“Well, it’d be no news to me.  I know Mormons.  I’ve seen their women’s strange love en’ patience en’ sacrifice an’ silence en’ whet I call madness for their idea of God.  An’ over against that I’ve seen the tricks of men.  They work hand in hand, all together, an’ in the dark.  No man can hold out against them, unless he takes to packin’ guns.  For Mormons are slow to kill.  That’s the only good I ever seen in their religion.  Venters, take this from me, these Mormons ain’t just right in their minds.  Else could a Mormon marry one woman when he already has a wife, an’ call it duty?”

“Lassiter, you think as I think,” returned Venters.

“How’d it come then that you never throwed a gun on Tull or some of them?” inquired the rider, curiously.

“Jane pleaded with me, begged me to be patient, to overlook.  She even took my guns from me.  I lost all before I knew it,” replied Venters, with the red color in his face.  “But, Lassiter, listen.  “Out of the wreck I saved a Winchester, two Colts, and plenty of shells.  I packed these down into Deception Pass.  There, almost every day for six months, I have practiced with my rifle till the barrel burnt my hands.  Practised the draw—­the firing of a Colt, hour after hour!”

“Now that’s interestin’ to me,” said Lassiter, with a quick uplift of his head and a concentration of his gray gaze on Venters.  “Could you throw a gun before you began that practisin’?”

“Yes.  And now...”  Venters made a lightning-swift movement.

Lassiter smiled, and then his bronzed eyelids narrowed till his eyes seemed mere gray slits.  “You’ll kill Tull!” He did not question; he affirmed.

“I promised Jane Withersteen I’d try to avoid Tull.  I’ll keep my word.  But sooner or later Tull and I will meet.  As I feel now, if he even looks at me I’ll draw!”

“I reckon so.  There’ll be hell down there, presently.”  He paused a moment and flicked a sage-brush with his quirt.  “Venters, seein’ as you’re considerable worked up, tell me Milly Erne’s story.”

Venters’s agitation stilled to the trace of suppressed eagerness in Lassiter’s query.

“Milly Erne’s story?  Well, Lassiter, I’ll tell you what I know.  Milly Erne had been in Cottonwoods years when I first arrived there, and most of what I tell you happened before my arrival.  I got to know her pretty well.  She was a slip of a woman, and crazy on religion.  I conceived an idea that I never mentioned—­I thought she was at heart more Gentile than Mormon.  But she passed as a Mormon, and certainly she had the Mormon woman’s locked lips.  You know, in every Mormon village there are women who seem mysterious to us, but about Milly there was more than the ordinary mystery.  When she came to Cottonwoods she had a beautiful little girl whom she loved passionately.  Milly was not known openly in Cottonwoods as a Mormon wife.  That she really was a Mormon wife I have no doubt.  Perhaps the Mormon’s other wife