Publisher's Synopsis
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 quietpastoral days to last always. Trouble between the Mormons and the Gentiles of the communitywould make her unhappy. She was Mormon-born, and she was a friend to poor and unfortunateGentiles. She wished only to go on doing good and being happy. And she thought of what that greatranch meant to her. She loved it all-the grove of cottonwoods, the old stone house, the ambertinted water, and the droves of shaggy, dusty horses and mustangs, the sleek, clean-limbed, bloodedracers, 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 burrobroke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the opencorrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolledbefore her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar-trees, fewand far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up thegradual 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 andbeauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging ofthe 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 afternoonshadow
