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Updated: June 17, 2025
Lassiter was right; he never made mistakes; he would not have told her unless he positively knew. Yet Jane was so tenacious of faith that she had to see with her own eyes, and so constituted that to employ even such small deceit toward her women made her ashamed, and angry for her shame as well as theirs.
Shefford told the Indian they would be climbing out soon, and then he sat down to wait and let his gaze rove over the valley. He might have sat there a long while, so sad and reflective and wondering was his thought, but it seemed a very short time till Fay came in sight with her free, swift grace, and Lassiter and Jane some distance behind.
All the floor was bare red and white stone, polished, glistening, slippery, affording treacherous foothold. And the time came when Nas Ta Bega abandoned the stream-bed to take to the rock-strewn and cactus-covered ledges above. Jane gave out and had to be assisted upon the weary mustang. Fay was persuaded to mount Nack-yal again. Lassiter plodded along. The Indian bent tired steps far in front.
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?"
Among the many riders with whom Venters had ridden he recalled no one who could have taken his trail at Cottonwoods and have followed it to the edge of the bare slope in the pass, let alone up that glistening smooth stone. Lassiter, however, was not an ordinary rider. Instead of hunting cattle tracks he had likely spent a goodly portion of his life tracking men.
Almost overwhelming relief surged through her, a feeling as akin to joy as any she could have been capable of in those gloomy hours of shadow, and one that suddenly stunned her with the significance of what Lassiter had come to mean to her. She had begged him, for his own sake, to leave Cottonwoods.
"By a man who thought he was well hid. But my eyes are pretty sharp. An', Jane," he went on, almost in a whisper, "I reckon it'd be a good idea for us to talk low. You're spied on here by your women." "Lassiter!" she whispered in turn. "That's hard to believe. My women love me." "What of that?" he asked. "Of course they love you. But they're Mormon women."
Jane shut the door and returned to Lassiter. Standing unsteadily, she put her hand on his arm. She let him see that doubt had gone, and how this stab of disloyalty pained her. "Spies! My own women!... Oh, miserable!" she cried, with flashing, tearful eyes. "I hate to tell you," he replied. By that she knew he had long spared her. "It's begun again that work in the dark."
There's no one with a right to question my actions." She turned smilingly to Venters. "You will come in, Bern, and Lassiter will come in. We'll eat and be merry while we may." "I'm only wonderin' if Tull an' his men'll raise a storm down in the village," said Lassiter, in his last weakening stand. "Yes, he'll raise the storm after he has prayed," replied Jane. "Come."
In anguish Jane Withersteen turned speechlessly to Lassiter, and, confirming her fears, she saw him gray-faced, aged all in a moment, stricken as if by a mortal blow. Then all her life seemed to fall about her in wreck and ruin. "It's all over," she heard her voice whisper. "It's ended. I'm going I'm going " "Where?" demanded Lassiter, suddenly looming darkly over her. "To to those cruel men "
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