128CHAPTER VIEL REY AND BOLT
Tharon Last and all her followers held themselves in readiness for anything in the days that followed the taking of the herds from Courtrey’s range.
They locked their doors at night, stood double guard at corral and stable. Mothers scattered throughout Lost Valley gathered in their little ones and watched the slopes and levels when their men were out.
But a strange quietness seemed to settle down upon them. That for which they waited did not materialize. Courtrey and his gun men rode into Corvan and up and down the Valley on mysterious missions which were as unsettling as open depredations, but nothing happened. In fact, Courtrey, burning with the new desire that was beginning to obsess him, was working out a new design.
He began to draw away from Lola. His triweekly visits to the Golden Cloud dropped off a bit. He took to drifting about from saloon to129saloon, to being less pronounced in his frequenting of one or two places.
His cold eyes, however, set in their narrow slits beneath the heavy brows, picked out every settler that he met and promised vague things for the future. He knew to a man who had ridden up from Last’s that day, and he meant that not one should escape full payment––some time. Now he thought of the girl who had defied him and he waited with leaping pulse. The memory of that kiss, taken by violence at her western door, was with him night and day. She stood for right and the dignity of order. He meant, for a time, to play her hand.
Therefore the settlers waited, and held their breath while they did so.
And Courtrey took to riding much more alone, to watching the slopes and stretches with a hand at his hat-brim, shading his keen eyes. He looked far and wide in the golden summer land for the sight of a silver horse cutting down the wind with a slim girl in saddle.
But Tharon was busy at the Holding and El Rey stamped and whistled in his paddock. The mistress knew that she had set stern tides flowing in the Valley, that sooner or later they were due to sweep away the peace and quiet that pervaded the cottonwoods and the singing springs. She130knew that Courtrey waited, but she made the most of that waiting.
Conford and Billy and the rest of the riders made strong bolts for all the doors of the house, reinforced the fences that held the herds at night, put trick locks on all the gates.
But the time came when the close retreat became irksome to the girl, and she went from room to room in an uneasiness that was foreign to her calm and happy nature. She read over and over the two or three old books that had been at the Holding since she could remember, made new covers for the tables in the living room, kept the hands of the Virgin full of fresh offerings. But these things staled.
She began to long for the distances, the open spaces, the feel of the swooping stallion under her sailing down the wind. Courtrey or no Courtrey, she could not fight it down. So, on a golden day when all the boys were out with the herds and only the Indianvaquerosleft in charge by Conford were at the stables, she flung the big saddle with its silver studs and its sombre stain on El Rey, mounted and went out and away like the wind itself. Not since the day of the raid on Courtrey’s stolen herds had she been on El Rey’s back and the first long leap and drop of the great horse beneath her set the lights to sparkling in131her eyes, the blood to burning in her golden cheeks. She lay low on his neck and let him run, and her heart leaped up with lightness as it ever did when she rode in these thundering bursts.
IN FACT COURTREY, BURNING WITH THE NEW DESIRE THAT WAS BEGINNING TO OBSESS HIM, WAS WORKING OUT A NEW DESIGN
IN FACT COURTREY, BURNING WITH THE NEW DESIRE THAT WAS BEGINNING TO OBSESS HIM, WAS WORKING OUT A NEW DESIGN
There was no other horse in Lost Valley like the great king! Neither Redbuck nor Golden nor Drumfire! Neither Sweetheart nor Westwind! No, nor any Ironwood Bay that came down from Courtrey’s Stronghold, Bolt and Arrow not excepted.
Tharon laughed and stroked the king’s neck, thewed like steel beneath her hands. She had no fear of Courtrey and his hired killers. Sooner or later the issue would come, of course. Then she would kill the man as she had promised Jim Last, without a thought.
Nay, she thought of Ellen, fragile white flower, of whom she had heard.
A softening came about her young mouth at thought of her, a shadow flickered in her blue eyes for a moment. Then it was gone and she laughed, a whooping gale of joy, there alone in the green stretches between the earth and sky, with the note of El Rey’s speed steadily rising in her ears.
It beat in her very heart, that singing note. She loved the king as she loved nothing else on earth, save only the memory of her father.132
She went south toward the Black Coulee and she thanked her stars that her riders were grazing the herds north toward the Cup Rim. Here there was none to say her nay, to urge her with loving solicitude to go back.
The miles sped backward and she scarce noted their travel. She drew the king down a bit, slowed him from the swooping run, set him into the wonderful rock-and-away of the singlefoot and retied the ribbon on her hair. She wore no hat this day and the tawny cloud of her hair fluffed back from her forehead, straining at its bands, its loose ends standing up like fairy stuff all over her head. So, with her two arms held high above her and the reins in her teeth, she rode down by the mouth of Black Coulee––and up from the depths of the rugged wash that split the plain for seven miles there came across her path a man on a great bay horse.
Courtrey on Bolt! She knew the beautiful animal even so far away. It did not need the challenging toss of El Rey’s head, the piercing scream that rang from his open mouth across the silence, nor the sudden lunge and strain against the bit.
That was Bolt, the mighty, and no mistake. None but Arrow carried his splendid head so regally,noneother bore so huge a cloud of mane on his arching neck, so long a tail that spread like133a fan between his knees and almost swept the ground.
So, Courtrey came out of the Coulee to meet her! He would, maybe, force the issue. But Tharon was not ready for that. What was plain killing? No, she wanted more than that. She wanted to see him scourged and beaten, humiliated and robbed as he had robbed Lost Valley.
So she turned El Rey, though it took the whole strength of her young arms, and headed him back the way they had come. With the first turn and straightening leap her heart thumped hard against her ribs.
There, between her and the Holding, far distant, there were two riders––and they rode bay horses, both!
She made no doubt that they were Wylackie Bob and Black Bart, on Arrow and Slingshot.
A sudden mist of fear came across her eyes. A tightening caught her throat. She looked around the illimitable spaces that stretched away on all sides. There was nothing in all the spreading plains but the three riders, sprung from nowhere, it seemed, and herself.
Courtrey came rapidly up toward her, swinging a bit to the west. The others, set somewhat apart to right and left, bore down upon her. It looked134very much as if they meant to ride her down to the Black Coulee.
Once in its sheltering deep wash she would be helpless, cut off from escape. The Black Coulee went back into the eastern hills, lost itself up in the rugged and torturous clefts and chasms that cut the unknown ramparts, dark with forest and mysterious.
No! Not the Black Coulee and Courtrey to take her prisoner!
She looked this way and that. Then she saw that toward her right she had some margin. There was space there to swing away from the man in front who came like the wind itself toward her. She caught the seeming of great speed and her heart leaped again.
She recalled the day she had asked Jack Masters if Bolt could run like El Rey.
“How do I know?” he had answered. “I know it was speed, an’ that is all.” True enough. It was Bolt, coming like his namesake, down along the sloping stretches.
But a great wave of exultation swept over her. She rose in her stirrups, shook an insulting hand above her, dropped on El Rey’s neck, swerved him east and swept away toward the lifting skirts of the wooded hills. She heard a yell behind her, glanced back and saw that the three Ironwoods135were sweeping behind her, closing in together. It was to be a race at last!
At last the whispered comparisons that had stirred under the speech of the Valley concerning the Ironwoods and the Finger Marks was to have justification. For the first and only time, in her knowledge, they were to run.
“All right!” cried Tharon aloud. “Come on, you bastards! It’s the king you come against an’ Jim Last’s blood! You’ll never put a hand on either.”
She struck her heels into El Rey’s flanks, leaned over her pommel, wished she was on the king’s bare back, reached her hands far out along the reins and began to call in his ear.
“Yeeoo! Yeeoo! Yeeoo!” she cried, a high, exciting note that keened in the singing wind. And El Rey, ever keen to run for no reason, finding himself called upon, stretched out his great body, dropped low to earth and began to run. The wind cut by Tharon’s face like a knife in the first few leaps.
It shut her eyes in a dozen. She rode and laughed with a half sob in her throat. The thunder of the king’s iron-shod hoofs was in her ears like the roar of the spring freshets when the empty cañons poured their temporary torrents down the Rockface into the Valley.136
She knew he was running as she had never ridden before. She had never called upon him before. It was like being adrift upon the wind. She heard the note of his speed rising in her ears. It was as it had ever been, save that it was a higher note, thinner, sharper. There was scarce a sense of touch beneath her, a lack of jar, of vibration, so evenly and smoothly did the shining hoofs take the grassy plain.
Tears were in her eyes. Laughter was on her lips. This was speed indeed! She had a sick longing that Jim Last might see his two loved ones go!
Then she gathered herself to turn her head across her leaning shoulder and look back.
As her eyes swept into focus behind, the laughter slipped off her lips as if wiped by an invisible hand.
There, the same distance away as when they started, rode Courtrey!
No farther away!
Bolt, shining in the sun, was keeping pace with El Rey!
Farther back––a little farther back––was Arrow, running magnificently, too.
A greater distance behind the two came Slingshot.
Tharon was frightened. Not for herself. Not137for the intent of the men who came after her. Not for gun-fire, nor for capture.
She was afraid for the king! Afraid that Bolt could hold that wonderful pace! Then a surging rage rose and sickened her.
She leaned down again and called once more into the stallion’s ear and once more the note rose a notch. She felt that great pulsing seeming of reserve. Always when she called there was the answer. The plain swam beneath her like a blur. The thunder of the king’s hoofs was a single note also.
Then Tharon raised her eyes and saw that she had left the open land behind. The mountains were rising swiftly before, she was sweeping up their skirts. Trees flew by. She heard the singing of waters. The forests seemed to come down out of the skies to meet her, dark, forbidding.
She felt a sense of disaster, of helplessness. Where was she going, she and El Rey, with her enemies behind and coming fast? What was to be the end of the race? And then, all suddenly, the woods seemed to fall away on either side, a gateway to open up before her. A lovely open glade spread into the heart of the forest and the great king thundered in between the guarding pines. Like a silver flame he shot up the sloping138floor, slowed, changed and came to stop before a cabin that sat securely at the glade’s head.
With the crashing pound of El Rey’s ploughing hoofs upon the very stones at the step, a man came quickly from the interior of the cabin and stepped out, his hand lifted.
Tharon Last, her hair beating on her shoulders, her face pale as ashes, her breast heaving, looked back toward the opening in the trees, and saw Courtrey swing in a wide arc and circle past to disappear toward the north.
After him swept his two lieutenants, to fade swiftly from sight behind the shielding forest.
A grim expression spread over the face of the man at the step as he, too, beheld the end of the vital play.
Then he looked up at the girl on the silver stallion and his dark eyes were alight.
“What’s this?” he asked abruptly.
Then Tharon seemed to become conscious of him for the first time.
She looked down at him and the black pupils were spread across the azure of her eyes, making them strangely exciting in their straight glance.
“This,” she said, panting, “is some of the law of Lost Valley. Courtrey’s law. That is the man I’m goin’ to kill some day.”
Kenset felt the blood flow back upon his heart,139an icy flood. The words were simple, sincere, unconscious of dramatic effect. They were as final as death itself, and he dropped his eyes unconsciously to the two guns at her hips. He wondered why she had ridden without a shot this time.
He found his lips suddenly dry and moistened them before he spoke.
“Why?” he asked, and his voice sounded strange to him.
“Because,” said Tharon simply, “because he kissed me––once––an’ shot my daddy––in th’ back, th’ hound!”
“God!” said Kenset
For a moment there was silence while a bird called sharply from a pine top and the voice of the little stream became subtly audible.
It seemed to the man that all his values of life had suddenly become shifted, changed. The commonplace had become the unreal, the unlikely the familiar.
Guns and threats and racing horses with a woman for prize became on the moment natural events in this hidden setting.
And what a woman she was! He looked up in her face again and saw there sweetness and strength, and grim purpose beyond his conception. He knew that her words were downright, and that they meant no more to her than duty to be done,140a conscience cleared of debt. He glanced at the hand lying so quietly on the pommel and thought of it as stained with blood. At the fancy he frowned and mentally shook himself.
Then, with an impulse wholly beyond his command, he reached up and laid his own hand over that one on the pommel.
“Miss Last,” he said gravely, “I have no words to express what I feel this moment about Lost Valley and its people. Will you get down and let me show you my house, here in my glade?”
Tharon sat quietly for a moment and looked down at him. She did not remove her hand from under his, neither did she seem to be conscious of it.
“Why should I?” she asked presently, “you don’t owe me anything. I sent you away from my house. I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known where I was goin’. It was a chance.”
“Granted. And yet I want you to come across my threshold, to sit in my big chair. Will you come?”
Never in her life had the girl heard so low a voice. It was soft and gentle, yet full of a vibrant quality that belied its softness. The man himself was unlike Lost Valley men. He wore the olive drab trousers of the semi-military uniform, the leather leggings, a tan leather belt and a soft141woolen shirt of the same drab color. It lay open at the throat, and the base of his strong neck was white as a woman’s. The dark eyes upturned to hers were deep and winning. The dark beard showed through his sharply shaven cheeks where the red blood pulsed, like dusky shadows.
A strange man, surely.
Tharon wondered what made him so different from other men she had known. There was Billy who had come into Lost Valley from somewhere “below,” and Conford, and Curly. Jack Masters had been born in the Valley. So had Bent Smith. These men were her men, like herself and Jim Last. This man was from “below,” too, yet he was unlike.
While she studied him he met her glance with the same grave look.
Presently, without a word, she swung herself from the saddle, dropped El Rey’s rein, and stepped around his shoulder.
“All right,” she said briefly, “but I won’t stay any longer than I let you stay.”
For the first time Kenset laughed.
“Twenty minutes, then,” he said, “I don’t think you let me exceed that limit.”
He led the way to the door, stepped back and let her enter. As she did so she passed close to142him and caught the scent of him, the clean soft smell of shaving soap, blended with the aroma of good tobacco.
That, too, was different.
Inside the cabin there was a sense of comfort, of brightness. The long pennants, like captured rainbows, tacked to the rough walls, the soft toned prints, the gay cushions, all these lent an air of permanence, of home, that she had never before seen in a man’s cabin. She stood and looked all around with that same half-insolent stare which had greeted Kenset at the Holding that memorable day.
Then she went slowly forward and sat down in the big chair by the table.
The man stood in her presence for a moment, thereby giving a subtle effect of deference which was not wholly lost upon Tharon, though she would have been at a loss to define it.
Then, he, too, sat down on the edge of the table desk in the corner, and with folded arms waited while she finished her scrutiny of the interior.
“I am proud of my home, Miss Last,” he said presently. “What do you think of it?”
“I think,” said Tharon slowly, “that it looks like there’s a woman somewhere.”
This time Kenset laughed in earnest, a ringing143peal that startled El Rey at the doorstep, and made him clink his bit-chains.
“There is,” said the man, “assuredly.”
Tharon turned her head and looked quickly over her shoulder.
“Where?” she asked in surprise.
“There in my big chair.”
“Oh––I meant a woman livin’ here, th’ woman who owns the pretties.”
And she waved a hand at the gay furnishings.
“No,” said Kenset, “these are all my own pretties. I have books, as you see, and my maps and several more pictures to put up, not to mention some Mexican pottery that I brought from Ciudad Juarez, and my chiefest treasure, a tapestry from France. That last I can’t decide upon. I have two splendid spaces––over there between the northern windows, facing the door, and yonder at the end. Perhaps you will be good enough to help me choose.”
There was a boyish eagerness in his voice.
“Will you? After a while, I mean, when you have rested from your ride.”
“Rested?”
Tharon looked at him in wonder. That ride had been like wine to her, a stimulant, a thing that sent the blood pounding in her veins.
Over the excitement had fallen a subtle shade,144however, a hush, with the sight of Bolt so close behind El Rey. If it had not been for that grave thing she would have felt like a wound-up spring, intent with energy, filled with action. She was always so when El Rey ran beneath her. And this stranger spoke of rest! Tharon Last could ride all day without a thought of rest.
“Sure,” she said, “I’ll help you if I can. But what’s this thing?”
“A sort of picture,” replied Kenset quickly, “a picture woven in cloth. But first, if you’ll be so kind, I want you to break bread with me. You said we would not be friends. I’m not so sure of that. There is nothing like a man’s bread and salt for the refutation of logic.”
He slipped off the desk with a lithe rippling of his body, but Tharon was first on her feet.
“You mean stay to supper?” she asked decisively. “No, I can’t do that. I took back a meal from you. That stan’s between.”
“Why, you funny girl,” said Kenset, “nothing stands between. And I don’t mean supper, exactly, either. Please sit down.”
Tharon stood, considering. She turned the matter over in her mind.
She had taken this man’s house by storm. It had, indeed, given her refuge. If it had not been for the glade in the pines, she wondered where145she would be now––driven deep into Black Coulee, she made no doubt, a prisoner to Courtrey.
“All right,” she said abruptly, “I’ll stay. But you must be quick. Th’ time is goin’ fast.”
Kenset went swiftly across the cabin to that part which served as kitchen, and took from a curtain-covered set of shelves, a shiny nickel object on spindly legs, which he brought and placed near Tharon on the table.
He struck a match and presently a clean blue flame grew up beneath it.
He lifted the lid and filled the small pot, thereby exposed, with water from the bucket on a bench. Then he delved in one of the big trunks against the farther wall and brought out a little tin of cakes, such as one could buy in any city of the world.
All this was absorbing to the girl in the big chair, who watched with grave eyes. And Kenset kept up a running stream of gay talk all the time. He wanted to make her at ease, to cover the thought of the strain between them, and how much he wanted to drive from his own mind the knowledge that this sweet and wholesome creature was a potential murderer, he did not know. From a can he measured chocolate. From a pan somewhere outdoors he brought milk. Sugar he added carefully as a woman, and presently he spread between146them on the table a small repast that was strange to this girl of the wilderness.
He watched her with appraising eyes and saw that there was in her no consciousness of the unusual. She might have sat at meat in the big room of the Holding for all the flutter there was in her.
He told her somewhat of himself, of his life in the East, but he was careful not to ask about Lost Valley, to make mention of the circumstances that had brought her to his door. And so an hour passed as if it had been a bagatelle. The afternoon was waning when Tharon rose swiftly and abruptly terminated this first visit inside his home of any Lost Valley denizen.
“Bring out your picture,” she said decisively, “I’ll help you hang it, an’ then I must go home.”
So Kenset dived once more into the mysterious recesses of the trunk and this time brought out a thing of rare beauty and value, a large tapestry, some four by six feet in size, a wonderful thing of soft and deathless hues, of cunning distances, of Greek figures and leaning trees, of sea-line so faint as to be almost lost in the misty skies.
“Oh!” said Tharon Last with an intake of her breath, “Oh, where do they make such things?”
“Far on the other side of the world,” said147Kenset gently, pleased with the wonder in her wide eyes, the evident and quick realization of beauty.
She whirled from it and glanced quickly at the two spaces on the rugged walls.
“There,” she said, pointing to the broad expanse between the northern windows, “hang it there.”
“Done,” said Kenset, and went promptly for a hammer.
When the huge thick mat was securely stretched in place, Tharon helping to hold it while he pounded in the broad-topped tacks, Kenset stepped back and wondered how he had ever for a moment considered hanging it in any other spot. The tempered light from the door came in upon it, bringing out each enchanted charm, each tender vista.
“Wonderful!” he said to himself, “I never knew how lovely it was amid conventional surroundings!”
“Huh?” asked Tharon.
The man laughed in spite of himself and turned his eyes to hers, to lose his quick amusement in the earnest blue depths that seemed to question him at every angle.
“I mean that it looks better here in my cabin than it ever did on city walls.”
“Why?”148
“Well––I don’t know. Contrast, perhaps.”
Tharon stood a moment thinking.
“Perhaps,” she answered slowly, “yes, perhaps. I guess that’s why you seem so diff’rent to me. Jim Last used to say that was why th’ Valley was so soft-like an’ lovely, contrasted by th’ Rockface.”
“Do I seem different to you?” asked Kenset quickly. “How?”
“Yes. I don’t know how. You seem soft, like a woman––some women––an’ I’m afraid–––”
She stopped suddenly, abruptly halted in her naïve speech, as if she had come face to face with something she had not meant to meet.
“Afraid?” probed the man gravely, “go on. You are afraid––of what?”
“No,” said Tharon, “I won’t say it”
“Please do. I want to know.”
“Then,” answered the girl straightly, after the honest and downright fashion of all her dealings, “I’m afraid you are––are too soft. You don’t pack a gun. I’m afraid you wouldn’t use it if you did.”
There was a certain finality about the short speech, as if she had put the last word of condemnation to his estate.
Kenset looked down at his hands, spread them out a bit.149
“You’re right,” he said shortly, though his voice was still gentle. “I don’t. And I wouldn’t. Not until the last extremity.”
“An’ what would that be?” she asked.
“I don’t just know, Miss Last,” he answered smiling and raising his eyes once more to hers, “it would have to be––thelastextremity, I know.
“The hands of all my forbears have been clean, so far as I know. I have a deep horror of that imaginary stain which human blood seems to leave on the hands of the killer. Blood guilt.”
“You call it that? My daddy had his killin’s, but they were all in fair-an’-open.Icalled him aman.”
There was a ringing quality in her voice, a depth and resonance that spoke of war and heroes. The fire that all the Holding knew was suddenly in her eyes, flashing and flaming. Kenset caught it, and a thrill shot through him.
“Granted,” he said quickly. “But is there onlyonetype of man?”
“For me,” said Tharon, “yes.”
“I’m sorry,” said he, and for the life of him he did not know why.
“So’m I,” said Tharon honestly.
They looked at each other for a pregnant moment, while a silence fell on the cabin and they150could hear the singing water running down the slopes.
Then the girl stooped and rearranged the cushion in the big chair, laid a book more neatly on top of another at the table’s edge.
“Th’ time is up,” she said, “I must be goin’.”
She straightened her shoulders and looked at him again.
“I thank you for th’ meal,” she said, “an’ some day I’ll return it––in some manner. I don’t know yet just what you’re here for, nor if you’re Courtrey’s man or not––––––”
“Good Lord!” ejaculated Kenset, but she went on.
“I won’t shake hands with you, for whilst I ain’t done no killin’ yet, I’m sworn––an’ Jim Last’s hands was red––they would be to such as you––an’ down to th’ last drop o’ blood, th’ last beat o’ my heart, I’m Jim Last’s girl––th’ best gun man in Lost Valley, if I do say so.”
And she swung quickly to the door.
Kenset followed her. He longed for words, but found none.
There was a sudden tragic seeming in the very air, a change from the pleasant commonplace to the tense and unexpected. It was always so in these strange meetings with the people of Lost Valley, it seemed, as if he was never to find his151way among them, the sane and quiet course that he must travel.
As they reached the step at the door sill El Rey stamped and whinnied a shrill blast. In through the gateway between the pines there came a rider on a running horse, Billy on Golden who ploughed to a stop before them, his grey eyes troubled.
“Hello, Billy,” said Tharon. “How’s this?”
“Been lookin’ for you,” said the boy. “We saw Courtrey an’ his ruffians ridin’ up east––watched ’em with th’ glass, an’ Anita said you rode south. Thought you might have met ’em.”
“I didn’t meet ’em, so to speak,” she said, smiling, “though if I’d been on anythin’ but El Rey I would. They tried to drive me into Black Coulee.”
“Hell!” said Billy softly.
Then the Mistress of Last’s remembered her manners.
“Billy,” she said, “I make you acquainted with Kenset of th’ foothills. I rode in here just in time to shake th’ Stronghold bunch.”
The two men spoke, reached to shake each other’s hands, and took a long survey that was mutual. As the two pairs of eyes met, a wall seemed to rear itself between them, a mist, a curtain, something intangible, but there.152
They looked across the woman’s shoulder, and from that moment she was to stand between, though what there could be in common between the man in the U. S. service and the common rider from Last’s was not apparent. El Rey was eager for flight and by the time Tharon’s foot was in the stirrup he was up on his hind feet, fore feet beating the air, silver mane like a flying cloud. The girl rose with him gracefully, threw her leg across the saddle, waved a hand to Kenset in the door, and in another moment they were gone away down the grassy slope, out through the opening, had stretched away along the oak-dotted plain, swung toward the north, and were out of sight.
The forest man turned away from the doorway, stood a moment looking over the cabin where the late light was making golden patterns on the green and brown rug, sighed and reached for his pipe.
Somehow all the spirit seem to have gone from the summer day. The long twilight was setting in.
“She wouldn’t shake hands,” he muttered to himself, “and what she said was true as death. She’ssworn––and it is a solemn oath to her. God help the man who killed her daddy!”
Then once more he sighed, unconsciously.153
“And Lord God help her!” he finished very gravely, “she is so sweet––so wild and spirited and sweet.”
Tharon and Billy let the horses run. Golden was a racer himself, though he could not hold a candle to the silver king, and the two young creatures atop were free as the summer winds, as buoyant and filled with joy of being. So they shot down along the levels, Tharon holding El Rey up a bit, though it was a man-size job to do so, and Billy’s rein swinging loose on Golden’s neck. They passed the last of the scattered oaks, came out to the green stretches. The sun was swinging like a copper ball above the Wall at the west. Down through the cañons the light came in long red shafts that cut through the cobalt shadows like sharp lances of fire and reached half across Lost Valley. All the western part of the Valley lay in that blue-black shadow. They could see Corvan set like a dull gem in the wide green country, the scattered ranches, miles apart.
They swung down to the west a bit, for Tharon said she wanted to go by the Gold Pool and see how it was holding out.
“Fine,” said Billy, “she’s deep as she ever was at this time of year, an’ cold as snow.”
Where one tall cottonwood stood like a sentinel154in the widespread landscape they drew rein and dismounted. Here a huge boulder cropped from the plain and under its protecting bulk there lay as lovely a spring as one would care to see, deep and golden as its name implied, above its swirling sands, for the waters were in constant turmoil as they pressed up from below.
The girl lay flat at its edge and with her face to the crystal surface, drank long and deeply.
As she looked up with a smile, Billy Brent felt the heart in him contract with a sudden ache.
Her fresh face, its cheeks whipped pink under their tan by the winds, its blue eyes sparkling, its wet red lips parted over the white teeth, hurt him with a downright pain.
“Oh, Tharon,” he said with an accent that was all-revealing, “Oh, Tharon, dear!”
The girl scrambled to her feet and looked at him in surprise.
“Billy,” she said sharply, “what’s th’ matter with you? Are you sick?”
“Yes,” said the boy with conviction, “I am. Let’s go home.”
“Sick, how?” she pressed, with the born tyranny of the loving woman, “have you got that pain in your stomach again?”
Billy laughed in spite of himself, and the romantic ache was shattered.155
“For the love of Pete!” he complained, “don’t you ever forget that? You know I’ve never et an ounce of Anita’s puddin’s since. No, I think,” he finished judiciously as he mounted Golden, “that I’ve caught somethin’, Tharon––caught somethin’ from that feller of th’ red-beet badge. Leastways I’ve felt it ever sence I left th’ clearin’.”
And as they swung away from the spring toward the Holding, far ahead under its cottonwoods, he let out the young horse for another stretch.
“Bet Golden can beat El Rey up home,” he said over his shoulder.
“Beat th’ king?” cried Tharon aghast, “you’re foolin’, Billy, an’ I don’t want to run nohow. I’ve run enough this day.”
So the rider held up again and together they paced slowly up through the gathering twilight where long blue shadows were reaching out to touch them from the western Wall and the golden shafts were turning to crimson, were lifting as the sun sank, were travelling up and up along the eastern mountains toward the pale skies. Soon they rode in purple dusk while the whole upper world was bathed in crimson and lavender light and Lost Valley lay deep in the earth’s heart, a sinister spot, secret and dark.
“Sometimes, Billy,” said Tharon softly, “I156like to ride like this, in th’ big shadows––an’ then I like to have some one with me that I know, some one like you, some one who will understand when I don’t talk, an’ who is always there beside me. It’s a wonderful feelin’––but somehow, it’s soft, too––mebby too soft––like––like––like a woman who’s just a woman.”
The boy swallowed once, miserably.
“Always, Tharon,” he said huskily, “always––when you want me––or need me––I’ll be there, beside you. An’ you don’t need to even speak a word to me. I’m like th’ dogs––there whether you call or not.”
“I know,” said the girl, and reaching over she caught the rider’s hand, brown beneath its vanity of studded leather cuff, and gave it a little tender pressure.
Billy set his teeth to keep from crushing her fingers, and together they rode slowly up along the sounding slopes to the beautiful security and comfort of Last’s Holding.
157CHAPTER VIITHE SHOT IN THE CAÑONS
Kenset of the foothills was very busy. Between study of his maps and the endless riding of their claimed areas he was out from dawn till dark.
He found, indeed, that none but he, of late years, had ridden those sloping forest covered skirts. Some one, sometime, must have done so, else the maps themselves would not have been, but what marks they must have left were either gone through the erosion of the elements or been wantonly destroyed.
He fancied the former had been the case, for he saw no signs of destruction, and the very curiosity of the denizens of the Valley precluded familiarity with forest work.
So he laid out for himself the labour of a dozen men and went at it with a vim that kept him at high tension. Therefore he had little time to think of Tharon Last and the strange life158in Lost Valley. Only when he rode between given points, unintent on the land around, did he give up to his speculations. At such times his mind invariably went back to that first day at Baston’s steps and he saw her again as he had seen her then, tense, stooping, her elbows bent above the guns at her hips, coming backward along the porch, feeling for the steps with her foot.
Always he saw the ashen whiteness of her cheeks beneath her blowing hair.
Always he frowned at the memory and always he felt a thrill go down his nerves. What was she, anyway, this wild, sweet creature of the wilderness who held herself aloof from his friendship, and said that she was “sworn?”
Kenset, sane, quiet, peace loving, shook himself mentally and tried not to think of her. But day after day he came down along the edges of the scattered woods where the cattle grazed––on the forest lands––and looked over to where the Holding lay like a greener spot on the green stretches.
He thought of her, living in this feudal hold, mistress of her riders, her cattle, and her wonderful racing horses of the Finger Marks, sweet, fair, wholesome––with the six-guns at her slender hips!
If only he, Kenset, could take those weapons from her clinging hands, could wipe out of her young heart the calm intent to kill!159
It was preposterous! It was awful!
Bred to another life, another law, another type of woman, he could not reconcile this girl of Lost Valley with anything he knew.
He went over in his mind again and again the serene calmness of her in his cabin that day of the race with Courtrey, and shook his head in puzzlement.
But why should he trouble himself about her at all?
He had come here in his Government’s service to reclaim its forest, to look after its interest.
Why should he bother with the moral code of Lost Valley?
But reason as he might, the face of Tharon Last came back to haunt him, waking or asleep.
He knew that it troubled him and was, in a way, ashamed. So he worked hard at his tasks, relocated boundaries, marked them with a peculiar blaze in convenient trees which looked something like this:
160
and set up monuments with odd and undecipherable hieroglyphics upon them.
And with each blaze, each mark and monument and sign, he drew closer in about him the net of suspicion and disapproval which was weaving in Lost Valley, for there was not one but ran the gamut of close inspection and speculation by Courtrey’s men, by the settlers who came many miles over from the western side of the Valley for the purpose, and by Tharon’s riders.
Low mutters of disapproval growled in the Valley.
Who was this upstart, anyway, to come setting signs and marks in the land that had been theirs from time immemorial? What mattered the little copper-coloured badge on his breast? What mattered it that he was beginning to send out word of his desire to work with and for the cattlemen of Lost Valley, the settlers, the homesteaders?
What was this matter of “grazing permits” of which he had spoken at the Stronghold?
Permits?
They had grazed their cattle where and when they chose––and could––from their earliest memory.
They asked no leave from Government.
When Kenset rode into Corvan he was treated with exaggerated politeness by those with whom161he had to deal, with utter unconsciousness by all the rest. To cattleman and settler alike he was as if he had not been.
None spoke to him in the few broad streets, none asked him to a bar to drink.
Serene, quiet, soft spoken, he came and went about his business, and sneers followed him covertly.
It was not long after Tharon’s visit to the cabin in the glade, that Kenset, riding alone along the twilight land, passed close to the mouth of Black Coulee one day at dusk. He rode loosely, slouching sidewise in his saddle, for he had been to Corvan for his monthly mail and a few supplies tied in a bag behind his saddle, and he carried his broad hat in his hand.
The little cool wind that blew in from the narrow gorge of the Bottle Neck and spread out like an invisible fan, breathed on his face with a grateful touch. The day had been hot, for the summer was opening beautifully, and he had ridden Captain far. Therefore he jogged and rested, his arms hanging listlessly at his sides, his thoughts two thousand miles away.
At the mouth of Black Coulee where the sinister split of the deep wash came up to the level, there grew a fringe of wild poplar trees. They were beautiful things, tall and straight and thickly covered162with a million shiny leaves that whirled and rustled softly in the wind, showing all their soft white silver sides when the breeze came up from the south as it did this day. There was water in Black Coulee, many small springs, not deep enough nor steady enough to count for water in a range country, but sufficient to keep the poplars growing on the rim of the great wash, to stand them thick on the caving sides. Whole benches of earth with their trees upon them slipped down these sides from time to time, making of the Coulee a mysterious labyrinth of thickets and shelves, of winding ways and secret places.
Kenset had heard a few wild stories about Black Coulee. Sam Drake had talked a bit more than most men of Lost Valley would have talked, and he had listened idly.
Now as he rode up along the levels and neared the dark mouth of the cut he studied it with appraising eyes. It was sinister enough, in all truth, a deep, dark place behind its veil of poplars, secretive, hushed.
The red light that dyed Lost Valley so wondrously at the hour of the sun’s sharp decline above the peaks and ridges of the Cañon Country was awash in all the great sunken cup, save at the west under the Rockface where the shadows were already dark.163
Kenset drank in the beauty of the scene with smiling eyes. Already a love for this hidden paradise had grown wonderfully in his heart. He felt as if he had never lived before, as if he had never known beauty.
And so, dreaming a little of other scenes, smiling to himself, he jogged along on Captain and was nearly past the frowning mouth of the Coulee, when there came the sharp snap of a rifle in the stillness, and Captain changed his feet, sagged and quivered, then caught himself and leaped ahead. For one amazed moment Kenset thought the horse was hit. Then, as he straightened in his saddle and dropped his hand to catch up his hanging rein, he looked quickly down. Where he was accustomed to the smooth feel of the pommel beneath his palm there was a sharp raw edge. A splinter of wood stood up and a small flare of leather hung to one side.
A bullet, singing out of Black Coulee, had carried away part of the pommel.
Kenset shut his lips in a new line, gathered up his rein and drew the horse down to a walk with an iron hand.
Slowly, without a backward glance, he rode on across the darkening levels. He was no fool.
He knew he had had his warning.164
Very well. He would give back his acceptance of that warning.
He had said to Courtrey that night at the Stronghold that he had come to stay.
No bunch of lawless bullies were going to scare him out.
No other shot followed. He had not expected one.
For a time after that he went about his work as usual. Nothing happened; he had no outward sign of the distaste with which he was regarded by all factions alike, it seemed.
He met Courtrey face to face in Corvan one day and spoke to him civilly, but Courtrey did not speak. Wylackie Bob did, however––a sneering salutation that was a covert insult. Kenset touched his hat with dignity and passed on.
“Of all th’ tenderfeet!” said Baston, watching the small by-play. “I b’lieve you could spit on him, boys.”
“I don’t,” spoke up Old Pete, shuffling by on his bandy legs, “sometimes that quiet, soft-spoken kind rises––an’ then hell’s to pay in their veecinity.”
But Wylackie looked at the weazened snow-packer with his snake-like eyes and snapped out a warning.165
“Some folks takes sides too quick, sometimes.”
But Old Pete went on about his business. He knew, as did all the Valley, that a price was on his head with Courtrey’s band for the daring leap which had saved the life of Tharon Last that day in spring.
Sooner or later that price would be paid, but Old Pete was true western stuff. He had lived his life, had had his day, and he was full of pride at the turn of fate which had made him a hero in a way at the end.
All the Valley stood off and admired Jim Last’s daughter.
Pete basked in the reflected light. And Tharon herself had taken his gnarled old hand one day in Baston’s store and called him a thoroughbred.
Folks in Lost Valley were chary of words, conservative to the last degree. That simple word, the handclasp, the look in the clear blue eyes, had been his eulogy.
It was whispered about, as was every smallest happening, and came to the ears of Courtrey himself, who had promised those vague things for the future on the fateful night. But Courtrey was playing a waiting game. He was obsessed with the image of Tharon. Sooner or later he meant to have her, to install her at the Valley’s head. He had always had what he wanted. Therefore,166he expected to have this girl with the challenging eyes, the maddening mouth, like crimson sumac.
Ellen?
Already he was setting in motion a thing that was to take care of Ellen.
The thing in hand now was to placate Tharon, the mistress of Last’s, to play the overwhelming lover.
Courtrey knew better than to go near the Holding. Bully that he was he yet had sense enough to know that no fear of him dwelt in the huge old house under the cottonwoods. If Tharon herself did not shoot him, one––or all––of her riders would. The day of the armed band riding down to take her was, if not past, passing fast. He recalled the look of the settlers––poor spawn that he hated––whirling their solid column behind her to face him that day from the Cup Rim’s floor.
No. Courtrey meant to have the girl some day––to hold in his arms that ached for her loveliness, the strong, resistant young body of her––to sate his thief’s mouth with kisses. But he would call her to him of her own will, would taste the savage triumph of seeing her come suing for his mercy.
If Tharon meant to break Courtrey, he meant no less to break her.167
Outlawry––mob law––they were pitted against each other.
And, lifting its head dimly through the smother of hatred, of wrong, of repression and reprisal, another law was struggling toward the light in Lost Valley––the sane, quiet law of right and equality, typified by the smiling, dark-eyed man of the cabin in the forest glade.
Courtrey sent word to Tharon––an illy spelled letter, mailed at Baston’s––that he had meant nothing by that race above the Black Coulee, except another kiss. There was Courtrey’s daring in the affronting words.
She sent the letter back to him––riding in on El Key alone––with the outline of a gun traced across it.
“Th’ little wildcat!” grinned the man, “she’s sure spunky!”
Once again Tharon met Kenset in the days that followed. Riding by the Silver Hollow she stopped one breathless afternoon, drank of the snow-cold waters, shared them with El Rey, dropped the rein over the stallion’s head and flung herself full length on the earth beside the spring. A clump of willow trees grew here, for every spring in Lost Valley had its lone sentinels to call its presence across the stretching miles. As the168girl lay flat on her back with her hands beneath her head, she looked up into the blue heart of the arching skies where the fleecy white clouds sailed, and a sense of sweetness and peace came down upon her like a garment.
“You’re sure some lovely spot, Lost Valley,” she said aloud, “an’ no mistake. I know, more’n ever as th’ days go by that Jim Last was only jokin’ when he told me of those other places out below, big as you, lovely as you. It just ain’t possible. Is it, El Rey, old boy?”
And she moved a booted foot to the king’s striped hoof and tapped it smartly.
El Rey, always aloof, always touchy, never sure of temper, jumped and snorted. The girl laughed and crossed her feet and fell to speculating idly about the world that lay beyond Lost Valley. Little she knew of it. Only the brief words of her father from time to time, the reluctant speech of Last’s riders, for the master of the Holding had laid down the law concerning this.
His daughter was of the Valley, content. He meant her to be so always. The man who had instilled into her young mind a discontent with her environment, a longing for the “flesh-pots” of the world as he had styled it once, would have had short shrift at Last’s. He169would have received his time and “gone packing” swiftly.
And Tharon was content.
Barring the loneliness that had come with Jim Last’s death, she was well content.
So she lay by the willows and hummed a sliding tune, a soft, sweet thing of minors and high notes falling, like rippling waters, and lazily watched the high white clouds sail by.
And as she lay she became conscious of something else in the drowsing land beside herself and her horse. She felt it first, this presence––a thin, dim vibration that sang in the earth beneath her. It stopped the wordless song on her lips, stilled the breath in her throat, set every nerve in her to listening, as it were.
Presently she sat up and felt quickly for the gun-butts in their scabbards. Then she parted the willows and looked out over the rolling slopes and levels. True enough. A horseman was coming in from the west, making for the Silver Hollow, but Tharon smiled and her fingers relaxed on the gun. This man rode straight––like a lance, she thought––and his mount was brown, a good-enough common horse, but no steed of Lost Valley.
Captain lacked the fire, the ramping keenness of the Ironwoods, the spirit and dash of the Finger Marks. For a long time the girl in the170willows watched them. Then as they came near she rose and caught El Rey’s bridle.
He was no gentleman, this big blue-silver king. He was savage and wild and imperious. He hated other horses with a quick hatred sometimes and had been known to wreak this sudden rage upon them in sickening fury.
So Tharon held him with a strong brown hand wrapped in the chain below the Spanish spade bit in his mouth. She stood beside him, waiting, a slim, golden creature, tawny of hair and blue of eye, and the great horse towered above her mightily, his silver mane blowing up above his arching neck in the little wind that came from the south.
They made a picture that Kenset never forgot, as he swung round the willows and faced them.
El Rey screamed and pounded with his striped hoofs, but Tharon jerked him down with no gentle hand.
“Be still, you bully!” she said sharply.
“Why, Miss Last!” cried the forest man, “I’m so glad to meet you!”
There was the genuine delight of a boy in his voice, and Tharon caught the note. The sweet, disarming smile parted her lips and she was all girl at the moment, artless, innocent, unstained by the shadow of lawlessness and crime that171seemed to ever hang above her in Kenset’s thoughts.
“Are you?”
“I certainly am.”
He swung down, gave Captain a drink at the edge of the spring farthest from El Rey, dropped the rein when he had finished, and swung around to face the girl. He took off his wide hat and wiped his forehead with a square of linen finer than anything of its kind she had ever seen.
Then he stood for a moment looking straight into her eyes with his smiling dark ones. It seemed to Tharon that this man was always smiling.
“This is your spring, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes. The Silver Hollow. Th’ Gold Pool is farther south toward th’ Black Coulee. There was another one, fine as this, perhaps a better one, up on th’ Cup Rim Range, but Courtrey blew her up, damn him! She was called th’ Crystal.” Kenset caught his breath, mentally, all but physically, and put up a hand to cover his lips.
Thiswasanother type of woman from any he had ever met, in truth.
The oath, rolling roundly over her full red lips, was as unconscious as the long breath that lifted her breast at the memory of that outrage.
“We replaced her with a well––an’ it’s a corker.172Mebby better than th’ old Crystal, though she was a lovely thing. As clear as––as ice that’s frozen hard without a ripple of white. You know that kind?”
“Yes,” said Kenset gravely.
“Well,” sighed Tharon, “she’s gone, an’ there ain’t no use cryin’ over spilt milk. What you ben a-doin’ sence I helped you hang th’ picture?”
“Won’t you sit down?” Kenset stepped aside. “It is uncomfortable to stand through a visit––and I mean to have a long talk-fest with you, if you will be so kind.”
Tharon flung herself down at the spring’s edge, eased the right gun from under her hip, leaned on her elbow and prepared to listen.
“Fire away,” she said.
Kenset laughed.
“For goodness’ sake!” he ejaculated, “I said visit. That takes two. What have you been doing?”
“Well, everythin’, mostly. Made a new shirt for Billy, for one thing. An’ I showed Courtrey th’ picture o’ this.”
She patted the blue gun that lay half in her lap, its worn scabbard black against her brown skirt.
Kenset sobered at once. As ever when he let his mind dwell on that dark shadow which sat so lightly on this girl, he had no feeling for mirth.173
A very real chill went down his spine and he looked intently into her eyes.
“How?” he asked, “what did you do?”
But Tharon shook her head.
“Nothin’ you’d understand,” she said quietly.
“I can show you something you will understand,” he said, and reached for Captain’s bridle. He pulled the horse around and pointed to the saddle horn.
“See that?”
She looked up quickly. With the sure instinct of a dweller in a gun man’s land she knew the meaning of the splintered wood of the pommel, the torn and ragged leather that had covered it.
“Hell!” she said softly, “where did you get that?”
“At the mouth of Black Coulee, at dusk a week ago.”
For a long moment Tharon studied the saddle. Then her gaze dimmed, lengthened, went beyond into infinitude. The pupils of her eyes drew down to tiny points of black against the brilliant blue.
At last she turned and held out a hand, rising from her elbow.
“I beg your pardon, Mister,” she said quaintly, “fer that day at the Holdin’ an’ th’ meal I offered an’ took, an’ fer my words. I know now that you are––that you were––straight. I don’t174yet know what you may mean in Lost Valley with your talk of Government, but I do know you ain’t a Courtrey man.”
Kenset took the hand. It was firm and shapely and vibrant with the young life there was in her. He laid his other one over it and held it in a close clasp for a moment.
“I mean only right,” he said, “sanity and law and decency. I think I have a big problem to handle here––aside from my work on the forest––a problem I must solve before I can be effective in that work––and I am more sincerely glad than I can say that my friend, the outlaw, took that warning shot at me. It ruined a perfectly good saddle, but it has made one point clear to you. I am no Courtrey man, and that’s a solemn fact.”
“An’ I ain’t ashamed to say I’m glad, too,” said Tharon.
So, with the sun shining in the cloud-flecked heavens and the little winds blowing up from the south to ruffle the hair at the girl’s temples, these two sat by the Silver Hollow and talked of a thousand things, after the manner of the young, for Kenset found himself reverting to the things of youth in the light of Tharon’s grave simplicity.
They looked into each other’s eyes and found there strange depths and lights. They were aliens, strangers, groping dimly for a common ground,175and finding little, though presently they fell once more upon the law in Lost Valley and earnestness deepened into gravity.
“Miss Last,” said Kenset, thrilling at his daring, “why must this law dwell in these?” and he reached a hand to tap the gun on her lap.
“Why? That very question’d show your ignorance to any Lost Valley man. Because it’s all there is. You’ve seen Courtrey. You’ve seen Steptoe Service. Can’t you judge from them?”
“Surely, so far as they two go. A bad man and a bad sheriff. But they are not all the officers of this County. Where and who is your Superior Judge?”
“Poor ol’ Ben Garland. Weaker’n skim milk. Scared to say his soul’s his own.”
There was infinite scorn in her voice.
“No, it’s Steptoe Service, or nothin’.”
Kenset thought a moment.
“Who’s the Coroner?” he asked presently.
“Jim Banner,” she answered quickly, “as straight a man as ever lived. Brave, too. He’s been shot at more’n once fer takin’ exception to some raw piece o’ work in this Valley, fer pokin’ his nose in, so to speak. Jim Last used to say he was th’ onlymanat the Seat, which is Corvan, you know, of course.”
“District Attorney?”176
“Tom Nord. Keen as a razor an’ married to Courtrey’s sister. Now do you see why this is th’ law?” She, too, tapped the gun.
Kenset frowned and looked down along the green range. He thought of the unpainted pine building in Corvan which was the Court House. A strange personnel, truly, to invest it with authortity!
“I see,” he said briefly, “but there must be some way out. This is not the right way, the way that must come and last.”
Tharon’s lips drew into the thin line that made them like her father’s. “It’s th’ law that’s here,” she said and there was an instant coldness in her voice, “an’ it’s th’ law that’ll last until Courtrey or I go down.”
The man, watching, saw that thinning of the lips, the hardening of all the young lines of her face. He knew he had blundered. Talk was cheap. It was action that counted in Lost Valley.
With a quick motion he reached over and caught the girl’s hand and drew it to him, covering it with both of his.
Her eyes followed, came to rest on his face, cool, appraising, waiting.
She was, in all that had counted in his life, crude, untutored, basic.
Yet that calm look made his impulsive action177seem unpardonable in the next second. However a warm surge of feeling shot through him with the quiet resting of that firm brown hand between his own, and he held it tighter. Kenset had thought he was sophisticated, that little or nothing could stir him deeply––not since Ethel Van Riper had gone to Europe as the bride of the old Count of Easthaven. That had been four years back. He had been pretty young then, but the young feel deeply.
Now he held a gun woman’s hand in the thin shade of a willow clump in the heart of Lost Valley––and the blood surged in his ears, the levels and slopes danced before his vision.
“Miss Tharon,” he said, for the first time using her given name, “I beg your pardon. You are strong, simple, serene. You know your land and its ways. I am an alien, an interloper––but I can’t bear to think of you as waiting for the time to kill a man––or to be killed in the killing. It sickens me.”
Tharon snatched her hand from his and leaped to her feet.
“Don’t talk like that!” she cried passionately, “I don’t like to hear it! I thought you were a real man, maybe, but you’re not! You––you’re a woman! A soft woman––I hate th’ breed!”
Her face was flushed, for what reason Kenset,178stunned by her vehement words, could not tell. She flung the rein up and followed it, leaping to saddle like a man.
“I tol’ you we couldn’t be friends!” she cried, her eyes blazing with sudden fire, “there ain’t no manner of use a-tryin’.”
Kenset, springing forward, caught El Rey’s bit. The stallion reared and struck, but he held him down.
“There is use, Tharon,” he panted. “It’s vital! Since that day on Baston’s steps, when you backed out past me I have had you in my mind––my thoughts by day and night––there is use, and I’ll keep your hands from blood––Courtrey’s or any other––if it takes my life––so help me God!”
The girl leaned down and her blue eyes blazed in his face.
“An’ make me false to th’ crosses on Jim Last’s stone?” she cried. “No––not you or anybody else––could do that trick! Let go!”
The next moment she had whirled out from the flickering shade of the willows and was gone around toward the north––there was only the sound of hoofs ringing on the earth. Kenset, left alone where the Silver Hollow bubbled softly above its snowy sands, passed a trembling hand across his eyes and stood as in a trance.179
What did it mean? What had he promised? What vital emotion had gripped him that his usually quiet tongue had rushed into that torrential speech that dealt with life and death? What was Tharon Last to him?
A figure of the old West! A romantic gun woman with her weapons on her hips! A rider of wild horses!
Slowly, as if he had gained an added weight of years, he reined Captain and swung himself up. He rode east from the spring toward the lacy and far-reaching skirts of the forest, and for the first time he saw the rolling country with tragic eyes.
It held deep issues––life and death and the passing or continuing of régimes and and dynasties––but it was a wondrous country, and, come good or bad, it had become his own. He swung around in his saddle and looked far back across the Valley. He saw the golden light on its uncounted acres, the shadow falling at the foot of the great Rockface, the mighty Wall itself with the silver ribbon of the Vestal’s Veil falling straight down from the upper rim, the distant town, looking always like a dull gem in a dark setting, and a thrill shot to his heart.
Yes, if he lived to do his work in the hidden180Valley––if he was shot this night on his own doorstep, it was his country.
He who was alien in every way, was yet native.
Something in the depths of him came down as from far distant racial haunts and was at home.
So he rode slowly up among the scattered oaks with his hands folded on the mutilated pommel, and he knew that his lines were definitely cast.
Tharon Last rode into the Holding and dismounted in unwonted silence.
There was a frown between her brows, an unusual thing. She turned the stallion into his corral, dragged off the big saddle to hang it on its peg, flung the studded bridle on a post.
The men were not in yet. Far toward the north beyond the big corrals she could see the cattle grazing toward home. A surge of savage joy in her possessions flooded over her. These things were her own. They were what Jim Last had worked for all his life.