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Updated: May 15, 2025
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.
Bounding swiftly away, Venters fled around the corner, across the street, and, leaping a hedge, he ran through yard, orchard, and garden to the sage. Here, under cover of the tall brush, he turned west and ran on to the place where he had hidden his rifle. Securing that, he again set out into a run, and, circling through the sage, came up behind Jane Withersteen's stable and corrals.
There was the night ride of Tull's, which, viewed in the light of subsequent events, had a look of his covert machinations; Oldring and his Masked Rider and his rustlers riding muffled horses; the report that Tull had ridden out that morning with his man Jerry on the trail to Glaze, the strange disappearance of Jane Withersteen's riders, the unusually determined attempt to kill the one Gentile still in her employ, an intention frustrated, no doubt, only by Judkin's magnificent riding of her racer, and lastly the driving of the red herd.
Venters saw, and knew that Lassiter saw, how Jane Withersteen's tortured soul wrestled with hate and threw it with scorn doubt, suspicion, and overcame all. "Bern, if in my misery I accused you unjustly, I crave forgiveness," she said. "I'm not what I once was. Tell me who is this girl?" "Jane, she is Oldring's daughter, and his Masked Rider.
Excitement and thrilling expectancy flooded out all Jane Withersteen's calm. A tight band closed round her breast as she saw the giant sorrel flit in reddish-brown flashes across the openings in the green. Then he was pounding down the lane thundering into the court crashing his great iron-shod hoofs on the stone flags.
The branches above him were full of mockingbirds. And then there before him stood three figures. Fay Larkin was held close to the side of a magnificent woman, barbarously clad in garments made of skins and pieces of blanket. Her face worked in noble emotion. Shefford seemed to see the ghost of that fair beauty Venters had said was Jane Withersteen's. Her hair was gray.
"I reckon I'm Milly's brother an' your uncle!... Uncle Jim! Ain't that fine?" "Oh, I can't believe Don't raise me! Bern, let me kneel. I see truth in your face in Miss Withersteen's. But let me hear it all all on my knees. Tell me how it's true!" "Well, Elizabeth, listen," said Lassiter. "Before you was born your father made a mortal enemy of a Mormon named Dyer.
The one thin little bedraggled garment she wore half covered her fine, slim body. Red as cherries were her cheeks and lips; her eyes were violet blue, and the crown of her childish loveliness was the curling golden hair. All the children of Cottonwoods were Jane Withersteen's friends, she loved them all. But Fay was dearest to her.
He realized then that the Indian was indeed a brother. And Shefford needed him. What he had to fight was more fatal than suffering and love it was hate rising out of the unsuspected dark gulf of his heart the instinct to kill the murder in his soul. Only now did he come to understand Jane Withersteen's tragic story and the passion of Venters and what had made Lassiter a gun-man.
There was a dinner such as Shefford had not seen for many a day, and such as Fay had never seen, and that brought to Jane Withersteen's eyes the dreamy memory of the bountiful feasts which, long years ago, had been her pride.
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