_ CHAPTER IV. UNBROKEN BREAD
Jameson, Hill and Thomas were as good as their word. During the week that followed the spectacular denouncement of Courtrey and Service at Baston's store, they went quietly to every settler in the Valley and declared themselves. In almost every instance they met with eager pledges of approval. They knew, every man of them, that this slow banding together for resistance against Courtrey and his power meant open war. For years they had suffered indignities and hardship without protest. While Jim Last lived they had had a sort of leader, an example, though they had feared to follow in his lead too strongly.
They had copied his methods of guarding possessions, of corraling every cattle-brute at night, of keeping every horse under bars. Last had looked Courtrey in the face. The rest dared not.
Now with Last gone, they felt the lack, as if a bastion had been razed, leaving them in the open. Secrecy in Lost Valley had been brought 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 her accuracy, went softly all about and about, garbled and accentuated. They said she could shoot the studs from the sides of a man's belt and never touch him. They said she could drive a nail farther than the ordinary man could see. They said she could draw so swiftly that the motion 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's intent than some of the others. Young Paula, half asleep in the deep recesses of the house, had witnessed that furious encounter by the western door on the soft spring day when Jim Last had come home to die at dusk. She knew that the look in Courtrey's eyes had been covetousness--and she had told Jose. Jose, loyal and sensible, had told the boys. So now there was always one or more of them on duty near the mistress of Last's on one pretext or another. To Tharon, who knew more than all of them put together, this was funny.
It stirred the small mirth there was in her these days, and often she sent them away, to have them turn up at the most unexpected times and places.
"You boys!" she would say whimsically, "you think Courtrey's goin' to cart me off livin'?"
"That's just what we are afraid of, Tharon," answered Conford gravely once, "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 up along the levels, past the head of Black Coulee, forded the Broken Bend 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 they had 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 the hoofs seemed to the girl as the call of clarions. The heart in her breast leaped with a strange thrill, a gladness. She felt as if her father's spirit stood behind her waiting the first step toward the fulfillment of her promise.
The riders stopped in the soft darkness. There was no moon and the very winds seemed to have hushed their whispers in the cottonwoods.
"Tharon," said the man who rode in the lead, and she recognized the voice 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 at his mistress' shoulder and waited, too.
For a long moment there was no sound save the eternal tree-toads at their concert. Then the girl spoke, and it seemed to those shadowy listeners 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 Valley has got t' stand or fall forever. Courtrey's gettin' stronger every day, more careless an' open. He's been content to steal a bunch of cattle here, another there, a little at a time. Now he's takin' them by th' herds, like John Dement's last month. He's got a wife, an' from what I've always heard, she's a sight too good fer him. But he wants more--he wants
me. He's offered me th' last insult, an' as Jim Last's daughter I'm a-goin' to even up my score with him, an' it's got three 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 us together. For every cattle-brute run off by Courtrey's band, we'll take back one in open day, all of us ridin'. We'll have to shoot, but I'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 thirty men swung off their horses.
Tharon stepped back in the lighted room. Her men stood there against the walls. The settlers came diffidently in across the sill, lean, poor men for the most part, their strained eyes and furrowed faces showing the effect of hardships. Not a man there but had seen himself despoiled, had swallowed the bitter dose in helplessness.
Most of them were married and had families. Some of them had killings to 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 the rest. McIntyre was like him. One by one they came forward as Tharon called them by name, and leaning down, put their names or their marks to a sheet of paper which bore these few simple lines:
"We, the signers named below, do solemnly promise and pledge ourselves to stand together, through all consequences of this act, for the protection of our lives and property. For every piece of property taken from any one of us, we shall go together and take back it, or its 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 her letters, read it aloud. The names of Last's Holding headed it. The thirty names and marks--and of the latter there were many--stretched to the bottom of the sheet.
When it was done the girl folded it solemnly and put it away in the depths of the big desk. Old Anita, watching from the shadows of the eating room beyond, put her
reboso over her head and rocked in silent grief. She had seen tragic things before.
Then these lean and quiet men filed out, mounted the waiting horses and went away in the darkness, mysterious figures against the stars.
That night Tharon Last sat late by the deep window in her own room at the south of the ranch house. It was a huge old room, high walled and sombre. There were bright blankets hung like pictures on the walls, baskets marvelously woven of grass and rushes, thick mats on the floor made in like manner and of a tough, long-fibred grass that grew down in a swale beyond the Black Coulee, while in one corner there shone pale in the darkness the one great treasure of that unknown mother, an almost 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 when Anita, throwing back to her Mexic ancestors, worshipped with vague rites at its feet.
Always its waxen hands bore offerings, silent tribute from the girl's still nature. Sometimes these were the prairie flowers, little wild things, sweet and fragile. Sometimes they were sprays of the water vines that grew by the wonderful spring of the Holding.
Again they were strings of bright beads, looped and falling in glistening cascades over the tarnished gilt robes of the Virgin.
Under the deep window there was a wide couch, piled high with a narrow mattress of wild goose feathers and covered with a crimson blanket. Here the girl sat with her arms on the sill and looked out into the darkness that covered the Valley. She thought of the thirty men who had signed her paper, riding far and by in the sounding basin, returning to their uncertain homes. She thought of her father asleep under his peaceful cross, of young Harkness beside him.
She thought of Courtrey and Service and Wylackie Bob, of Black Bart and 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 of rulers and their helpless subjects. Jim Last could talk when he needed, though he was a man of conserved speech.
Yes, Courtrey was like a king in Lost Valley, absolute. She thought of the many crimes done and laid to his door since she could remember, of countless cattle run off, of horses stolen and shamelessly ridden in grinning defiance of any who might dare to identify them, of Cap Hart killed 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 scare their kind. Her soft lips drew themselves into a hard line, very like Jim Last's, and the heart in her ratified its treaty with the thirty men.
She had none to mourn her, she thought a trifle sadly--well Anita and Paula, of course, and there were her riders. Billy would grieve--he'd kill some one if she were killed--and Conford and Jack.
A warm glow pervaded her being. Yes, she had folks, even if she was the last of her blood.
But she didn't intend to be killed. She was right, and she had listened enough to Anita to believe with a superstitious certainty, that right was invulnerable. For instance, if she and Courtrey should draw at the same second, she believed absolutely, that because she was in the right, her bullet would travel a bit the swifter, her aim be truer. She felt in her heart with a profound conviction that some day she would kill Courtrey. She thought of his wife, Ellen, a pale flower of a woman, white as milk, with hair the colour of unripe maize, and wondered if she loved the man who made her life hell, so the Valley whispered. Tharon wondered how it would seem to love a man, as women who were wives must love their men--if the agony of loss to Ellen could be as acute and terrifying as hers had been ever since that soft night in spring when her best friend, Jim Last, had come home on El Rey.
She thought of the grey look on his face, of the pinched line at his nostrils' base, and the tears came miserably under her lids, she laid her head on the cloth mat that covered the wide window ledge and wept like 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 she caught a faint sound out where the little rock-bordered paths ran in what she was pleased to call her garden, since a few hardy flowers grew by the spring's trickle, and she held her breath to listen. It was 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 saw him coming, in the mid-morning while the work of the house went forward. Paula, bringing a pan of milk from the springhouse spied him first and stopped to satisfy her young eyes with the unwonted appearance of him. She looked long, and hurried in to tell her mistress.
"Senorita," she said excitedly, "see who comes! A stranger who has different 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 of the 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 her grumbling.
"Who can it be, to come so, Senorita?" wondered Paula, her brown cheek beside her mistress, "is he not handsome!"
"For mercy sake, Paula," chided Tharon laughing, "I believe you'd look for beauty in th' ol' Nick himself if he rode up. But I've seen this man before."
"Where? When?"
"In town that day I met Courtrey an' Service. I remember seen' him come into line as I backed out--he was standin' between th' racks an' th' porch, somewhere." And she narrowed her eyes and studied the rider as he came jogging up across the range.
"H'm," she said presently, "he does ride funny. I bet he ain't rode range much in
his life. Stiff as a ramrod, an' no mistake."
Then with an unconscious grace and poise that set well upon her as the mistress of Last's, Tharon moved into the open door and waited.
As the stranger came closer both girls subjected him to a frank and careful scrutiny that in any other place than Lost Valley would have been rudeness itself.
Here it catalogued the stranger, set the style of his welcome.
It left him stripped of surprise, outwardly, before he was within speaking 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--was different from most faces they had ever seen, that it was open, smiling, easy, that he was straight as a ramrod, indeed, that he rode as if he feared nothing in the earth or the heavens, that he carried no gun, that he wore the peculiar uniform that Tharon had noticed before, and that there was something on his breast, a dark shield of some sort which made them think of Steptoe Service and his disgraced sheriff's star. This thought brought a frown to Tharon's brows, and it was there to greet the stranger when he rode up to the step and halted, his smart tan hat in his hand. The morning sun burned warmly down on his dark hair, which was brushed straight back from his forehead in a way unknown in those parts. His dark eyes, slow and deep but 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 his business. Paula drew back behind her mistress.
The man sat still on his horse and waited, too. The silence became profound. 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 her for the first time in her life for such a reason.
There was something in the low voice that implied a lack, accused her of something. She resented it instantly.
"If that is so," she said slowly, "light."
The man laughed delightedly, and swung quickly down, dropping his rein. Tharon noticed that. That much was natural. He held his hat against his breast with one hand and came forward with the same quickness, holding out the other. Tharon was not used to shaking hands with strange men. She gave her hand diffidently, because he so evidently expected it, and took it away swiftly.
"My name," he said, "is Kenset--David Kenset, and I am from Washington, D. C."
He might as well have said Timbuctoo. Tharon Last knew little outside her own environment. Words and names that had to do with unknown places were vague things to her.
"Yes?" she answered politely, "I make no doubt you've come far. Come in. Dinner'll soon be ready," and she moved back from the door with a smile that covered her pitiful ignorance as with a garment of gold. When Tharon smiled like that she was wholly adorable, and the man knew it at once.
Why she had so quickly invited him in before he had fully declared himself, she did not know, unless it was because of that lack in her which his first words had implied.
Old Anita, whose manners were the simple and perfect ones of the Mexican coupled to a kindly heart, had taught her how to comport.
Her easy and constant association with the riders and
vaqueros had dulled 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 the girl of a few moments before.
The man came in, laid his hat on the flat top of the melodeon, walked over to a chair and sat down. There was an ease about him, a taking-for-granted, that amazed Tharon beyond words.
Then he looked frankly at her and began to talk as if he had known her always.
"I've come to live in Lost Valley, Miss Last," he said, "for a long while, 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, a place from which they imported gun men. Only this man wore no gun, and he 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 build myself a house," and he waved a hand toward the east where the ranges rolled up to the thickening fringes of the forest that marched back into the ramparts of the trail-less hills.
"I want to find an ideal spot, a glade where the pines stand round the edges, with a spring of living water running down, and where I can look down and over the magnificent reaches of Lost Valley. I shall make 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 for Courtrey, 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 in the 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 prated of Gov'ment. It was a farce, a synonym for juggled duty, a word to suggest the one-man law of the place, for even Courtrey, who made the sheriffs--and unmade them--did it under the grandiloquent name of Government. She looked at him keenly, and there was a sudden hardening in her young eyes.
"Then I reckon, Mister," she said coolly, "that you an' me can't be friends."
"What?"
"No, sir."
"Are you in earnest?"
"Certainly am," said Tharon. "I ain't on good terms at present with anything 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," he answered, "but we are on unfamiliar ground. You have a wrong conception of Government, a perverted idea of law and what it stands for."
"All right, Mister," said the girl rising. "We won't argy. I asked you t' dinner, but I take it back. I ask ye t' forgive me my manners, but th' sooner we part th' better. Then we won't be a-hurtin' each other's feelin's. I'm fer law, too, but it ain't your kind, an' we ain't likely to agree."
She picked up his hat from where it lay on the melodeon and fingered it a bit, smiling at him in the ingenuous manner that was utterly disarming.
A slow dark flush spread over the man's face. He laughed, however, and in reaching for the hat, caught two of her fingers, whether purposely or not, Tharon could not tell.
"Admirable hospitality in the last frontier," he said. "But perhaps I should not have expected anything different."
"You make me ashamed," said Tharon straightly, "but Last's ain't takin' chances these days. You may belong to Government, an' you may belong to Courtrey, an' I'm against 'em both."
She walked with him to the door, stepped out, as if with some thought to soften her unprecedented treatment of the stranger under her roof. She noted the trim figure of him in its peculiar garb, the proud carriage, 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. "Just on general principles."
But she shook her head.
"I can't take no favours from you when I've just took stand against you, 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 its rider were well down along the levels toward Black Coulee.
Then a sigh at her shoulder recalled her and she turned to see the wistful dark face of Paula gazing raptly in the same direction.
"He was so handsome, Senorita," said the girl, "to be so hardly dealt with."
"Paula," said the mistress bitingly, "will you remember who you're talkin' 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 that bundle."
Swiftly and obediently the girl did as she was told, unrolling the wrapper from the package.
She brought to light the meal-sack which Tharon had dropped that day on Baston's porch.
A slow flush stained Tharon's cheeks at the sight, and she went abruptly into the house.
When the riders came in at night she told them in detail about the whole affair, for Last's and its men were one, their interests the same.
They held counsel around the long table in the dining room under the hanging lamp, and Conford at her right was spokesman for the rest.
"He's somethin' official, all right, I make no doubt, Tharon," he said when he had listened attentively, "but what or who I don't know. I heard from Dixon about him comin' into Corvan that day, an' that he had rode far. No one knows his business, or what he's in Lost Valley for. He's some mysterious."
"He's goin' to stay, so he told me," went on the girl, "goin' to build a house up where the pines begin an' means to ride. But how'll he live? 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 him by?" asked Billy.
"Yes, there was. He wore somethin' on his breast, a sign, a dull-like thing with words an' letters on it."
"So?" said Conford quickly, "what was it like, Tharon? Can't you describe it?"
"Can with a pencil," said Tharon, rising. "Come on in."
She went swiftly to the big desk in the other room and rummaged among its drawers for paper and pencil. These things were precious in Lost Valley.
Jim Last had had great stacks of paper, neat, glazed sheets with faint lines upon them, made somewhere in that mysterious "below" and brought in 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 signed themselves into the new law of the Valley.
To Tharon these sheets had always been magic, invested with grave dignity.
Anything done upon them was of import, irrevocable.
Thus had Jim Last inscribed the semi-yearly letters that went down the Wall with the cattle, or for supplies.
Now she spread a shining pad under the light, sat down in her father's chair and began, carefully and minutely to reproduce the badge that meant authority of a sort, yet was not a sheriff's star.
The riders, clustered at her shoulder, watched the thing take shape and form. At the end of twenty painstaking minutes Tharon straightened and 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 took up 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 no call to kick. Don't you worry, Tharon, about this new bird."
"I'm a darned sight more worried about that other one, th' Arizona beauty which Courtrey's got in."
"Forget th' gun man, Burt," said Billy, "this feller's a heap more interestin' to me, for I've got a hunch he's a poet. Now who on this footstool but a poet would come ridin' into Lost Valley with his badge o' 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 soft voice, "an' I'm sorry for him if he starts your 'interest,' so to speak. 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 is in for trouble enough without any side issues."
"True," said the boy instantly, "I'll promise to leave th' poet alone."
Then the talk fell about the new well that had taken the place of the old Crystal and which was proving a huge success.
"Can't draw her dry," said Bent Smith, "pulled all of three hours with Nick 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 with conviction, "there ain't no artificial water-well extent that can hold a candle t' th' real livin' springs of a cattle country, when they're such 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' no mistake. 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 love my springs."
"So do th' herds," put in Jack Masters. "They'll come fast at night now because they can smell th' water far off, an' it's gettin' pretty dry on th' range."
"Yes," sighed Tharon, "it's summer now, an' Jim Last died in spring. A whole season gone."
A whole season had gone, indeed, since that tragic night.
Last's Holding had missed its master at each turn and point. A thousand times did Conford, the foreman, catch himself in the act of going 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 for his keen insight. The
vaqueros missed him and his open hand.
The very dogs at the steps missed him, and so did El Rey, waiting in his corral for the step that did not come, the strong hand on his bit.
And how much his daughter missed him only the stars and the pale Virgin knew.
For the next few days following the short, awkward visit of the stranger Tharon felt a prickle of uneasiness under her skin at every thought of it. There was something in the memory that confused and distressed her, a feeling of failure, of a lack in her that put her in a bad light to herself.
She knew that, instinctively, she had been protecting her own, that since Last's had stepped out in the light against Courtrey she must take no chance. But should she have taken back the common courtesy of the offered meal? Would it not have been better to let him stay and meet Conford who would have been in at noon?
She vexed herself a while with these questions, and then dismissed them with her cool good sense.
"It's done," she told herself, "an' can't be helped. An' yet, there was somethin' about him, somethin' that made me think of Jim Last himself--somethin' in his quiet eyes--as if they had both come from somewhere outside Lost Valley where they grow different men. It was a--bigness, a softness. I don't know."
And with that last wistful thought she forgot all about the incident and the man, for the prediction of Jameson that dusk at the head of Rolling Cove became reality.
Dixon, who lived north along the Wall near the Pomo settlement, lost ten head of steers, all white and deeply earmarked, unmistakable cattle that could not be disguised.
Courtrey was resenting the vague something in the air that was crystallizing into resistance about him.
Word of the stealing ran about the Valley like a grass fire, more boldly than usual.
It came to Last's in eighteen hours, brought by a horseman who had carried 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. _