by Zane Grey
“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 she now began to fear he was proof against all persuasion. The iron and stone quality that she had early suspected in him had actually cropped out as an impregnable barrier. Nevertheless, if Lassiter remained in Cottonwoods she would never give up her hope and desire to change him. She would change him if she had to sacrifice everything dear to her except hope of heaven. Passionately devoted as she was to her religion, she had yet refused to marry a Mormon. But a situation had developed wherein self paled in the great white light of religious duty of the highest order. That was the leading motive, the divinely spiritual one; but there were other motives, which, like tentacles, aided in drawing her will to the acceptance of a possible abnegation. And through the watches of that sleepless night Jane Withersteen, in fear and sorrow and doubt, came finally to believe that if she must throw herself into Lassiter’s arms to make him abide by “Thou shalt not kill!” she would yet do well.
In the morning she expected Lassiter at the usual hour, but she was not able to go at once to the court, so she sent little Fay. Mrs. Larkin was ill and required attention. It appeared that the mother, from the time of her arrival at Withersteen House, had relaxed and was slowly losing her hold on life. Jane had believed that absence of worry and responsibility coupled with good nursing and comfort would mend Mrs. Larkin’s broken health. Such, however, was not the case.
When Jane did get out to the court, Fay was there alone, and at the moment embarking on a dubious voyage down the stone-lined amber stream upon a craft of two brooms and a pillow. Fay was as delightfully wet as she could possibly wish to get.
Clatter of hoofs distracted Fay and interrupted the scolding she was gleefully receiving from Jane. The sound was not the light-spirited trot that Bells made when Lassiter rode him into the outer court. This was slower and heavier, and Jane did not recognize in it any of her other horses. The appearance of Bishop Dyer startled Jane. He dismounted with his rapid, jerky motion flung the bridle, and, as he turned toward the inner court and stalked up on the stone flags, his boots rang. In his authoritative front, and in the red anger unmistakably flaming in his face, he reminded Jane of her father.
“Is that the Larkin pauper?” he asked, bruskly, without any greeting to Jane.
“It’s Mrs. Larkin’s little girl,” replied Jane, slowly.
“I hear you intend to raise the child?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you mean to give her Mormon bringing-up?”
“No.”
His questions had been swift. She was amazed at a feeling that someone else was replying for her.
“I’ve come to say a few things to you.” He stopped to measure her with stern, speculative eye.
Jane Withersteen loved this man. From earliest childhood she had been taught to revere and love bishops of her church. And for ten years Bishop Dyer had been the closest friend and counselor of her father, and for the greater part of that period her own friend and Scriptural teacher. Her interpretation of her creed and her religious activity in fidelity to it, her acceptance of mysterious and holy Mormon truths, were all invested in this Bishop. Bishop Dyer as an entity was next to God. He was God’s mouthpiece to the little Mormon community at Cottonwoods. God revealed himself in secret to this mortal.
And Jane Withersteen suddenly suffered a paralyzing affront to her consciousness of reverence by some strange, irresistible twist of thought wherein she saw this Bishop as a man. And the train of thought hurdled the rising, crying protests of that other self whose poise she had lost. It was not her Bishop who eyed her in curious measurement. It was a man who tramped into her presence without removing his hat, who had no greeting for her, who had no semblance of courtesy. In looks, as in action, he made her think of a bull stamping cross-grained into a corral. She had heard of Bishop Dyer forgetting the minister in the fury of a common man, and now she was to feel it. The glance by which she measured him in turn momentarily veiled the divine in the ordinary. He looked a rancher; he was booted, spurred, and covered with dust; he carried a gun at his hip, and she remembered that he had been known to use it. But during the long moment while he watched her there was nothing commonplace in the slow-gathering might of his wrath.
“Brother Tull has talked to me,” he began. “It was your father’s wish that you marry Tull, and my order. You refused him?”
“Yes.”
“You would not give up your friendship with that tramp Venters?”
“No.”
“But you’ll do as I order!” he thundered. “Why, Jane Withersteen, you are in danger of becoming a heretic! You can thank your Gentile friends for that. You face the damning of your soul to perdition.”
In the flux and reflux of the whirling torture of Jane’s mind, that new, daring spirit of hers vanished in the old habitual order of her life. She was a Mormon, and the Bishop regained ascendance.
“It’s well I got you in time, Jane Withersteen. What would your father have said to these goings-on of yours? He would have put you in a stone cage on bread and water. He would have taught you something about Mormonism. Remember, you’re a born Mormon. There have been Mormons who turned heretic—damn their souls!—but no born Mormon ever left us yet. Ah, I see your shame. Your faith is not shaken. You are only a wild girl.” The Bishop’s tone softened. “Well, it’s enough that I got to you in time.… Now tell me about this Lassiter. I hear strange things.”
“What do you wish to know?” queried Jane.
“About this man. You hired him?”
“Yes, he’s riding for me. When my riders left me I had to have any one I could get.”
“Is it true what I hear—that he’s a gun-man, a Mormon-hater, steeped in blood?”
“True—terribly true, I fear.”
“But what’s he doing here in Cottonwoods? This place isn’t notorious enough for such a man. Sterling and the villages north, where there’s universal gun-packing and fights every day—where there are more men like him, it seems to me they would attract him most. We’re only a wild, lonely border settlement. It’s only recently that the rustlers have made killings here. Nor have there been saloons till lately, nor the drifting in of
outcasts. Has not this gun-man some special mission here?”
Jane maintained silence.
“Tell me,” ordered Bishop Dyer, sharply.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Do you know what it is?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me that.”
“Bishop Dyer, I don’t want to tell.”
He waved his hand in an imperative gesture of command. The red once more leaped to his face, and in his steel-blue eyes glinted a pin-point of curiosity.
“That first day,” whispered Jane, “Lassiter said he came here to find—Milly Erne’s grave!”
With downcast eyes Jane watched the swift flow of the amber water. She saw it and tried to think of it, of the stones, of the ferns; but, like her body, her mind was in a leaden vise. Only the Bishop’s voice could release her. Seemingly there was silence of longer duration than all her former life.
“For what—else?” When Bishop Dyer’s voice did cleave the silence it was high, curiously shrill, and on the point of breaking. It released Jane’s tongue, but she could not lift her eyes.
“To kill the man who persuaded Milly Erne to abandon her home and her husband—and her God!”
With wonderful distinctness Jane Withersteen heard her own clear voice. She heard the water murmur at her feet and flow on to the sea; she heard the rushing of all the waters in the world. They filled her ears with low, unreal murmurings—these sounds that deadened her brain and yet could not break the long and terrible silence. Then, from somewhere—from an immeasurable distance—came a slow, guarded, clinking, clanking step. Into her it shot electrifying life. It released the weight upon her numbed eyelids. Lifting her eyes she saw—ashen, shaken, stricken—not the Bishop but the man! And beyond him, from round the corner came that soft, silvery step. A long black boot with a gleaming spur swept into sight—and then Lassiter! Bishop Dyer did not see, did not hear: he stared at Jane in the throes of sudden revelation.
“Ah, I understand!” he cried, in hoarse accents. “That’s why you made love to this Lassiter—to bind his hands!”
It was Jane’s gaze riveted upon the rider that made Bishop Dyer turn. Then clear sight failed her. Dizzily, in a blur, she saw the Bishop’s hand jerk to his hip. She saw gleam of blue and spout of red. In her ears burst a thundering report. The court floated in darkening circles around her, and she fell into utter blackness.
The darkness lightened, turned to slow-drifting haze, and lifted. Through a thin film of blue smoke she saw the rough-hewn timbers of the court roof. A cool, damp touch moved across her brow. She smelled powder, and it was that which galvanized her suspended thought. She moved, to see that she lay prone upon the stone flags with her head on Lassiter’s knee, and he was bathing her brow with water from the stream. The same swift glance, shifting low, brought into range of her sight a smoking gun and splashes of blood.
“Ah-h!” she moaned, and was drifting, sinking again into darkness, when Lassiter’s voice arrested her.
“It’s all right, Jane. It’s all right.”
“Did—you—kill—him?” she whispered.
“Who? That fat party who was here? No. I didn’t kill him.”
“Oh!… Lassiter!”
“Say! It was queer for you to faint. I thought you were such a strong woman, not faintish like that. You’re all right now—only some pale. I thought you’d never come to. But I’m awkward round women folks. I couldn’t think of anythin’.”
“Lassiter!… the gun there!… the blood!”
“So that’s troublin’ you. I reckon it needn’t. You see it was this way. I come round the house an’ seen that fat party an’ heard him talkin’ loud. Then he seen me, an’ very impolite goes straight for his gun. He oughtn’t have tried to throw a gun on me—whatever his reason was. For that’s meetin’ me on my own grounds. I’ve seen runnin’ molasses that was quicker ’n him. Now I didn’t know who he was, visitor or friend or relation of yours, though I seen he was a Mormon all over, an’ I couldn’t get serious about shootin’. So I winged him—put a bullet through his arm as he was pullin’ at his gun. An’ he dropped the gun there, an’ a little blood. I told him he’d introduced himself sufficient, an’ to please move out of my vicinity. An’ he went.”
Lassiter spoke with slow, cool, soothing voice, in which there was a hint of levity, and his touch, as he continued to bathe her brow, was gentle and steady. His impassive face, and the kind gray eyes, further stilled her agitation.
“He drew on you first, and you deliberately shot to cripple him—you wouldn’t kill him—you—Lassiter?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Jane kissed his hand.
All that was calm and cool about Lassiter instantly vanished.
“Don’t do that! I won’t stand it! An’ I don’t care a damn who that fat party was.”
He helped Jane to her feet and to a chair. Then with the wet scarf he had used to bathe her face he wiped the blood from the stone flags and, picking up the gun, he threw it upon a couch. With that he began to pace the court, and his silver spurs jangled musically, and the great gun-sheaths softly brushed against his leather chaps.
“So—it’s true—what I heard him say?” Lassiter asked, presently halting before her. “You made love to me—to bind my hands?”
“Yes,” confessed Jane. It took all her woman’s courage to meet the gray storm of his glance.
“All these days that you’ve been so friendly an’ like a pardner—all these evenin’s that have been so bewilderin’ to me—your beauty—an’—an’ the way you looked an’ came close to me—they were woman’s tricks to bind my hands?”
“Yes.”
“An’ your sweetness that seemed so natural, an’ your throwin’ little Fay an’ me so much together—to make me love the child—all that was for the same reason?”
“Yes.”
Lassiter flung his arms—a strange gesture for him.
“Mebbe it wasn’t much in your Mormon thinkin’, for you to play that game. But to ring the child in—that was hellish!”
Jane’s passionate, unheeding zeal began to loom darkly.
“Lassiter, whatever my intention in the beginning, Fay loves you dearly—and I—I’ve grown to—to like you.”
“That’s powerful kind of you, now,” he said. Sarcasm and scorn made his voice that of a stranger. “An’ you sit there an’ look me straight in the eyes! You’re a wonderful strange woman, Jane Withersteen.”
“I’m not ashamed, Lassiter. I told you I’d try to change you.”
“Would you mind tellin’ me just what you tried?”
“I tried to make you see beauty in me and be softened by it. I wanted you to care for me so that I could influence you. It wasn’t easy. At first you were stone-blind. Then I hoped you’d love little Fay, and through that come to feel the horror of making children fatherless.”
“Jane Withersteen, either you’re a fool or noble beyond my understandin’. Mebbe you’re both. I know you’re blind. What you meant is one thing—what you did was to make me love you.”
“Lassiter!”
“I reckon I’m a human bein’, though I never loved any one but my sister, Milly Erne. That was long—”
“Oh, are you Milly’s brother?”
“Yes, I was, an’ I loved her. There never was any one but her in my life till now. Didn’t I tell you that long ago I back-trailed myself from women? I was a Texas ranger till—till Milly left home, an’ then I became somethin’ else—Lassiter! For years I’ve been a lonely man set on one thing. I came here an’ met you. An’ now I’m not the man I was. The change was gradual, an’ I took no notice of it. I understand now that never-satisfied longin’ to see you, listen to you, watch you, feel you near me. It’s plain now why you were never out of my thoughts. I’ve
had no thoughts but of you. I’ve lived an’ breathed for you. An’ now when I know what it means—what you’ve done—I’m burnin’ up with hell’s fire!”
“Oh, Lassiter—no—no—you don’t love me that way!” Jane cased.
“If that’s what love is, then I do.”
“Forgive me! I didn’t mean to make you love me like that. Oh, what a tangle of our lives! You—Milly Erne’s brother! And I—heedless, mad to melt your heart toward Mormons. Lassiter, I may be wicked but not wicked enough to hate. If I couldn’t hate Tull, could I hate you?”
“After all, Jane, mebbe you’re only blind—Mormon blind. That only can explain what’s close to selfishness—”
“I’m not selfish. I despise the very word. If I were free—”
“But you’re not free. Not free of Mormonism. An’ in playin’ this game with me you’ve been unfaithful.”
“Un-faithful!” 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’ today he’d have shot me if he’d been quick enough on the draw. Could I walk or ride down into Cottonwoods without my guns? This is a wild time, Jane Withersteen, this year of our Lord eighteen seventy-one.”