ght
conscious smile. For she was thinking of more than the desire to be fair
in her own eyes, in those of her friend; she wondered if she were to
seem fair in the eyes of this Lassiter, this man whose name had crossed
the long, wild brakes of stone and plains of sage, this gentle-voiced,
sad-faced man who was a hater and a killer of Mormons. It was not
now her usual half-conscious vain obsession that actuated her as she
hurriedly changed her riding-dress to one of white, and then looked long
at the stately form with its gracious contours, at the fair face
with its strong chin and full firm lips, at the dark-blue, proud, and
passionate eyes.

"If by some means I can keep him here a few days, a week--he will never
kill another Mormon," she mused. "Lassiter!... I shudder when I think
of that name, of him. But when I look at the man I forget who he is--I
almost like him. I remember only that he saved Bern. He has suffered. I
wonder what it was--did he love a Mormon woman once? How splendidly he
championed us poor misunderstood souls! Somehow he knows--much."

Jane Withersteen joined her guests and bade them to her board.
Dismissing her woman, she waited upon them with her own hands. It was a
bountiful supper and a strange company. On her right sat the ragged
and half-starved Venters; and though blind eyes could have seen what
he counted for in the sum of her happiness, yet he looked the gloomy
outcast his allegiance had made him, and about him there was the shadow
of the ruin presaged by Tull. On her left sat black-leather-garbed
Lassiter looking like a man in a dream. Hunger was not with him, nor
composure, nor speech, and when he twisted in frequent unquiet movements
the heavy guns that he had not removed knocked against the table-legs.
If it had been otherwise possible to forget the presence of Lassiter
those telling little jars would have rendered it unlikely. And Jane
Withersteen talked and smiled and laughed with all the dazzling play
of lips and eyes that a beautiful, daring woman could summon to her
purpose.

When the meal ended, and the men pushed back their chairs, she leaned
closer to Lassiter and looked square into his eyes.

"Why did you come to Cottonwoods?"

Her question seemed to break a spell. The rider arose as if he had just
remembered himself and had tarried longer than his wont.

"Ma'am, I have hunted all over the southern Utah and Nevada
for--somethin'. An' through your name I learned where to f