-Mormon magazine crusade: If you could read what is being written now in three magazines about the Mormons, he wrote to Rust, you would be pleased with my point of view. Grey was well aware not only of the anti-Mormon articles that year but of the lucrative potential of anti-Mormon sentiment; he went on to argue that by writing favorably about Mormons, he would lose money rather than earn it: As I will not make any contract with a magazine to roast the Mormons, I’ll have to pay my expenses [for the 1911 trip] out of my own pocket. If I wanted to make any such contract I should get $2500 tomorrow for a trip. Riders of the Purple Sage, of course, made him a wealthy man; in writing the novel, Grey may have been divided between friendship and the desire for financial success, as the magazine crusade continued.

Grey’s novel helped codify the formula Western around a historical specificity that had, by the time of the Progressive era, borne the weight of rumor, hysteria, and stereotype, and that had been enmeshed in decades-old debates not only about religion but about race, sex, and the territorial, jurisdictional future of the nation. Like many silent films on the subject (including The Victim of the Mormons and Trapped by the Mormons in 1911 and 1922), Riders of the Purple Sage simplifies an image of the Mormon polygamist that had been for decades varied, wide-ranging, and often contradictory in its negative associations. Representations of Mormon polygamy relied on various nonwhite ethnic categories to emphasize the threat it posed not just to marriage but to white, Christian civilization, of which marriage was considered the cornerstone. The sense of cosmic significance Grey gives to the struggle over the marital fate of the virtuous Mormon heroine Jane Withersteen derives from the long history of this freighted rhetoric, which his mystical landscapes absorb and dehistoricize. Within that struggle, Grey’s Gentile men and Mormon women undergo cross-fertilizing transformations. While Grey simplifies the Mormon polygamist’s evil, his novel also aims to render the Mormon heroine’s plight sympathetically and to figure her conversion away from blind religious duty. In the process, the Gentile hero Lassiter converts to a religion he can share with her, so that Mormon difference is made more familiar and assimilable, and thus ultimately less threatening, at the moment that this finally began to happen historically. The developing romance between Lassiter and Jane, in other words, can be read to represent a larger social shift in Mormon-American relations.

Riders of the Purple Sage serves this cultural assimilation by typologizing its characters. Lassiter says to Jane, "mercy an’ goodness, such as is in you, though they’re the grand things in human nature, can’t be lived up to on this Utah border. Life’s hell out here. . . . I’m goin’ to try to hide you somewhere in this Pass. I’d like to hide many more women, for I’ve come to see there are more like you among your people. . . . An’ remember this—some day the border’ll be better, cleaner, for the ways of men like Lassiter!" (emphasis added). Grey establishes fixed, analogous types—Gentile American men like Lassiter, redeemed Mormon women like Jane—within a border region about to undergo historical transition and religious and legal transformation. By setting the novel in 1871 (before federal pressure had forced the Mormon church officially to abandon polygamy), Grey re-creates a dramatic, pervasive threat from which to rescue his Mormon heroine. In culturally shaping the moral and sexual identity of the Mormon for an American readership, the work of fiction follows the work of law in the latter’s shaping of the Mormons’ future place in the American nation. Jane’s dilemma—the oppositional claims of Mormon and Gentile men and her inability to keep her land and her freedom—resembles the no-win situation in which Mormons found themselves in the years leading up to their church’s ban against polygamy: practice religious freedom and face destruction or give up the cornerstone practice of the religion and join the nation. Between a rock and a hard place, Jane rides away with Lassiter. The fall of Balancing Rock, which closes off Deception Pass forever at the novel’s end and thwarts the pursuing Mormon riders, allows Lassiter to hide Jane and to close a chapter in southern Utah’s history before a better and cleaner era begins, implicitly leaving to others the resolution of historical struggle.

In the contest over sexual relations that Grey’s novel engages, grounded on the American side in the conflation of federal law and natural law governing the sexes, and on the Mormon side by invocations of religious freedom, a woman’s body, soul, and possessions are both battleground and sacrifice. Jane is possessed by her American savior only to be dispossessed of her Mormon father’s land and inheritance. (A woman in Utah in the 1870s had unusual rights of inheritance—and even divorce and property ownership—not accorded to women in the rest of the country.) Like all the contradictions in this novel, the fact that Jane resists the Mormon elders who want her land by allowing Lassiter to take her away from it forever is less troubling when viewed in light of the evil Mormon elders, perhaps the only characters who never contradict themselves. The crime of which Tull and his colleagues are guilty is quite simple; at the novel’s opening, Venters puts it directly: 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! Connected to land and cattle, Jane is in the end forced to cede both to the Mormon elders in her absence. The fate of Jane’s womanhood is the microcosm of a larger legal and national destiny that Grey’s readers understood had overtaken Mormonism.

When Venters exclaims to Tull, You want her all yourself, it is not just Tull’s polygamous plans, but his claim of exclusive rights to a woman and her land that upsets Venters, who is not immune, once he shoots, nurses, and falls in love with Bess, to wanting a woman all to himself. The two love plots in Riders, one involving Jane Withersteen and Lassiter and the other involving Bern Venters and Bess (or, as she turns out to be, Elizabeth Erne), reinforce the natural sexual law of one man for one woman that the novel is keen to uphold. Yet in reinforcing this principle, the plots also place the male hero in a role that imitates the Mormons’ seduction and captivity of women. To extend what Forrest Robinson says in his study of the Western, the American heroes have it both ways: both seducers and saviors, both enforcers of moral codes and liberators from religious codes. And their seduction and rescue of women border on a cruelty that in Venters’s case is redeemed only by his ignorance at the moment he pulls the trigger (Mormons, in contrast, know just what they are aiming at): Venters shoots Bess (but nurses her back to health), kills the man Bess thinks is her father (but she agrees to marry his murderer); Lassiter torches Jane’s house (in order to keep it from Mormon hands) and kills Mormon associates of her father. Saving a woman from corruption, in other words, threatens to corrupt her while also cutting her ties to Mormon patriarchy. When Bess is recovering from her gunshot wound by Venters in Surprise Valley, the Edenic hideout and her condition offer Venters a seductively dangerous power over her: You’ve saved me, she tells him, —and I’m—I’m yours to do with as you like. Riders risks ever more ambiguous distinctions between moral codes. While Jane and Lassiter’s relationship is sanctified by conventional values (one man for one woman), the ending also upends them as Jane’s sexual virtue is threatened with corruption, by 1912 standards, since, as she is being saved, she and Lassiter are sealed in Surprise Valley without being married. (In the sequel, the grown-up Fay suggestively downplays this contravention of sexual norms when she reports to the Protestant minister Shefford that in Surprise Valley, Uncle Jim and Mother Jane talked less as the years went by.)

Grey’s adulterous affairs may have inspired this pushing of the sexual envelope. One of his biographers, Stephen May, speculates that Grey’s prurient interest in Mormon polygamy may have influenced his philandering early in his career. On one hand, polygamy shocked his Protestant sensibilities; on the other it excited a libidinous need in him. . . . Grey began to feel some justification for traveling with women friends away from his wife. After all, May writes, his Mormon friends engaged in plural marriages and yet led highly moral lives; why shouldn’t he? That Grey’s hero has it both ways mirrors the symmetrically opposing arguments between Mormons and Americans over polygamy: plural marriage as either the cornerstone of true religion (in the Mormon argument) or its corruption (in the American one); religious belief as an excuse for lust (from the American point of view) versus sanctified sex as a form of divine exaltation (in Mormon belief).

Grey’s first readers may have been nostalgic for an era of unresolved tension in which Mormon difference was preserved as a threat from which to rescue people. Frontier regions, Grey knew, provided this backdrop of dramatic contrasts as places that were, one could say, not yet nationally finished, just as southern Utah in 1871 was a border region in the sense that it was a federal territory and not a state, and in the sense that it was populated by both Mormons and Gentiles. In addition to suspenseful melodrama surrounding the rescue of Jane from Mormon polygamy, two other key elements thus help to explain the popularity and entertainment value of Grey’s novel when it was published: the inference of undomesticated sex and nostalgia for a West that was not yet fully Americanized. These may seem to contradict anti-Mormon sentiment somewhat: since antipolygamy arguments were based in part on the view that polygamy was licentious, such a view does not seem compatible with a desire for sexual titillation. Moreover, why would readers be nostalgic for Mormon difference when they had fought for years to eradicate it? In fact, these three elements are intimately linked and depend upon each other: antipolygamy fever was often prurient, and a culture is nostalgic not just for what it has lost but for what it has taken away, against which it had identified itself.

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.¹

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 grow 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 elder² 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.³ 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! ⁴ 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, come 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.

That’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 agin 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 ⁵ 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 on the Utah