Riders of the Purple Sage

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If he were burdened he did not feel it. From time to time, when
he passed out of the black lines of shade into the wan starlight,
he glanced at the white face of the girl lying in his arms. She
had not awakened from her sleep or stupor. He did not rest until
he cleared the black gate of the canyon. Then he leaned against a
stone breast-high to him and gently released the girl from his
hold. His brow and hair and the palms of his hands were wet, and
there was a kind of nervous contraction of his muscles. They
seemed to ripple and string tense. He had a desire to hurry and
no sense of fatigue. A wind blew the scent of sage in his face.
The first early blackness of night passed with the brightening of
the stars. Somewhere back on his trail a coyote yelped, splitting
the dead silence. Venters's faculties seemed singularly
acute.

He lifted the girl again and pressed on. The valley better
traveling than the canyon. It was lighter, freer of sage, and
there were no rocks. Soon, out of the pale gloom shone a still
paler thing, and that was the low swell of slope. Venters mounted
it and his dogs walked beside him. Once upon the stone he slowed
to snail pace, straining his sight to avoid the pockets and
holes. Foot by foot he went up. The weird cedars, like great
demons and witches chained to the rock and writhing in silent
anguish, loomed up with wide and twisting naked arms. Venters
crossed this belt of cedars, skirted the upper border, and
recognized the tree he had marked, even before he saw his waving
scarf.

Here he knelt and deposited the girl gently, feet first and
slowly laid her out full length. What he feared was to reopen one
of her wounds. If he gave her a violent jar, or slipped and fell!
But the supreme confidence so strangely felt that night admitted
no such blunders.

The slope before him seemed to swell into obscurity to lose its
definite outline in a misty, opaque cloud that shaded into the
over-shadowing wall. He scanned the rim where the serrated points
speared the sky, and he found the zigzag crack. It was dim, only
a shade lighter than the dark ramparts, but he distinguished it,
and that served.

Lifting the girl, he stepped upward, closely attending to the
nature of the path under his feet. After a few steps he stopped
to mark his line with the crack in the rim. The dogs clung closer
to him. While chasing the rabbit this slope had appeared
interminable to him; now, burdened as he was, he did not think of
length or height or toil. He remembered only to avoid a misstep
and to keep his direction. He climbed on, with frequent stops to
watch the rim, and before he dreamed of gaining the bench he
bumped his knees into it, and saw, in the dim gray light, his
rifle and the rabbit. He had come straight up without mishap or
swerving off his course, and his shut teeth unlocked.

As he laid the girl down in the shallow hollow of the little
ridge with her white face upturned, she opened her eyes. Wide,
staring black, at once like both the night and the stars, they
made her face seem still whiter.

"Is--it--you?" she asked, faintly.

"Yes," replied Venters.

"Oh! Where--are we?"

"I'm taking you to a safe place where no one will ever find you.
I must climb a little here and call the dogs. Don't be afraid.
I'll soon come for you."

She said no more. Her eyes watched him steadily for a moment and
then closed. Venters pulled off his boots and then felt for the
little steps in the rock. The shade of the cliff above obscured
the point he wanted to gain, but he could see dimly a few feet
before him. What he had attempted with care he now went at with
surpassing lightness. Buoyant, rapid, sure, he attained the
corner of wall and slipped around it. Here he could not see a
hand before his face, so he groped along, found a little flat
space, and there removed the saddle-bags. The lasso he took back
with him to the corner and looped the noose over the spur of
rock.

"Ring--Whitie--come," he called, softly.

Low whines came up from below.

"Here! Come, Whitie--Ring," he repeated, this time sharply.

Then followed scraping of claws and pattering of feet; and out of
the gray gloom below him swiftly climbed the dogs to reach his
side and pass beyond.

Venters descended, holding to the lasso. He tested its strength
by throwing all his weight upon it. Then he gathered the girl up,
and, holding her securely in his left arm, he began to climb, at
every few steps jerking his right hand upward along the lasso. It
sagged at each forward movement he made, but he balanced himself
lightly during the interval when he lacked the support of a taut
rope. He climbed as if he had wings, the strength of a giant, and
knew not the sense of fear. The sharp corner of cliff seemed to
cut out of the darkness. He reached it and the protruding shelf,
and then, entering the black shade of the notch, he moved blindly
but surely to the place where he had left the saddle-bags. He
heard the dogs, though he could not see them. Once more he
carefully placed the girl at his feet. Then, on hands and knees,
he went over the little flat space, feeling for stones. He
removed a number, and, scraping the deep dust into a heap, he
unfolded the outer blanket from around the girl and laid her upon
this bed. Then he went down the slope again for his boots, rifle,
and the rabbit, and, bringing also his lasso with him, he made
short work of that trip.

"Are--you--there?" The girl's voice came low from the blackness.

"Yes," he replied, and was conscious that his laboring breast
made speech difficult.

"Are we--in a cave?"

"Yes."

"Oh, listen!...The waterfall!...I hear it! You've brought me
back!"

Venters heard a murmuring moan that one moment swelled to a pitch
almost softly shrill and the next lulled to a low, almost
inaudible sigh.

"That's--wind blowing--in the--cliffs," he panted. "You're far
from Oldring's--canyon."

The effort it cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme
lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he
lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last
before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body
one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting
veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he
had begun to rest.

Rest came to him that night, but no sleep. Sleep he did not want.
The hours of strained effort were now as if they had never been,
and he wanted to think. Earlier in the day he had dismissed an
inexplicable feeling of change; but now, when there was no longer
demand on his cunning and strength and he had time to think, he
could not catch the illusive thing that had sadly perplexed as
well as elevated his spirit.

Above him, through a V-shaped cleft in the dark rim of the cliff,
shone the lustrous stars that had been his lonely accusers for a
long, long year. To-night they were different. He studied them.
Larger, whiter, more radiant they seemed; but that was not the
difference he meant. Gradually it came to him that the
distinction was not one he saw, but one he felt. In this he
divined as much of the baffling change as he thought would be
revealed to him then. And as he lay there, with the singing of
the cliff-winds in his ears, the white stars above the dark, bold
vent, the difference which he felt was that he was no longer
alone.

CHAPTER IX. SILVER SPRUCE AND ASPENS

The rest of that night seemed to Venters only a few moments of
starlight, a dark overcasting of sky, an hour or so of gray
gloom, and then the lighting of dawn.

When he had bestirred himself, feeding the hungry dogs and
breaking his long fast, and had repacked his saddle-bags, it was
clear daylight, though the sun had not tipped the yellow wall in
the east. He concluded to make the climb and descent into
Surprise Valley in one trip. To that end he tied his blanket upon
Ring and gave Whitie the extra lasso and the rabbit to carry.
Then, with the rifle and saddle-bags slung upon his back, he took
up the girl. She did not awaken from heavy slumber.

That climb up under the rugged, menacing brows of the broken
cliffs, in the face of a grim, leaning boulder that seemed to be
weary of its age-long wavering, was a tax on strength and nerve
that Venters felt equally with something sweet and strangely
exulting in its accomplishment. He did not pause until he gained
the narrow divide and there he rested. Balancing Rock loomed
huge, cold in the gray light of dawn, a thing without life, yet
it spoke silently to Venters: "I am waiting to plunge down, to
shatter and crash, roar and boom, to bury your trail, and close
forever the outlet to Deception Pass!"

On the descent of the other side Venters had easy going, but was
somewhat concerned because Whitie appeared to have succumbed to
temptation, and while carrying the rabbit was also chewing on it.
And Ring evidently regarded this as an injury to himself,
especially as he had carried the heavier load. Presently he
snapped at one end of the rabbit and refused to let go. But his
action prevented Whitie from further misdoing, and then the two
dogs pattered down, carrying the rabbit between them.

Venters turned out of the gorge, and suddenly paused stock-still,
astounded at the scene before him. The curve of the great stone
bridge had caught the sunrise, and through the magnificent arch
burst a glorious stream of gold that shone with a long slant down
into the center of Surprise Valley. Only through the arch did any
sunlight pass, so that all the rest of the valley lay still
asleep, dark green, mysterious, shadowy, merging its level into
walls as misty and soft as morning clouds.

Venters then descended, passing through the arch, looking up at
its tremendous height and sweep. It spanned the opening to
Surprise Valley, stretching in almost perfect curve from rim to
rim. Even in his hurry and concern Venters could not but feel its
majesty, and the thought came to him that the cliff-dwellers must
have regarded it as an object of worship.

Down, down, down Venters strode, more and more feeling the weight
of his burden as he descended, and still the valley lay below
him. As all other canyons and coves and valleys had deceived him,
so had this deep, nestling oval. At length he passed beyond the
slope of weathered stone that spread fan-shape from the arch, and
encountered a grassy terrace running to the right and about on a
level with the tips of the oaks and cottonwoods below. Scattered
here and there upon this shelf were clumps of aspens, and he
walked through them into a glade that surpassed in beauty and
adaptability for a wild home, any place he had ever seen. Silver
spruces bordered the base of a precipitous wall that rose
loftily. Caves indented its surface, and there were no detached
ledges or weathered sections that might dislodge a stone. The
level ground, beyond the spruces, dropped down into a little
ravine. This was one dense line of slender aspens from which came
the low splashing of water. And the terrace, lying open to the
west, afforded unobstructed view of the valley of green treetops.

For his camp Venters chose a shady, grassy plot between the
silver spruces and the cliff. Here, in the stone wall, had been
wonderfully carved by wind or washed by water several deep caves
above the level of the terrace. They were clean, dry, roomy.

He cut spruce boughs and made a bed in the largest cave and laid
the girl there. The first intimation that he had of her being
aroused from sleep or lethargy was a low call for water.

He hurried down into the ravine with his canteen. It was a
shallow, grass-green place with aspens growing up everywhere. To
his delight he found a tiny brook of swift-running water. Its
faint tinge of amber reminded him of the spring at Cottonwoods,
and the thought gave him a little shock. The water was so cold it
made his fingers tingle as he dipped the canteen. Having returned
to the cave, he was glad to see the girl drink thirstily. This
time he noted that she could raise her head slightly without his
help.

"You were thirsty," he said. "It's good water. I've found a fine
place. Tell me--how do you feel?"

"There's pain--here," she replied, and moved her hand to her left
side.

"Why, that's strange! Your wounds are on your right side. I
believe you're hungry. Is the pain a kind of dull ache--a
gnawing?"

"It's like--that."

"Then it's hunger." Venters laughed, and suddenly caught himself
with a quick breath and felt again the little shock. When had he
laughed? "It's hunger," he went on. "I've had that gnaw many a
time. I've got it now. But you mustn't eat. You can have all the
water you want, but no food just yet."

"Won't I--starve?"

"No, people don't starve easily. I've discovered that. You must
lie perfectly still and rest and sleep--for days."

"My hands--are dirty; my face feels--so hot and sticky; my boots
hurt." It was her longest speech as yet, and it trailed off in a
whisper.

"Well, I'm a fine nurse!"

It annoyed him that he had never thought of these things. But
then, awaiting her death and thinking of her comfort were vastly
different matters. He unwrapped the blanket which covered her.
What a slender girl she was! No wonder he had been able to carry
her miles and pack her up that slippery ladder of stone. Her
boots were of soft, fine leather, reaching clear to her knees. He
recognized the make as one of a boot- maker in Sterling. Her
spurs, that he had stupidly neglected to remove, consisted of
silver frames and gold chains, and the rowels, large as silver
dollars, were fancifully engraved. The boots slipped off rather
hard. She wore heavy woollen rider's stockings, half length, and
these were pulled up over the ends of her short trousers. Venters
took off the stockings to note her little feet were red and
swollen. He bathed them. Then he removed his scarf and bathed her
face and hands.

"I must see your wounds now," he said, gently.

She made no reply, but watched him steadily as he opened her
blouse and untied the bandage. His strong fingers trembled a
little as he removed it. If the wounds had reopened! A chill
struck him as he saw the angry red bullet-mark, and a tiny stream
of blood winding from it down her white breast. Very carefully he
lifted her to see that the wound in her back had closed
perfectly. Then he washed the blood from her breast, bathed the
wound, and left it unbandaged, open to the air.

Her eyes thanked him.

"Listen," he said, earnestly. "I've had some wounds, and I've
seen many. I know a little about them. The hole in your back has
closed. If you lie still three days the one in your breast will
close and you'll be safe. The danger from hemorrhage will be
over."

He had spoken with earnest sincerity, almost eagerness.

"Why--do you--want me--to get well?" she asked, wonderingly.

The simple question seemed unanswerable except on grounds of
humanity. But the circumstances under which he had shot this
strange girl, the shock and realization, the waiting for death,
the hope, had resulted in a condition of mind wherein Venters
wanted her to live more than he had ever wanted anything. Yet he
could not tell why. He believed the killing of the rustler and
the subsequent excitement had disturbed him. For how else could
he explain the throbbing of his brain, the heat of his blood, the
undefined sense of full hours, charged, vibrant with pulsating
mystery where once they had dragged in loneliness?

"I shot you," he said, slowly, "and I want you to get well so I
shall not have killed a woman. But--for your own sake, too--"

A terrible bitterness darkened her eyes, and her lips quivered.

"Hush," said Venters. "You've talked too much already."

In her unutterable bitterness he saw a darkness of mood that
could not have been caused by her present weak and feverish
state. She hated the life she had led, that she probably had been
compelled to lead. She had suffered some unforgivable wrong at
the hands of Oldring. With that conviction Venters felt a shame
throughout his body, and it marked the rekindling of fierce anger
and ruthlessness. In the past long year he had nursed resentment.
He had hated the wilderness--the loneliness of the uplands. He
had waited for something to come to pass. It had come. Like an
Indian stealing horses he had skulked into the recesses of the
canyons. He had found Oldring's retreat; he had killed a rustler;
he had shot an unfortunate girl, then had saved her from this
unwitting act, and he meant to save her from the consequent
wasting of blood, from fever and weakness. Starvation he had to
fight for her and for himself. Where he had been sick at the
letting of blood, now he remembered it in grim, cold calm. And as
he lost that softness of nature, so he lost his fear of men. He
would watch for Oldring, biding his time, and he would kill this
great black-bearded rustler who had held a girl in bondage, who
had used her to his infamous ends.

Venters surmised this much of the change in him--idleness had
passed; keen, fierce vigor flooded his mind and body; all that
had happened to him at Cottonwoods seemed remote and hard to
recall; the difficulties and perils of the present absorbed him,
held him in a kind of spell.

First, then, he fitted up the little cave adjoining the girl's
room for his own comfort and use. His next work was to build a
fireplace of stones and to gather a store of wood. That done, he
spilled the contents of his saddle-bags upon the grass and took
stock. His outfit consisted of a small-handled axe, a
hunting-knife, a large number of cartridges for rifle or
revolver, a tin plate, a cup, and a fork and spoon, a quantity of
dried beef and dried fruits, and small canvas bags containing
tea, sugar, salt, and pepper. For him alone this supply would
have been bountiful to begin a sojourn in the wilderness, but he
was no longer alone. Starvation in the uplands was not an
unheard-of thing; he did not, however, worry at all on that
score, and feared only his possible inability to supply the needs
of a woman in a weakened and extremely delicate condition.

If there was no game in the valley--a contingency he doubted--it
would not be a great task for him to go by night to Oldring's
herd and pack out a calf. The exigency of the moment was to
ascertain if there were game in Surprise Valley. Whitie still
guarded the dilapidated rabbit, and Ring slept near by under a
spruce. Venters called Ring and went to the edge of the terrace,
and there halted to survey the valley.

He was prepared to find it larger than his unstudied glances had
made it appear; for more than a casual idea of dimensions and a
hasty conception of oval shape and singular beauty he had not had
time. Again the felicity of the name he had given the valley
struck him forcibly. Around the red perpendicular walls, except
under the great arc of stone, ran a terrace fringed at the
cliff-base by silver spruces; below that first terrace sloped
another wider one densely overgrown with aspens, and the center
of the valley was a level circle of oaks and alders, with the
glittering green line of willows and cottonwood dividing it in
half. Venters saw a number and variety of birds flitting among
the trees. To his left, facing the stone bridge, an enormous
cavern opened in the wall; and low down, just above the
tree-tops, he made out a long shelf of cliff-dwellings, with
little black, staring windows or doors. Like eyes they were, and
seemed to watch him. The few cliff-dwellings he had seen- -all
ruins--had left him with haunting memory of age and solitude and
of something past. He had come, in a way, to be a cliff-dweller
himself, and those silent eyes would look down upon him, as if in
surprise that after thousands of years a man had invaded the
valley. Venters felt sure that he was the only white man who had
ever walked under the shadow of the wonderful stone bridge, down
into that wonderful valley with its circle of caves and its
terraced rings of silver spruce and aspens.

The dog growled below and rushed into the forest. Venters ran
down the declivity to enter a zone of light shade streaked with
sunshine. The oak-trees were slender, none more than half a foot
thick, and they grew close together, intermingling their
branches. Ring came running back with a rabbit in his mouth.
Venters took the rabbit and, holding the dog near him, stole
softly on. There were fluttering of wings among the branches and
quick bird-notes, and rustling of dead leaves and rapid
patterings. Venters crossed well-worn trails marked with fresh
tracks; and when he had stolen on a little farther he saw many
birds and running quail, and more rabbits than he could count. He
had not penetrated the forest of oaks for a hundred yards, had
not approached anywhere near the line of willows and cottonwoods
which he knew grew along a stream. But he had seen enough to know
that Surprise Valley was the home of many wild creatures.

Venters returned to camp. He skinned the rabbits, and gave the
dogs the one they had quarreled over, and the skin of this he
dressed and hung up to dry, feeling that he would like to keep
it. It was a particularly rich, furry pelt with a beautiful white
tail. Venters remembered that but for the bobbing of that white
tail catching his eye he would not have espied the rabbit, and he
would never have discovered Surprise Valley. Little incidents of
chance like this had turned him here and there in Deception Pass;
and now they had assumed to him the significance and direction of
destiny.

His good fortune in the matter of game at hand brought to his
mind the necessity of keeping it in the valley. Therefore he took
the axe and cut bundles of aspens and willows, and packed them up
under the bridge to the narrow outlet of the gorge. Here he began
fashioning a fence, by driving aspens into the ground and lacing
them fast with willows. Trip after trip he made down for more
building material, and the afternoon had passed when he finished
the work to his satisfaction. Wildcats might scale the fence, but
no coyote could come in to search for prey, and no rabbits or
other small game could escape from the valley.

Upon returning to camp he set about getting his supper at ease,
around a fine fire, without hurry or fear of discovery. After
hard work that had definite purpose, this freedom and comfort
gave him peculiar satisfaction. He caught himself often, as he
kept busy round the camp-fire, stopping to glance at the quiet
form in the cave, and at the dogs stretched cozily near him, and
then out across the beautiful valley. The present was not yet
real to him.

While he ate, the sun set beyond a dip in the rim of the curved
wall. As the morning sun burst wondrously through a grand arch
into this valley, in a golden, slanting shaft, so the evening
sun, at the moment of setting, shone through a gap of cliffs,
sending down a broad red burst to brighten the oval with a blaze
of fire. To Venters both sunrise and sunset were unreal.

A cool wind blew across the oval, waving the tips of oaks, and
while the light lasted, fluttering the aspen leaves into millions
of facets of red, and sweeping the graceful spruces. Then with
the wind soon came a shade and a darkening, and suddenly the
valley was gray. Night came there quickly after the sinking of
the sun. Venters went softly to look at the girl. She slept, and
her breathing was quiet and slow. He lifted Ring into the cave,
with stern whisper for him to stay there on guard. Then he drew
the blanket carefully over her and returned to the camp-fire.

Though exceedingly tired, he was yet loath to yield to lassitude,
but this night it was not from listening, watchful vigilance; it
was from a desire to realize his position. The details of his
wild environment seemed the only substance of a strange dream. He
saw the darkening rims, the gray oval turning black, the
undulating surface of forest, like a rippling lake, and the
spear-pointed spruces. He heard the flutter of aspen leaves and
the soft, continuous splash of falling water. The melancholy note
of a canyon bird broke clear and lonely from the high cliffs.
Venters had no name for this night singer, and he had never seen
one, but the few notes, always pealing out just at darkness, were
as familiar to him as the canyon silence. Then they ceased, and
the rustle of leaves and the murmur of water hushed in a growing
sound that Venters fancied was not of earth. Neither had he a
name for this, only it was inexpressibly wild and sweet. The
thought came that it might be a moan of the girl in her last
outcry of life, and he felt a tremor shake him. But no! This
sound was not human, though it was like despair. He began to
doubt his sensitive perceptions, to believe that he half-dreamed
what he thought he heard. Then the sound swelled with the
strengthening of the breeze, and he realized it was the singing
of the wind in the cliffs.

By and by a drowsiness overcame him, and Venters began to nod,
half asleep, with his back against a spruce. Rousing himself and
calling Whitie, he went to the cave. The girl lay barely visible
in the dimness. Ring crouched beside her, and the patting of his
tail on the stone assured Venters that the dog was awake and
faithful to his duty. Venters sought his own bed of fragrant
boughs; and as he lay back, somehow grateful for the comfort and
safety, the night seemed to steal away from him and he sank
softly into intangible space and rest and slumber.

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