Chapter XV: Shadows on the Sage-Slope
Jane’s heart sank as she tried to recognize Venters in the rider. Something familiar struck her in the lofty stature in the sweep of powerful shoulders. But this bearded, longhaired, unkempt man, who wore ragged clothes patched with pieces of skin, and boots that showed bare legs and feet — this dusty, dark, and wild rider could not possibly be Venters. [. . . .]
“Jane — Jane, it’s good to see you! Hello, Lassiter! Yes, it’s Venters.”
Like rough iron his hard hand crushed Jane’s. In it she felt the difference she saw in him. Wild, rugged, unshorn — yet how splendid! He had gone away a boy — he had returned a man. He appeared taller, wider of shoulder, deeper-chested, more powerfully built. But was that only her fancy — he had always been a young giant — was the change one of spirit? He might have been absent for years, proven by fire and steel, grown like Lassiter, strong and cool and sure. His eyes — were they keener, more flashing than before? — met hers with clear, frank, warm regard, in which perplexity was not, nor discontent, nor pain. [. . . .]
Here Lassiter paused while he turned his sombrero round and round, in his familiar habit, and his eyes had the look of a man seeing over again some thrilling spectacle, and under his red bronze there was strange animation.
“Like a shot, then, Venters told Tull that the friendship between you an’ him was all over, an’ he was leaving your place. He said you’d both of you broken off in the hope of propitiatin’ your people, but you hadn’t changed your mind otherwise, an’ never would.
“Next he spoke up for you. I ain’t goin’ to tell you what he said. Only — no other woman who ever lived ever had such tribute! You had a champion, Jane, an’ never fear that those thick-skulled men don’t know you now. It couldn’t be otherwise. He spoke the ringin’, lightnin’ truth….Then he accused Tull of the underhand, miserable robbery of a helpless woman. He told Tull where the red herd was, of a deal made with Oldrin’, that Jerry Card had made the deal. I thought Tull was goin’ to drop, an’ that little frog-legged cuss, he looked some limp an’ white. But Venters’s voice would have kept anybody’s legs from bucklin’. I was stiff myself. He went on an’ called Tull — called him every bad name ever known to a rider, an’ then some. [. . . .]
“Then he finished, an’ by this time he’d almost lost his voice. But his whisper was enough. ‘Tull,’ he said, ‘she begged me not to draw on you to-day. She would pray for you if you burned her at the stake….But listen!…I swear if you and I ever come face to face again, I’ll kill you!’
“We backed out of the door then, an’ up the road. But nobody follered us.”
Jane found herself weeping passionately. She had not been conscious of it till Lassiter ended his story, and she experienced exquisite pain and relief in shedding tears. Long had her eyes been dry, her grief deep; long had her emotions been dumb. Lassiter’s story put her on the rack; the appalling nature of Venters’s act and speech had no parallel as an outrage; it was worse than bloodshed. Men like Tull had been shot, but had one ever been so terribly denounced in public? Over-mounting her horror, an uncontrollable, quivering passion shook her very soul. It was sheer human glory in the deed of a fearless man. It was hot, primitive instinct to live — to fight. It was a kind of mad joy in Venters’s chivalry. It was close to the wrath that had first shaken her in the beginning of this war waged upon her.
“Well, well, Jane, don’t take it that way,” said Lassiter, in evident distress. “I had to tell you. There’s some things a feller jest can’t keep. It’s strange you give up on hearin’ that, when all this long time you’ve been the gamest woman I ever seen. But I don’t know women. Mebbe there’s reason for you to cry. I know this — nothin’ ever rang in my soul an’ so filled it as what Venters did. I’d like to have done it, but — I’m only good for throwin’ a gun, en’ it seems you hate that….Well, I’ll be goin’ now.”
The Official Blog of the Western Literature Association 
In chapter XV when Venters finally returns to Cottonwoods he himself has become representative of what is sublime. The sublime is described by Burke as something that encompasses, “darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, succession, magnificence, loudness, and suddenness…” When Venters returns and sees Jane and Lassiter for the first time in weeks his physical being is revealed to have changed into something that is much darker than it was before and quite literally there is a suddeness that Jane experiences when she first sees him.
Venters physically becomes an example of the sublime through Jane’s description of him, “Something familiar struck her in the lofty stature in the sweep of powerful shoulders. But this bearded, longhaired, unkempt man, who wore ragged clothes patched with pieces of skin, and boots that showed bare legs and feet — this dusty, dark, and wild rider could not possibly be Venters…” Not only does Jane actually obviously describe this new Venters as dark which is an aspect of the sublime but the idea of something wild also adds to the argument that he has in a way become something rather obscure and mysterious. Also regarding how Venters looks the fact that Jane takes notice of his “powerful shoulders,” and notices that he is, “…wider of shoulder” and “deeper-chested” implies that Venters has also become something magnificant. The new Venters is encompassing the sublime through his physical description as something dark and magnificant and in a way becomes reminiscent of some powerful statue that represents how he left Cottonwoods a boy and has returned a man.
Sorry I’m in here at the very tail-end of the Grey week, and I’m departing somewhat below from the sublime. But I believe the material connects to it in some ways, which I try at the end to hitch back to.
Courtesy of a McCarthy Society pal who didn’t have the time, I wrote an introduction for Barnes and Nobel to the sequel or companion novel of _Purple Sage_, the _Rainbow Trail_. Though prior to that I’d read a few of Grey’s novels and read the fine long biography about him, I read a good deal more both by and about Grey in the course of the project. As a result, I gained a far greater appreciation for Grey as a writer, particularly much of his work up to about 1927. In those works he is running some sort of “bold raid on the inarticulate,” as TS Eliot puts it–i.e., on the ineffable. He has more ambition than ability, but he has a fer amount of even that, and his landscapes, at times so famously purple, are actually defendable given their subject matter. That ubiquitous intertwining of writer’s weaknesses linking vitally to their strenghts, and vice-versa. All of this connects to his intensity and his mysticism, and thus in turn to the sublime. It anticipates Hemingway, Abbey, McCarthy, and so many others in ways that Wister does not. In my estimation, Grey has been rather unfairly turned into more of a caricature than he deserves, particularly based on his later career, when he indeed descended into self-caricature.
And Michael and others, I’m not sure if you’re aware of the fact that _Sage_ has been republished, supposedly with re-additions, as that well-known Grey phrase (and I believe original _Sage_ title) _The Desert Crucible_. I’ve not yet purchased, let alone read it, but it’s out there in the Westerns section at our Spearfish Safeway. . . . This element of course connects back to the Teddy Roosevelt vigorous life and such so beloved and portrayed by Grey, and I believe that element also strongly connects to the sublime of Grey’s aesthetics.