Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
Etext prepared by Bill Brewer, billbrewer@ttu.edu





RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

ZANE GREY




CHAPTER I. LASSITER

A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and
clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over
the sage.

Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and
troubled eyes. A rider had just left her and it was his message
that held her thoughtful and almost sad, awaiting the churchmen
who were coming to resent and attack her right to befriend a
Gentile.

She wondered if the unrest and strife that had lately come to the
little village of Cottonwoods was to involve her. And then she
sighed, remembering that her father had founded this remotest
border settlement of southern Utah and that he had left it to
her. She owned all the ground and many of the cottages.
Withersteen House was hers, and the great ranch, with its
thousands of cattle, and the swiftest horses of the sage. To her
belonged Amber Spring, the water which gave verdure and beauty to
the village and made living possible on that wild purple upland
waste. She could not escape being involved by whatever befell
Cottonwoods.

That year, 1871, had marked a change which had been gradually
coming in the lives of the peace-loving Mormons of the border.
Glaze--Stone Bridge--Sterling, villages to the north, had risen
against the invasion of Gentile settlers and the forays of
rustlers. There had been opposition to the one and fighting with
the other. And now Cottonwoods had begun to wake and bestir
itself and grown hard.

Jane prayed that the tranquillity and sweetness of her life would
not be permanently disrupted. She meant to do so much more for
her people than she had done. She wanted the sleepy quiet
pastoral days to last always. Trouble between the Mormons and the
Gentiles of the community would make her unhappy. She was
Mormon-born, and she was a friend to poor and unfortunate
Gentiles. She wished only to go on doing good and being happy.
And she thought of what that great ranch meant to her. She loved
it all--the grove of cottonwoods, the old stone house, the
amber-tinted water, and the droves of shaggy, dusty horses and
mustangs, the sleek, clean-limbed, blooded racers, and the
browsing herds of cattle and the lean, sun-browned riders of the
sage.

While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward
change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and
it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the
open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight
intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low
swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely
cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at
long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual
slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple
and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that
faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color
and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of
canyons from which rose an up-Hinging of the earth, not
mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and
fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments.
Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.