The Rainbow Trail by Zane Grey - also known as The Desert Crucible, is Western author Zane Grey's sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage. Originally published under the title The Rainbow Trail in 1915, it was re-edited and re-released in recent years as The Desert Crucible with the original manuscript that Grey submitted to publishers. The novel takes place twelve years after events of Riders of the Purple Sage, in or about 1883. The wall to Surprise Valley has been breached, and Jane Withersteen is forced to choose between Lassiter's life and Fay Larkin's marriage to a Mormon. Plot John Shefford arrives in Red Lake, Arizona Territory, in April, having come from the East. In the post of the trader Presbrey, he finds a missionary (Willetts) struggling with a Navajo girl. He strikes the man, who flees, before finding Presbrey outside. Presbrey welcomes him and outfits him with gear and advice, and offers him a job, but he declines, preferring to travel to Kayenta, a trading post farther north. On his way to Kayenta, Shefford meets a man (Shadd) who intends to rob and kill him, but flees at the approach of another, who proves to be a Navajo, Nas Ta Bega, accompanied by the girl from Red Lake, who he describes as his sister, Glen Naspa. The two take Shefford to Kayenta, where he meets the trader Withers. That night, he tells Withers that he was a clergyman in Illinois, and had become good friends with a man named Venters, who had been a cowboy for a wealthy Utah Mormon woman, Jane Withersteen, who adopted a child, Fay Larkin, but fled the Mormon establishment with another cowboy, Lassiter. The three had entered a hidden canyon—Surprise Valley—and sealed the entrance with a landslide; Shefford is searching for the girl, Fay. Withers tells Shefford of a secret Mormon village, of "sealed wives"—the additional wives of Mormon polygamists—in a valley near the Utah border to which he takes periodic pack trains of supplies. He notes he once heard the name Fay Larkin in the nearby village of Stonebridge, Utah, and gives Shefford the job of taking his pack train. When Withers' employee, a young Mormon named Joe Lake, arrives, Withers, Nas Ta Bega, Lake, and Shefford take a pack train to the hidden village, which proves to have three men and many women and children; the other husbands only visit occasionally, in secret. Shefford remains in the village for some days and is well-received, getting to know the inhabitants. One woman keeps to herself, and most of the others have little to do with her, calling her the Sago Lily.
