



Produced by Bill Brewer and Rick Fane





RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

By 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 <DW72> 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-<DW72> 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 <DW72>, 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 <DW72> descended to a dim line of canyons 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

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-<DW72>s.
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."

