Tharon of Lost Valley Part 15

He resented with every ounce of the repressed spirit there was in him the girl's poor standing at the Stronghold.

Black Bart and Wylackie Bob treated her with no more consideration than any of the Indian serving women. They swore and drank before her with an abandon that made the young man's nails cut deep in his palms at times, the blood mount high in his white cheeks.

And Ellen drooped like a lily on a broken stem, brooded over her husband's absences, and hated the name of Lola, used openly to her as a cruel joke.

The Stronghold was a huge place. The house was like the majority of the habitations of the region, built of adobe and able to stand siege against a regiment. It was shaded by cottonwoods and spruces, flanked by corrals and barns and sheds until the place resembled a small town.

Cleve Whitmore rode for Courtrey but his heart was not in Courtrey's game. He was slim and sullen, dissatisfied, slow of speech, repressed.

He worked early and late and thought a lot.

Courtrey, who kept close count of the favours he did for others, considered Cleve deep in his debt and paid him a n.i.g.g.ardly wage. So it was, that when the newly organized Vigilantes under Tharon Last came out in broad day and took back their own from Courtrey's herds, there was one at the Stronghold who laughed quietly to himself in sympathy with the defy.

"Good enough," he told the wide sky and the silence as he rode herd under the beetling rocklands, "hope t' G.o.d some one gits him good an'

plenty."

But Courtrey was hard to get. His aides and lieutenants were picked men. He was like a king in his domain.

But if strife and ferment seethed under the calm surface in Lost Valley, its surges died before they reached the rolling slopes where the forests came down to the eastern plains. Up among the pines and oaks, the ridges and the age-worn, tumbled rocks David Kenset had found his ideal spot, his glade where the pines stood guard and a talking stream ran down. High on the wooded slopes he had set his mark, begun that home of which he had told Tharon. From Corvan he had hired three men, a teamster by the name of Drake and his two sons, and together they had felled and dressed trees enough for a cabin, laid them up with clay brought five miles on mule-back, roofed the structure with shakes made on the spot with a froe, and the result was pleasing, indeed, to this man straight from the far eastern cities.

The cabin faced southwest, set at an angle to command the circled glade, the dropping slopes, the distant range lands, the wooded line of the Broken Bend, and farther off the levels and slants of the gently undulating Valley, with the mighty Rockface of the Wall rising like a mystery beyond. Kenset cut all trees at the west and south of the glade, thus forming a splendid doorway into his retreat, through which all this shone in, like those wonderful etched landscapes one sometimes sees in tiny toys that fit the narrowed eye.

Before the cabin was finished, Starret, who ran the regular pack-train, brought in a string of trunks and boxes which caused much curious comment in Corvan. These came up, after much delay, to be dumped in the door yard of the house in the glade, and Kenset felt as if the gateway to the outside world might close and he care very little.

Here was the wilderness, in all verity, here was work, that greatest of boons, here were health and plenty and the hazard of outlawry, that he was beginning to dimly sense under the calmly flowing currents of Lost Valley.

And here was Romance, as witness the slim girl who had backed out from a group of men that first day of his coming--backed out with her guns upon them, himself included, and mounted a silver stallion, whose like he had not known existed. In fact, Kenset had thought he knew horses, but he stood in open-mouthed wonder before the horses of Lost Valley--the magnificent Ironwood bays of Courtrey's, with their wonderful long manes and tails that shone like a lady's hair, the Finger Marks which he had seen once or twice, and marvelled at.

With the opening of the boxes the cabin in the glade took on a look of home, of individuality. A big dark rug, woven of strong cord in green and brown, came out and went down on the rough floor, leather runners were flung on the two tables, a student lamp of nickel, a pair of old candlesticks in hammered bra.s.s, added their touch of gleam and s.h.i.+ne to table and shelf-above-the-hearth, college pennants, in all the colours of the rainbow, were hung about the walls between four fine prints in sepia, gay cus.h.i.+ons, much the worse for wear, landed in the handsome chairs, and lastly, but far from being least, three long shelves beneath the northern windows were filled to the last inch with books.

When all these things had been put in place Kenset stood back and surveyed the room with a smile in his dark eyes.

"Some spot," he said aloud, "some spot!"

On the small table that was to do duty as a desk in the corner between the southwest window and the fireplace he stacked neatly a ma.s.s of literature, all marked with the same peculiar s.h.i.+eld of the pine trees and the big U. S. that shone always on his breast.

To the Drakes these things were of quick interest, but they asked no questions.

When the last thing had been done to the cabin they set to work and built a smaller cabin for the good brown horse which Kenset had bought far down to the south and west in the Coast Country, for Sam Drake told him that Lost Valley locked its doors to all the world in winter.

He would house his only friend as he housed himself.

When the Drakes, father and sons, were gone back down to Corvan for good, Kenset stretched himself, physically and mentally, and began his life in the last frontier.

He began to be out from dawn to dark riding the ridges, exploring the wooded slopes, the boldly upsweeping b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the nameless mountains, making friends with the rugged land. It was a beautiful country, hushed and silent, save for the soft song of the pines, the laughter of streams that ran to the Valley, cold as snow and clear as wind. Strange flowers nodded on tall stems in glade and opening, peeped from the flat earth by stone and moss-bed. Few birds were here, though squirrels were plentiful.

Sometimes he saw a horseman sitting on some slant watching him intently. These invariably rode rapidly away on being discovered, not troubling to return his salute of a hand waved high above him.

"Funny tribe," he told himself, half puzzled, half irritated, "their manners seem to be peculiarly their own. As witness the offered meal so calmly 'taken back' by the young highway-woman of Last's Holding."

That had rankled. Sane as Kenset was, as cool and self-contained, he could not repress a cold p.r.i.c.kle of resentment at that memory.

He had gone to the Holding in such good faith, actuated by a lively desire to see Tharon again after that one amazing meeting at Baston's steps, and he had been so readily received at first, so coolly turned out at last. But he had not forgotten the look in the girl's blue eyes, nor the disarming smile which had seemed to make it reasonable.

She merely did not hold with law, and wanted him to have no false impressions. This incident furnished him with more food for thought than he was aware of in those first long days when he rode the silent forest.

What was Tharon Last, anyway? What did she mean by those words of hers about his law and hers? That they were not the same sort of law--that he and she would not agree?

They could not be friends, she had said.

Well, Kenset was not so sure of that. There was something about this girl of the guns that sent a thrill tingling in his blood already, made him recall each expression of her speaking face, each line of her lean young figure.

He did not go near Last's again, though his business took him far and by in the Valley, for the big maps, hung on a rack beyond his fireplace, covered full half the ranges thereof and stretched away into the mysterious and illimitable forests that went up and away into the eastern mountains.

It was as if some fateful Power at Was.h.i.+ngton had set down a careless finger on a map of the U.S.A., and said to Kenset, "Here is your country," without knowledge or interest. Sometimes he wondered if there was another forest in the land as utterly lost as this, as little known.

But with this wonder came a thrill. He had read romances of the great West in his youth and felt a vague regret that he had not lived in the rollicking days of '49. Now as he rode his new domain he smiled to himself and thought that out of a modern college he had been set back half a century. Here was the rule of might, if he was not mistaken.

Here was romance in its most vital and appealing form. Yes, he felt himself lucky.

So he took up his life and his duties with a vim. He rode early and late, took notes and gathered data for his first reports, and set up for himself in Lost Valley a spreading antagonism.

If he rode herd on the range lands, the timber sections, there were those who rode herd on him. Not a movement of his that was not reported faithfully to Courtrey, not a coming or going that was not watched from start to finish.

And the cattle king narrowed his eyes and listened to his lieutenants with growing disapproval.

"Took up land, think?" he asked Wylackie Bob. "Homesteadin'?"

Wylackie shook his head.

"Ain't goin' accordin' to entry," he said, "no more'n th' cabin. Don't see no signs of tillin'. He ain't fencin', nor goin' to fence, as near as I can find out."

"Cattle?"

"No. Nor horses."

"Hogs, then?"

"No."

"d.a.m.n it! maybe it's sheep!" and the red flush rose in the bully's dark cheeks.

"Don't think so. Seems like he's after somethin', but what it is I can't make out."

But it was not long before the Stronghold solved the mystery, for Kenset rode boldly in one day and introduced himself.

It was mid-afternoon, for the cabin in the glade lay a long way from the Valley's head, and the whole big place lay silent as death in the summer sun.

The Indian serving women were off in the depths somewhere, the few _vaqueros_ left at home were out about the spreading corrals, and all the men that counted at the ranch had ridden into Corvan early in the day.