by Zane Grey
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 dirl?” 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 o
f 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.