Tharon of Lost Valley

by Roe, Vingie E

  As the last rider of the cavalcade went down over the slanting edge of the Cup Rim there came the sound of quick shots snapping in the distance and the belated sight of riders streaming down from the Stronghold hurried the descent.

  They had reached the level floor of the sunken range and spread out upon it for better travelling before Courtrey and his men, some ten or fifteen riders, appeared on the upper crest.

  The settlers stopped instantly at a call from Conford, drew together behind the cattle, turned and faced them. They were too far away for speech, out of rifle range, but the still, grim defiance of that compact front halted the outlaw cattle king and his followers.

  For the first time in all his years of rising power in Lost Valley Courtrey felt a challenge. For the first time he knew that a tide was banking in full force against him. A red rage flushed up under his dark skin, and he raised a silent fist and shook it at the blue heavens.

  The grim watchers below knew that gesture, significant, majestic, boded ill to them.

  But Tharon Last, muttering to herself in the hatred that possessed her of late at sight of Courtrey, raised her own doubled fist and shook it high toward him, an answer, an acceptance of that challenge.

  Then they calmly turned and drove the recovered cattle down along the sloping levels at a fast trot.

  The die was struck. Lost Valley was no longer a stamping-ground for wrong and oppression. It had gone to war.

  That night the white and yellow herd bedded at the Holding, vaqueros rode about it all night long, quietly, softly under the stars. The settlers walked about, smoking, or sat silently in the darkened living room. At midnight Tharon and young Paula made huge pots of coffee which they dispensed along with crullers.

  By dawn the cattle were well on their way, still safeguarded by the band of men, down toward the homesteads where they belonged.

  During that night of unlighted silence plans had been perfected in low voices, a name chosen for the band itself. They would call themselves the Vigilantes, as many another organization had called itself in the desperate straits that made its existence imperative.

  By sundown the hundred head had been driven, hot and tired, into John Dement’s corrals, the ten white steers were bedded by Black’s Spring over toward the Wall. They had farther to go and would not reach Dixon’s until the morning.

  And with each band there was a group of determined men.

  * * *

  Word of this exploit ran all over the Valley in a matter of hours. To each faction it had a deep significance.

  But speech concerning it was sparse as it had ever been anent the doings of Courtrey. A man’s tongue was a prisoner to his common sense those days.

  To Tharon Last, busy at her tasks about the Holding, it was a vital matter. She felt a strong surge, an uplift within her. She had begun the task she had set herself and solemn joy pervaded her being.

  But of all those whom it affected there was none to whom it meant what it did to Courtrey himself. In him it set loose something which burned in him like a consuming fire. Where he had thought of Tharon Last before with a certain intent, now he thought of her in a sort of madness. He was a king himself, in a manner, an eagle, a prowler of great spaces, a rule-or-ruin force. Down there on the sloping floor of the Cup Rim had been a fit mate for him in the slim girl who had shaken her fist back at him in strong defiance.

  He felt his blood leap hot at the thought of her. She was built of fighting stuff. No pale willy-nilly, like some he knew who wept whole fountains daily. No––neither was she like Lola of the Golden Cloud, past-master of men because she had belonged to many.

  Courtrey, who had run life’s gamut himself, thought of Tharon Last’s straight young purity with growing desire.

  It began to obsess him with a mania. His temper, bad at all times, became worse. Ellen, the veriest slave through her devotion to him, found her life at the Stronghold almost unbearable.

  She was a white woman, like a lily, with transparent flesh where the blue veins showed. Her pale blue eyes, like the painted eyes of a china doll, were red with constant tears under their corn-silk lashes. The pale gold hair on her temples was often damp with the sweat that comes with agony of soul.

  “It jes’ seems I can’t live another minute, Cleve,” she would tell her brother who lived at the Stronghold, “seems like I don’t want to. Th’ very sunlight looks sad t’ me, an’ I hate th’ tree-toads that are singin’ eternal down in th’ runnel.”

  This brother, her only relative, would stir uneasily at such times and the fire that shot from his eyes, light, too, under the same corn-silk lashes, was a rare thing. Nothing but this had ever set it burning. He was a slight man, narrow-chested and thin. They had been from run-down stock, these two, a strain that seemed indigenous to the Valley, without other memories. Their name was Whitmore, and they had lived all their lives in a poor cove up beyond the Valley’s head where the barren rocklands came down out of the skies. There had been, besides themselves, only the father and mother, worn-out workers, who had died at last, leaving the brother and sister to live as best they might in the solitudes.

  Here Courtrey had found them, both in their teens, and he had promptly taken them both along with their scant affairs. It was about the only thing to his credit that he had married Ellen, hard and fast enough, with the offices of a bona fide justice, a matter which he had regretted often enough in the years that followed.

  It was this knowledge which set the light burning in Cleve’s eyes.

  He knew how Ellen loved Courtrey.

  He knew also that Lola of the Golden Cloud had made the cattle king step lively for over a year. He saw the daily growing impatience with which Courtrey regarded his marriage.

  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 niggardly 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’ God 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 brass, added their touch of gleam and shine 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 cushions, 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 mass of literature, all marked with the same peculiar shield 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 breasts 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 prickle 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 Washington 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.”

  “Damn 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.

  Only Ellen, pale as a flower, her sweet mouth drooping, sat listlessly on the hard beaten earth at the eastern side of the squat house where the spruce trees grew, her hands folded in her lap, a sunbonnet covering the golden mass of her hair.

 
At the sound of his horse’s hoofs on the stone-flagged yard Kenset saw her start, half rise, fling a startled look at him and then sink back, as if even the advent of a stranger was of slight import in the heavy current of her dull life.

  He came in close, drew up, and, with his hat in his hand, sat smiling down at her. To Kenset it was more natural to smile than not to.

  The girl, for she was scarce more, looked up at him and he saw at once, even under the disfiguring headgear, that here was a breaking heart laid open for all eyes. The very droop and tremble of the lips were proof.

  “Mrs. Courtrey?” he asked gently.

  At the words, the smile, the unusual courtesy of the removed hat, Ellen rose from her chair, a tall, slim wisp of a woman, whose blue-veined hands were almost transparent.

  “Yes,” she said, and waited.

  That little waiting, calm, unruffled, made him think sharply of Tharon Last who had waited also for his accounting for himself.

  “I am Kenset,” he said, “of over in the foothills. Is your husband at home?”

  “No,” said Ellen, “he’s gone in t’ Corvan.”

  There was a world of meaning in the inflection.

  “Yes? Now that’s too bad. It’s taken me a long time to come and I particularly wished to see him. Do you mind if I wait?”

  “Why, no,” said Ellen a bit reluctantly, “no, sir, I guess not.”

  Kenset swung off the brown horse and dropped the rein.

  “Tired, Captain?” he asked whimsically, rubbing the sweaty mane, while the animal drew a long whistling breath and in turn rubbed the sticky brow band on its forehead on Kenset’s arm.

  “Looks like he’s thirsty,” said Ellen presently. “There’s a trough round yonder at th’ back,” and she waved a long hand.

  Kenset led Captain around back where a living spring sang and gurgled into a section of tree, deeply hollowed and covered with moss.

  When he came back to the shade the woman had brought from some near place a second chair, and he dropped gratefully into it, weary from his long ride.