Riders of the Purple Sage

Southern Utah, 1871. Jane Withersteen owns the little border village of Cottonwoods — its spring, its cattle, its houses — and she has always believed that her church and her people are good. Two men mean to prove her wrong. Elder Tull wants to marry her; Bishop Dyer wants her fortune inside the church; and both want her to stop befriending Bern Venters, a young rider from outside their faith whom they have already stripped of everything he owned. On the afternoon they drag Venters out to whip him, a stranger in black leather rides out of the sage. He is Lassiter, the most feared gunman on the border, and he has come looking for the grave of a woman named Milly Erne — and for the man who destroyed her.

What follows is a slow, patient ruin. Jane's riders are called away. Her red herd is driven off by the outlaw Oldring. Her white herd is stampeded. Her servants become spies, her papers disappear, her beloved black racers are stolen, and the friends who stay loyal to her are killed for it. Jane will not marry Tull and will not let Lassiter kill on her behalf, so she loses everything, piece by piece, keeping only an orphan child named Fay.

Meanwhile Venters rides down into Deception Pass to find where Oldring hides, and shoots the outlaw's famous Masked Rider — who turns out to be a girl. He carries her, dying, up a stair cut into a cliff a thousand years ago, past a huge balanced stone, into a hidden green valley no one has entered since. There he nurses her back to life, learns that her name is Bess, and falls in love with her.

The two stories run toward each other: a killing horse race, a shot fired in a saloon that Venters will regret for the rest of his life, a child stolen out of Jane's own garden, and a small gold locket that answers the question Lassiter has carried for eighteen years. It ends at the head of the Pass, with riders climbing and one balanced stone waiting to fall.