CHAPTER IV
UNBROKEN BREAD
Jameson, Hill and Thomas were as good as their word. During the weekthat followed the spectacular denouncement of Courtrey and Service atBaston's store, they went quietly to every settler in the Valley anddeclared themselves. In almost every instance they met with eagerpledges of approval. They knew, every man of them, that this slowbanding together for resistance against Courtrey and his power meantopen war. For years they had suffered indignities and hardship withoutprotest. While Jim Last lived they had had a sort of leader, anexample, though they had feared to follow in his lead too strongly.
They had copied his methods of guarding possessions, of corralingevery cattle-brute at night, of keeping every horse under bars. Lasthad looked Courtrey in the face. The rest dared not.
Now with Last gone, they felt the lack, as if a bastion had beenrazed, leaving them in the open. Secrecy in Lost Valley had beenbrought to a work of art. They could hold their tongues.
But with the new knowledge Tharon Last took on a light, a halo.
Men spoke in whispers about her daring. They felt it themselves.
Word of her lightning quickness with her daddy's guns, of heraccuracy, went softly all about and about, garbled and accentuated.They said she could shoot the studs from the sides of a man's belt andnever touch him. They said she could drive a nail farther than theordinary man could see. They said she could draw so swiftly that themotion of the hands was lost.
A slow excitement took the faction of the settlers.
But out at Last's Holding a grave anxiety sat upon Tharon's riders.Conford knew--and Billy knew--and Curly knew more about Courtrey'sintent than some of the others. Young Paula, half asleep in the deeprecesses of the house, had witnessed that furious encounter by thewestern door on the soft spring day when Jim Last had come home to dieat dusk. She knew that the look in Courtrey's eyes had beencovetousness--and she had told Jose. Jose, loyal and sensible, hadtold the boys. So now there was always one or more of them on dutynear the mistress of Last's on one pretext or another. To Tharon, whoknew more than all of them put together, this was funny.
It stirred the small mirth there was in her these days, and often shesent them away, to have them turn up at the most unexpected times andplaces.
"You boys!" she would say whimsically, "you think Courtrey's goin' tocart me off livin'?"
"That's just what we are afraid of, Tharon," answered Conford gravelyonce, "we know it'd not be _livin'_."
And Tharon had looked away toward Jose's cross, and frowned.
"No," she said, "an' it won't be any way, _livin'_ or dead."
One night toward the end of that week a strange cavalcade wound upalong the levels, past the head of Black Coulee, forded the BrokenBend in silence save for the stroke of hoof and iron shoe on stone,and went toward Last's. There were thirty men, riding close, and theyhad nothing to say in the darkness.
At the Holding Tharon Last waited them on her western doorstep.
As they rode in along the sounding-board the muffled ringing of thehoofs seemed to the girl as the call of clarions. The heart in herbreast leaped with a strange thrill, a gladness. She felt as if herfather's spirit stood behind her waiting the first step toward thefulfillment of her promise.
The riders stopped in the soft darkness. There was no moon and thevery winds seemed to have hushed their whispers in the cottonwoods.
"Tharon," said the man who rode in the lead, and she recognized thevoice of Jameson from the southern end of the Valley, "we've come."
That was all. A simple declaration, awaiting her disposal.
Conford, not half approving, his heart heavy with foreboding, stood athis mistress' shoulder and waited, too.
For a long moment there was no sound save the eternal tree-toads attheir concert. Then the girl spoke, and it seemed to those shadowylisteners that they heard again the voice of Jim Last, sane,commanding, full of courage and conviction.
"I'm glad," said Tharon simply, "th' time has come when Lost Valleyhas got t' stand or fall forever. Courtrey's gettin' stronger everyday, more careless an' open. He's been content to steal a bunch ofcattle here, another there, a little at a time. Now he's takin' themby th' herds, like John Dement's last month. He's got a wife, an' fromwhat I've always heard, she's a sight too good fer him. But he wantsmore--he wants _me_. He's offered me th' last insult, an' as JimLast's daughter I'm a-goin' to even up my score with him, an' it's gotthree counts. You've all got scores against him."
Here there were murmurs through the silent group.
"Th' next outrage from Courtrey, on any one of us, gets all of ustogether. For every cattle-brute run off by Courtrey's band, we'lltake back one in open day, all of us ridin'. We'll have to shoot, butI'm ready. Are you?"
Every man answered on the instant.
"Then," said the girl tensely, "get down an' sign."
There was a rattle of stirrups and bits, a creak of leather as thirtymen swung off their horses.
Tharon stepped back in the lighted room. Her men stood there againstthe walls. The settlers came diffidently in across the sill, lean,poor men for the most part, their strained eyes and furrowed facesshowing the effect of hardships. Not a man there but had seen himselfdespoiled, had swallowed the bitter dose in helplessness.
Most of them were married and had families. Some of them had killingsto their record. Many of them were none too upright.
Jameson was a good man, and so was Dan Hill. Thomas was merely weak.Buford was a gun man who had protected his own much better than therest. McIntyre was like him. One by one they came forward as Tharoncalled them by name, and leaning down, put their names or their marksto a sheet of paper which bore these few simple lines:
"We, the signers named below, do solemnly promise and pledge ourselvesto stand together, through all consequences of this act, for theprotection of our lives and property. For every piece of propertytaken from any one of us, we shall go together and take back it, orits worth, from whoever took it. For every person killed in any way,but fair-and-open, we promise to hang the murderer."
Billy had drafted the document. Tharon, whom Jim Last had taught herletters, read it aloud. The names of Last's Holding headed it. Thethirty names and marks--and of the latter there were many--stretchedto the bottom of the sheet.
When it was done the girl folded it solemnly and put it away in thedepths of the big desk. Old Anita, watching from the shadows of theeating room beyond, put her _reboso_ over her head and rocked insilent grief. She had seen tragic things before.
Then these lean and quiet men filed out, mounted the waiting horsesand went away in the darkness, mysterious figures against the stars.
That night Tharon Last sat late by the deep window in her own room atthe south of the ranch house. It was a huge old room, high walled andsombre. There were bright blankets hung like pictures on the walls,baskets marvelously woven of grass and rushes, thick mats on the floormade in like manner and of a tough, long-fibred grass that grew downin a swale beyond the Black Coulee, while in one corner there shonepale in the darkness the one great treasure of that unknown mother, analmost life-size statue of the Holy Virgin.
Of this beautiful thing Tharon had stood in awe from babyhood.
A half fearful reverence bowed her before it on those rare times whenAnita, throwing back to her Mexic ancestors, worshipped with vaguerites at its feet.
Always its waxen hands bore offerings, silent tribute from the girl'sstill nature. Sometimes these were the prairie flowers, little wildthings, sweet and fragile. Sometimes they were sprays of the watervines that grew by the wonderful spring of the Holding.
Again they were strings of bright beads, looped and falling inglistening cascades over the tarnished gilt robes of the Virgin.
Under the deep window there was a wide couch, piled high with a narrowmattress of wild goose feathers and covered with a crimson blanket.Here the girl sat with her arms on the sill and looked out into thedarkness that covered the Valley. She thought of th
e thirty men whohad signed her paper, riding far and by in the sounding basin,returning to their uncertain homes. She thought of her father asleepunder his peaceful cross, of young Harkness beside him.
She thought of Courtrey and Service and Wylackie Bob, of Black Bartand the stranger from Arizona. They were a hard bunch to tackle.
They had the Valley under their thumbs to do with as they pleased,like the veriest Roman potentate of old. Her daddy had told her once,when she was small and lonely of winter nights, strange old tales ofrulers and their helpless subjects. Jim Last could talk when heneeded, though he was a man of conserved speech.
Yes, Courtrey was like a king in Lost Valley, absolute. She thought ofthe many crimes done and laid to his door since she could remember, ofcountless cattle run off, of horses stolen and shamelessly ridden ingrinning defiance of any who might dare to identify them, of Cap Hartkilled on the Stronghold's range and left to rot under the open skies,a warning like those birds of prey that are shot and hung to scaretheir kind. Her soft lips drew themselves into a hard line, very likeJim Last's, and the heart in her ratified its treaty with the thirtymen.
She had none to mourn her, she thought a trifle sadly--well Anita andPaula, of course, and there were her riders. Billy would grieve--he'dkill some one if she were killed--and Conford and Jack.
A warm glow pervaded her being. Yes, she had folks, even if she wasthe last of her blood.
But she didn't intend to be killed. She was right, and she hadlistened enough to Anita to believe with a superstitious certainty,that right was invulnerable. For instance, if she and Courtrey shoulddraw at the same second, she believed absolutely, that because she wasin the right, her bullet would travel a bit the swifter, her aim betruer. She felt in her heart with a profound conviction that some dayshe would kill Courtrey. She thought of his wife, Ellen, a pale flowerof a woman, white as milk, with hair the colour of unripe maize, andwondered if she loved the man who made her life hell, so the Valleywhispered. Tharon wondered how it would seem to love a man, as womenwho were wives must love their men--if the agony of loss to Ellencould be as acute and terrifying as hers had been ever since that softnight in spring when her best friend, Jim Last, had come home on ElRey.
She thought of the grey look on his face, of the pinched line at hisnostrils' base, and the tears came miserably under her lids, she laidher head on the cloth mat that covered the wide window ledge and weptlike any child for a time. Then she wiped her face with her hands,sighed, and fell again to thinking.
An hour later as she rose to make ready for bed, she thought shecaught a faint sound out where the little rock-bordered paths ran inwhat she was pleased to call her garden, since a few hardy flowersgrew by the spring's trickle, and she held her breath to listen. Itwas nothing, however, she thought, and turned into the deep room.
Only the tree-toads, long since silent, knew that a cigarette,carefully shielded in a palm, glowed in the darkness.
Two days after this a visitor came to Last's. From far down they sawhim coming, in the mid-morning while the work of the house wentforward. Paula, bringing a pan of milk from the springhouse spied himfirst and stopped to satisfy her young eyes with the unwontedappearance of him. She looked long, and hurried in to tell hermistress.
"Senorita," she said excitedly, "see who comes! A stranger who hasdifferent clothes from any other. He rides not like Lost Valley men,either, being too stiff and straight. Come, see."
And Tharon, busy about the kitchen in her starched print dress,dropped everything at once to run with Paula to the western door ofthe living room that they might look south.
"_Muchachas_ both," complained old Anita, "the milk is spilled and the_pan dulce_ burns in the oven! Tch, tch!"
But the young creatures in the west door cared naught for hergrumbling.
"Who can it be, to come so, Senorita?" wondered Paula, her brown cheekbeside her mistress, "is he not handsome!"
"For mercy sake, Paula," chided Tharon laughing, "I believe you'd lookfor beauty in th' ol' Nick himself if he rode up. But I've seen thisman before."
"Where? When?"
"In town that day I met Courtrey an' Service. I remember seen' himcome into line as I backed out--he was standin' between th' racks an'th' porch, somewhere." And she narrowed her eyes and studied the rideras he came jogging up across the range.
"H'm," she said presently, "he does ride funny. I bet he ain't roderange much in _his_ life. Stiff as a ramrod, an' no mistake."
Then with an unconscious grace and poise that set well upon her as themistress of Last's, Tharon moved into the open door and waited.
As the stranger came closer both girls subjected him to a frank andcareful scrutiny that in any other place than Lost Valley would havebeen rudeness itself.
Here it catalogued the stranger, set the style of his welcome.
It left him stripped of surprise, outwardly, before he was withinspeaking distance.
It told the observers that he was young, of some twenty-six or seven,that his face, the first point taken in with lightning swiftness--wasdifferent from most faces they had ever seen, that it was open,smiling, easy, that he was straight as a ramrod, indeed, that he rodeas if he feared nothing in the earth or the heavens, that he carriedno gun, that he wore the peculiar uniform that Tharon had noticedbefore, and that there was something on his breast, a dark shield ofsome sort which made them think of Steptoe Service and his disgracedsheriff's star. This thought brought a frown to Tharon's brows, and itwas there to greet the stranger when he rode up to the step andhalted, his smart tan hat in his hand. The morning sun burned warmlydown on his dark hair, which was brushed straight back from hisforehead in a way unknown in those parts. His dark eyes, slow and deepbut somehow merry, took in the pretty picture in the door.
"Miss Last?" he asked in a low voice.
"Yes," said Tharon promptly and waited.
Every one waited in Lost Valley for a stranger to make known hisbusiness. Paula drew back behind her mistress.
The man sat still on his horse and waited, too. The silence becameprofound. The hens cackling about the barns intruded sharply.
"Well," he said presently, "I am a stranger, and I came to see you."
The girl in the doorway felt a hot surge of discomfort flare over herfor the first time in her life for such a reason.
There was something in the low voice that implied a lack, accused herof something. She resented it instantly.
"If that is so," she said slowly, "light."
The man laughed delightedly, and swung quickly down, dropping hisrein. Tharon noticed that. That much was natural. He held his hatagainst his breast with one hand and came forward with the samequickness, holding out the other. Tharon was not used to shakinghands with strange men. She gave her hand diffidently, because he soevidently expected it, and took it away swiftly.
"My name," he said, "is Kenset--David Kenset, and I am fromWashington, D. C."
He might as well have said Timbuctoo. Tharon Last knew little outsideher own environment. Words and names that had to do with unknownplaces were vague things to her.
"Yes?" she answered politely, "I make no doubt you've come far. Comein. Dinner'll soon be ready," and she moved back from the door with asmile that covered her pitiful ignorance as with a garment of gold.When Tharon smiled like that she was wholly adorable, and the man knewit at once.
Why she had so quickly invited him in before he had fully declaredhimself, she did not know, unless it was because of that lack in herwhich his first words had implied.
Old Anita, whose manners were the simple and perfect ones of theMexican coupled to a kindly heart, had taught her how to comport.
Her easy and constant association with the riders and _vaqueros_ haddulled her somewhat, but she could be royal on occasion.
Now she simply stepped back in the deep cool room where the _ollas_swung in the windows, smiled--and she was changed entirely from thegirl of a few moments before.
The man came in, laid his hat on the flat top
of the melodeon, walkedover to a chair and sat down. There was an ease about him, ataking-for-granted, that amazed Tharon beyond words.
Then he looked frankly at her and began to talk as if he had known heralways.
"I've come to live in Lost Valley, Miss Last," he said, "for a longwhile, I think. Wish me luck."
"Come here to live?" said Tharon, "a settler? Goin' to homestead?"
He shook his head.
"No."
A quick suspicion seized her. Perhaps Washington was like Arizona, aplace from which they imported gun men. Only this man wore no gun, andhe had not a look of prowess. No. This man was different.
"Then what you goin' to do?" she asked as frankly as a child.
"First," he said, "I'm going up where the pines grow yonder and buildmyself a house," and he waved a hand toward the east where the rangesrolled up to the thickening fringes of the forest that marched backinto the ramparts of the trail-less hills.
"I want to find an ideal spot, a glade where the pines stand round theedges, with a spring of living water running down, and where I canlook down and over the magnificent reaches of Lost Valley. I shallmake me a home, and then I shall work."
"Ride?" asked the girl succinctly.
"Ride? Of course, that will be a great part of that work."
"Who for?"
He looked at her sharply.
"Who for?"
"Yes. What outfit?"
There was a hard quality in her voice. If he had come in to ride forCourtrey, why he must know at once that Last's was no friend of his,now or ever.
He caught the drift of her thought in part.
"For no outfit, Miss Last," he said with a gentle dignity. "I am inthe employ of the United States Government."
A swift change came over Tharon's face.
Government!
That was no word to conjure by in Lost Valley. Steptoe Service pratedof Gov'ment. It was a farce, a synonym for juggled duty, a word tosuggest the one-man law of the place, for even Courtrey, who made thesheriffs--and unmade them--did it under the grandiloquent name ofGovernment. She looked at him keenly, and there was a sudden hardeningin her young eyes.
"Then I reckon, Mister," she said coolly, "that you an' me can't befriends."
"What?"
"No, sir."
"Are you in earnest?"
"Certainly am," said Tharon. "I ain't on good terms at present withanything that has t' do with law."
David Kenset leaned forward and looked into her face with his deep,compelling eyes.
"I guessed as much from my first knowledge of you the other day," heanswered, "but we are on unfamiliar ground. You have a wrongconception of Government, a perverted idea of law and what it standsfor."
"All right, Mister," said the girl rising. "We won't argy. I asked yout' dinner, but I take it back. I ask ye t' forgive me my manners, butth' sooner we part th' better. Then we won't be a-hurtin' each other'sfeelin's. I'm fer law, too, but it ain't your kind, an' we ain'tlikely to agree."
She picked up his hat from where it lay on the melodeon and fingeredit a bit, smiling at him in the ingenuous manner that was utterlydisarming.
A slow dark flush spread over the man's face. He laughed, however, andin reaching for the hat, caught two of her fingers, whether purposelyor not, Tharon could not tell.
"Admirable hospitality in the last frontier," he said. "But perhaps Ishould not have expected anything different."
"You make me ashamed," said Tharon straightly, "but Last's ain'ttakin' chances these days. You may belong to Government, an' you maybelong to Courtrey, an' I'm against 'em both."
She walked with him to the door, stepped out, as if with some thoughtto soften her unprecedented treatment of the stranger under her roof.She noted the trim figure of him in its peculiar garb, the proudcarriage, the even and easy comportment under insult.
From his saddle he untied a package wrapped in paper.
"Will you please take this?" he asked lightly, holding it out. "Juston general principles."
But she shook her head.
"I can't take no favours from you when I've just took stand againstyou, can I?" she asked in turn.
"Well, of all the ridiculous----"
The man laughed again shortly, tossed the package on the step,mounted, whirled and rode away without a backward glance.
Tharon stood frowning where he left her until the brown horse and itsrider were well down along the levels toward Black Coulee.
Then a sigh at her shoulder recalled her and she turned to see thewistful dark face of Paula gazing raptly in the same direction.
"He was so handsome, Senorita," said the girl, "to be so hardly dealtwith."
"Paula," said the mistress bitingly, "will you remember who you'retalkin' to? Do you want to go back to th' Pomos under th' Rockface?"
"Saints forbid!" cried Paula instantly.
"Then keep your sighs for Jose an' mind your manners. Pick up thatbundle."
Swiftly and obediently the girl did as she was told, unrolling thewrapper from the package.
She brought to light the meal-sack which Tharon had dropped that dayon Baston's porch.
A slow flush stained Tharon's cheeks at the sight, and she wentabruptly into the house.
When the riders came in at night she told them in detail about thewhole affair, for Last's and its men were one, their interests thesame.
They held counsel around the long table in the dining room under thehanging lamp, and Conford at her right was spokesman for the rest.
"He's somethin' official, all right, I make no doubt, Tharon," he saidwhen he had listened attentively, "but what or who I don't know. Iheard from Dixon about him comin' into Corvan that day, an' that hehad rode far. No one knows his business, or what he's in Lost Valleyfor. He's some mysterious."
"He's goin' to stay, so he told me," went on the girl, "goin' to builda house up where the pines begin an' means to ride. But how'll helive? What an' who will he ride for? He said for Government."
"What's he mean by that?"
"Search me."
"Wasn't there nothin' about him different? Nothin' you could judge himby?" asked Billy.
"Yes, there was. He wore somethin' on his breast, a sign, a dull-likething with words an' letters on it."
"So?" said Conford quickly, "what was it like, Tharon? Can't youdescribe it?"
"Can with a pencil," said Tharon, rising. "Come on in."
She went swiftly to the big desk in the other room and rummaged amongits drawers for paper and pencil. These things were precious in LostValley.
Jim Last had had great stacks of paper, neat, glazed sheets with faintlines upon them, made somewhere in that mysterious "below" and broughtin by pack train. It was on one of these, with the distinctive words"Last's Holding" printed at the top, that the thirty men had signedthemselves into the new law of the Valley.
To Tharon these sheets had always been magic, invested with gravedignity.
Anything done upon them was of import, irrevocable.
Thus had Jim Last inscribed the semi-yearly letters that went down theWall with the cattle, or for supplies.
Now she spread a shining pad under the light, sat down in her father'schair and began, carefully and minutely to reproduce the badge thatmeant authority of a sort, yet was not a sheriff's star.
The riders, clustered at her shoulder, watched the thing take shapeand form. At the end of twenty painstaking minutes Tharon straightenedand looked up in the interested faces.
"There," she said, "an' its dull copper colour!"
And this was the shield with its unknown heraldry which Conford tookup and studied carefully for a long time.
"'Forest Service,'" he read aloud, "'Department of Agriculture.' Well,so far as I can see, it ain't so terrifyin'. That last means raisin'things, like beets an' turnips an' so on, an' as for th' forest part,why, if he stays up in his 'fringe o' pines' I guess we ain't got nocall to kick. Don't you worry, Tharon, about this new bird."
"I'm a
darned sight more worried about that other one, th' Arizonabeauty which Courtrey's got in."
"Forget th' gun man, Burt," said Billy, "this feller's a heap moreinterestin' to me, for I've got a hunch he's a poet. Now who on thisfootstool but a poet would come ridin' into Lost Valley with his badgeo' beets an' his line o' talk about 'fringes o' pines' an' 'runnin'streams,' to quote Tharon?"
"Even poets are human, you young limb," drawled Curly in his softvoice, "an' I'm sorry for him if he starts your 'interest,' so tospeak. He'll need all his poetic vision t' survive."
"I hope, Billy," said Tharon severely, and with lofty inconsistency,"that you'll remember your manners an' not start anything. Last's isin for trouble enough without any side issues."
"True," said the boy instantly, "I'll promise to leave th' poetalone."
Then the talk fell about the new well that had taken the place of theold Crystal and which was proving a huge success.
"Can't draw her dry," said Bent Smith, "pulled all of three hours withNick Bob an' Blue Pine yesterday an' never even riled her.
"She's good as th' Gold Pool or th' Silver Hollow now."
"You're some range man t' make any such a comparison," said Curly withconviction, "there ain't no artificial water-well extent that can holda candle t' th' real livin' springs of a cattle country, when they'resuch bubblin', shinin' beauties as th' Springs of Last's."
"You're right, Curly," said Tharon quietly from under the light,"there's nothin' like them. They must be th' blessin's of God, an' nomistake. They're th' stars at night, an' th' winds an' th' sunshine.They're th' lovers of th' horses, th' treasure of th' masters. I lovemy springs."
"So do th' herds," put in Jack Masters. "They'll come fast at nightnow because they can smell th' water far off, an' it's gettin' prettydry on th' range."
"Yes," sighed Tharon, "it's summer now, an' Jim Last died in spring. Awhole season gone."
A whole season had gone, indeed, since that tragic night.
Last's Holding had missed its master at each turn and point. Athousand times did Conford, the foreman, catch himself in the act ofgoing to the big room to find him at his desk, a big, vital force,intent on the accounts of the ranch, a thousand times did he long forhis keen insight. The _vaqueros_ missed him and his open hand.
The very dogs at the steps missed him, and so did El Rey, waiting inhis corral for the step that did not come, the strong hand on hisbit.
And how much his daughter missed him only the stars and the paleVirgin knew.
For the next few days following the short, awkward visit of thestranger Tharon felt a prickle of uneasiness under her skin at everythought of it. There was something in the memory that confused anddistressed her, a feeling of failure, of a lack in her that put her ina bad light to herself.
She knew that, instinctively, she had been protecting her own, thatsince Last's had stepped out in the light against Courtrey she musttake no chance. But should she have taken back the common courtesy ofthe offered meal? Would it not have been better to let him stay andmeet Conford who would have been in at noon?
She vexed herself a while with these questions, and then dismissedthem with her cool good sense.
"It's done," she told herself, "an' can't be helped. An' yet, therewas somethin' about him, somethin' that made me think of Jim Lasthimself--somethin' in his quiet eyes--as if they had both come fromsomewhere outside Lost Valley where they grow different men. It wasa--bigness, a softness. I don't know."
And with that last wistful thought she forgot all about the incidentand the man, for the prediction of Jameson that dusk at the head ofRolling Cove became reality.
Dixon, who lived north along the Wall near the Pomo settlement, lostten head of steers, all white and deeply earmarked, unmistakablecattle that could not be disguised.
Courtrey was resenting the vague something in the air that wascrystallizing into resistance about him.
Word of the stealing ran about the Valley like a grass fire, moreboldly than usual.
It came to Last's in eighteen hours, brought by a horseman who hadcarried it to many a lonely homestead.
Tharon received it with a thrill of joy.
"Good enough," she said, "no use wasting time."
And she sent out a call for the thirty men.
Tharon of Lost Valley Page 4
