Riders of the Purple Sage (Leisure Historical Fiction)

by Zane Grey

  "Oh... I'm a coward! A miserable coward! I can't fight or think or hope or pray! I'm lost! Oh, Lassiter, look back! Is he coming? I'll not... hold out...."

  "Keep your breath, woman, an' ride not for yourself or for me, but for Fay!"

  A last, breaking run across the sage brought Lassiter's horse to a walk.

  "He's done," said the rider.

  "Oh, -no..-. no!" moaned Jane.

  "Look back, Jane, look back. Three... four miles we've come across this valley, an' no Tull yet in sight. Only a few miles more!"

  Jane looked back over the long stretch of sage and found the narrow gap in the wall, out of which came a file of dark horses with a white horse in the lead. Sight of the riders acted upon Jane as a stimulant. The weight of cold, horrible terror lessened. Gazing forward at the dogs, at Lassiter's limping horse, at the blood on his face, at the rocks growing nearer-lastly at Fay's golden hair, the ice left her veins, and slowly, strangely, she gained hold of strength that she believed would see her to the safety Lassiter promised. As she gazed, Lassiter's horse stumbled and fell.

  He swung his leg and slipped from the saddle. "Jane, take the child," he said, and lifted Fay up. Jane clasped her with arms suddenly strong. "They're gainin'," went on Lassiter, as he watched the pursuing riders. "But we'll beat them yet."

  Turning, with Jane's bridle in his hand, he was about to start when he saw the saddlebag on the fallen horse.

  "I've jest about time," he muttered, and with swift fingers that did not blunder or fumble he loosened the bag and threw it over his shoulder. Then he started to run, leading Jane's horse, and he ran, and trotted, and walked, and ran again. Close ahead now Jane saw a rise of bare rock. Lassiter reached it, searched along the base, and, finding a low place, dragged the weary horse up and over round, smooth stone. Looking backward, Jane saw Tull's white horse not a mile distant, with rid ers strung out in a long line behind him. Looking forward, she saw more valley to the right, and to the left a towering cliff. Lassiter pulled the horse and kept on.

  Little Fay lay in her arms with wide-open eyes-eyes that were still shadowed by pain, but no longer fixed, glazed in terror. The golden curls blew across Jane's lips; the little hands feebly clasped her arms; a ghost of a troubled, trustful smile hovered around the sweet lips. Jane Withersteen awoke to the spirit of a lioness.

  Lassiter was leading the horse up a smooth slope toward cedar trees of twisted and bleached appearance. Among these he halted.

  "Jane, give me the girl, an' get down," he said. As if it wrenched him, he unbuckled his heavy belt and dropped the empty black guns with a strange air of finality. He then received Fay in his arms and stood a moment, looking backward. Tull's white horse mounted the ridge of round stone, and several bays or blacks followed. "I wonder what he'll think when he sees them empty guns. Jane, bring your saddlebag and climb after me."

  A glistening, wonderful, bare slope with little holes swelled up and up to lose itself in a frowning, yellow cliff. Jane closely watched her steps and climbed behind Lassiter. He moved slowly. Perhaps he was only husbanding his strength. But she saw drops of blood on the stones, and then she knew. They climbed and climbed without looking back. Her breast labored; she began to feel as if little points of fiery steel were penetrating her side into her lungs. She heard the panting of Lassiter, and the quicker panting of the dogs.

  "Wait... here," he said.

  Before her rose a bulge of stone, nicked with little cut steps, and above that a corner of yellow wall, and overhanging that a vast, ponderous cliff. The dogs pattered up, disappeared around the corner. Lassiter mounted the steps with Fay, and he swayed like a drunken man, and he, too, disappeared. But instantly he returned alone and half ran, half slipped down to her. Then from below pealed up hoarse shouts of angry men. Tull and several of his riders had reached the spot where Lassiter had parted with his guns.

  "You'll need that breath... mebbe," said Lassiter, facing downward with glittering eyes. "Now, Jane, the last wag," he went on. "Walk up them little steps. I'll follow an' steady you. Don't think. Jest go. Little Fay's above. Her eyes are open. She jest said to me... `Where's Muvver Jane?"'

  Without a fear or a tremor or a slip or a touch of Lassiter's hand Jane Withersteen walked up that ladder of cut steps. He pushed her around the corner of wall. Fay lay with wide, staring eyes in the shade of a gloomy wall. The dogs waited. Lassiter picked up the child and turned into a dark cleft. It zigzagged. It widened. It opened. Jane was amazed at a wonderfully smooth and steep incline leading up between ruined, splintered, toppling walls. A red haze from the setting sun filled this passage Lassiter climbed with slow, measured steps, and blood dripped from him to make splotches on the white stone. Jane tried not to step in his blood, but was compelled to do it for she found no other footing. The saddlebag began to drag her down; she gasped for breath; she thought her heart was bursting. Slower, slower yet, the rider climbed, whistling as he breathed. The incline widened. Huge pinnacles and monuments of stone stood alone, leaning fearfully. Red sunset haze shone through cracks where the wall had split. Jane did not look high, but she felt the overshadowing of broken rims above. She felt that it was a fearful, menacing place. She climbed on in heartrending effort. And she fell beside Lassiter and Fay at the top of the incline on a narrow, smooth divide.

  He staggered to his feet-staggered to a huge, leaning rock that rested on a small pedestal. He put his hand on it-the hand that had been shot through-and Jane saw blood drip from the ragged hole. Then he fell.

  "Jane... I... can't... do... it," he whispered.

  "What?"

  "Roll the stone. All my... life I've loved... to roll stones... an' now I can't."

  "What of it? You talk strangely... why roll that stone?"

  "I planned to... fetch you here... to roll this stone. See. It'll smash the crags... loosen the walls... close the outlet."

  As Jane Withersteen gazed down that long incline, walled in by crumbling cliffs, awaiting only the slightest jar to make them fall asunder, she saw Tull appear at the bottom and begin to climb. A rider followed himanother-and another.

  "See! Tull! The riders!"

  "Yes. They'll get us... now."

  "Why? Haven't you strength left to roll the stone?"

  "Jane... it ain't that... I've lost my nerve...

  "You? Lassiter!"

  "I wanted to roll it... meant to... but I... can't. Venters's valley is down behind here. We could... live there. But if I roll the stone... we're shut in for always. I don't dare. I'm thinkin' of you."

  "Lassiter! Roll the stone!" she cried.

  Ghastly, with protruding jaw, he arose, tottering, and again he placed the bloody hand on the balancing rock. Jane Withersteen gazed from him down the passageway. Tull was climbing. Almost, she thought, she saw his dark, relentless face. Behind him more riders climbed. What did they mean for Fay-for Lassiterfor herself?

  "Roll the stone!... Lassiter, I love you!"

  Under all his deathly pallor, and the blood, and the iron of seared cheek and lined brow, worked a great change. He placed both hands on the rock, and then leaned his shoulder there and braced his powerful body.

  "Roll the stone!"

  It stirred, it groaned, it grated, it moved-and with a slow grind, as of wrathful relief, began to lean. It had waited ages to fall and now was slow in starting. Wondrously it heaved, with sullen low roar as it loosened its hold, to sway, to fall with loud crunch. Then, as if suddenly instinct with life, it leaped hurtlingly down to alight on the steep incline, to bound swifter into the air, to gather momentum, to plunge into the lofty, leaning crag below. The crag thundered into atoms. A wave of air-a splitting shock! Dust shrouded the sunset red of shaking rims; dust shrouded Tull as he fell on his knees with flinging, uplifted arms. Shafts and monuments and sections of wall fell majestically. Deep, weird, detonating, deafening boom of doom!

  The outlet to Deception Pass closed forever.

  Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Gray at Zanesville, Ohio, in 1872
. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 with a degree in dentistry. He practiced in New York City while striving to make a living by writing. He married Lina Elise Roth in 1905 and with her financial assistance he published his first novel himself, Betty Zane (1903). Closing his dental office, the Greys moved into a cottage on the Delaware River, near Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. Grey took his first trip to Arizona in 1907 and, following his return, wrote The Heritage of the Desert (1910). The profound effect that the desert had had on him was so vibrantly captured that it still comes alive for a reader. Grey couldn't have been more fortunate in his choice of a mate. Trained in English at Hunter College, Lina Grey proofread every manuscript Grey wrote, polished his prose, and later she managed their financial affairs. Grey's early novels were serialized in pulp magazines, but by 1918 he had graduated to the slick magazine market. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune and, with 109 films based on his work, Grey set a record yet to be equaled by any other author. Zane Grey was not a realistic writer, but rather one who charted the interiors of the soul through encounters with the wilderness. He provided characters no less memorable than one finds in Balzac, Dickens, or Thomas Mann, and they have a vital story to tell. "There was so much unexpressed feeling that could not be entirely portrayed," Loren Grey, Grey's younger son and a noted psychologist, once recalled, "that, in later years, he would weep when re-reading one of his own books." Perhaps, too, closer to the mark, Zane Grey may have wept at how his attempts at being truthful to his muse had so often been essentially altered by his editors, so that no one might ever be able to read his stories as he had intended them. It may be said of Zane Grey that, more than mere adventure tales, he fashioned psycho-dramas about the odyssey of the human soul. If his stories seem not always to be of the stuff of the mundane world, without what his stories do touch, the human world has little meaning-which may go a long way to explain the hold he has had on an enraptured reading public ever since his first Western novel in 1910.