"I'll take it here--if I must," said Venters. "But by God!--Tull
you'd better kill me outright. That'll be a dear whipping for you
and your praying Mormons. You'll make me another Lassiter!"
The strange glow, the austere light which radiated from Tull's
face, might have been a holy joy at the spiritual conception of
exalted duty. But there was something more in him, barely hidden,
a something personal and sinister, a deep of himself, an
engulfing abyss. As his religious mood was fanatical and
inexorable, so would his physical hate be merciless.
"Elder, I--I repent my words," Jane faltered. The religion in
her, the long habit of obedience, of humility, as well as agony
of fear, spoke in her voice. "Spare the boy!" she
whispered.
"You can't save him now," replied Tull stridently.
Her head was bowing to the inevitable. She was grasping the
truth, when suddenly there came, in inward constriction, a
hardening of gentle forces within her breast. Like a steel bar it
was stiffening all that had been soft and weak in her. She felt a
birth in her of something new and unintelligible. Once more her
strained gaze sought the sage-slopes. Jane Withersteen loved that
wild and purple wilderness. In times of sorrow it had been her
strength, in happiness its beauty was her continual delight. In
her extremity she found herself murmuring, "Whence cometh my
help!" It was a prayer, as if forth from those lonely purple
reaches and walls of red and clefts of blue might ride a fearless
man, neither creed-bound nor creed-mad, who would hold up a
restraining hand in the faces of her ruthless people.
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