“Don’t—­look—­back!” he said, and his voice, too, was not clear.

Facing straight ahead, seeing only the waving, shadowy sage, Jane held out her gauntleted hand, to feel it enclosed in strong clasp.  So she rode on without a backward glance at the beautiful grove of Cottonwoods.  She did not seem to think of the past of what she left forever, but of the color and mystery and wildness of the sage-slope leading down to Deception Pass, and of the future.  She watched the shadows lengthen down the slope; she felt the cool west wind sweeping by from the rear; and she wondered at low, yellow clouds sailing swiftly over her and beyond.

“Don’t look—­back!” said Lassiter.

Thick-driving belts of smoke traveled by on the wind, and with it came a strong, pungent odor of burning wood.

Lassiter had fired Withersteen House!  But Jane did not look back.

A misty veil obscured the clear, searching gaze she had kept steadfastly upon the purple slope and the dim lines of canyons.  It passed, as passed the rolling clouds of smoke, and she saw the valley deepening into the shades of twilight.  Night came on, swift as the fleet racers, and stars peeped out to brighten and grow, and the huge, windy, eastern heave of sage-level paled under a rising moon and turned to silver.  Blanched in moonlight, the sage yet seemed to hold its hue of purple and was infinitely more wild and lonely.  So the night hours wore on, and Jane Withersteen never once looked back.

CHAPTER XXI.  BLACK STAR AND NIGHT

The time had come for Venters and Bess to leave their retreat.  They were at great pains to choose the few things they would be able to carry with them on the journey out of Utah.

“Bern, whatever kind of a pack’s this, anyhow?” questioned Bess, rising from her work with reddened face.

Venters, absorbed in his own task, did not look up at all, and in reply said he had brought so much from Cottonwoods that he did not recollect the half of it.

“A woman packed this!” Bess exclaimed.

He scarcely caught her meaning, but the peculiar tone of her voice caused him instantly to rise, and he saw Bess on her knees before an open pack which he recognized as the one given him by Jane.

“By George!” he ejaculated, guiltily, and then at sight of Bess’s face he laughed outright.

“A woman packed this,” she repeated, fixing woeful, tragic eyes on him.

“Well, is that a crime?’

“There—­there is a woman, after all!”

“Now Bess—­”

“You’ve lied to me!”

Then and there Venters found it imperative to postpone work for the present.  All her life Bess had been isolated, but she had inherited certain elements of the eternal feminine.

“But there was a woman and you did lie to me,” she kept repeating, after he had explained.

“What of that?  Bess, I’ll get angry at you in a moment.  Remember you’ve been pent up all your life.  I venture to say that if you’d been out in the world you d have had a dozen sweethearts and have told many a lie before this.”