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It was not improbable that among Oldring's rustlers there was one who shared Lassiter's gift for trailing. And the more Venters dwelt on this possibility the more perturbed he grew. Lassiter's visit, moreover, had a disquieting effect upon Bess, and Venters fancied that she entertained the same thought as to future seclusion.
Tom Lassiter's guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road ahead of him. "Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!"
He leaped to catch Lassiter's busy hands. "No, no! What are you doing?" he demanded, in a kind of fury. "I won't take her racers. What do you think I am? It'd be monstrous. Lassiter! stop it, I say!... You've got her to save. You've miles and miles to go. Tull is trailing you. There are rustlers in the Pass. Give me back that saddle-bag!"
So I'm preparin' you." "For what?" "I didn't tell you why I jest had to go after them fellers. I couldn't tell you. I believe you'd have died. But I can tell you now if you'll bear up under a shock?" "Go on, my friend." "I've got little Fay! Alive bad hurt but she'll live!" Jane Withersteen's dead-locked feeling, rent by Lassiter's deep, quivering voice, leaped into an agony of sensitive life.
She had growl supernaturally sweet and beautiful. For Jane Withersteen the child was an answer to prayer, a blessing, a possession infinitely more precious than all she had lost. For Lassiter, Jane divined that little Fay had become a religion. "Does oo love my new mower?" repeated Fay. Lassiter's answer to this was a modest and sincere affirmative.
Like a tree cut deep into its roots, she began to quiver and shake, and her anger weakened into despair. And her ringing voice sank into a broken, husky whisper. Then, spent and pitiable, upheld by Lassiter's arm, she turned and hid her face in Black Star's mane. Numb as Venters was when at length Jane Withersteen lifted her head and looked at him, he yet suffered a pang.
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.
She wondered dully at her sitting there, hands folded listlessly, with a kind of numb deadness to the passing of time and the passing of her riches. She thought of Venters's friendship. She had not lost that, but she had lost him. Lassiter's friendship that was more than love it would endure, but soon he, too, would be gone.
Silence intervened until Lassiter's soft, jingling step assured her of his approach. When he appeared he was covered with blood. "All right, Jane," he said. "I come back. An' don't worry." With water from a canteen he washed the blood from his face and hands. "Jane, hurry now. Tear my scarf in two, en' tie up these places.
At length he saw a horse rise above a ridge, and he knew it to be Lassiter's black. Climbing to the highest rock, so that he would show against the sky-line, he stood and waved his hat. The almost instant turning of Lassiter's horse attested to the quickness of that rider's eye.
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