_ CHAPTER V. THE WORKING OF THE LAW
It was a clear, bright morning in early summer. All up and down Lost Valley the little winds wimpled the grass where the cattle grazed, and brought the scent of flowers. In the thin, clear atmosphere points and landmarks stood out with wonderful boldness.
The homesteads set in the endless green like tiny gems, the stupendous face of the Wall, stretching from north to south and sheer as a plumb line for a thousand feet, was fretted with a myriad of tiny seams and crevasses not ordinarily visible.
Far up at the Valley's head against the huge uplift of the jumbled and barren rocklands the scattered squat buildings of the Stronghold brooded like a monster.
Spread out on the velvet slopes below lay the herds that belonged to it, sleek fat cattle, guarded carelessly by a few lazy and desultory riders. Courtrey was too secure in his insolent might to take those rigid and untiring precautions which were the only price of safety to the lesser men of the community. Toward the south where the Valley narrowed to the Bottle Neck and the Broken Bend went out, there shimmered and shone like a silver ribbon hung down the cliff the thin, long shower of Vestal's Veil fall.
The roar of it could be heard for miles like the constant and incessant wail of winds in time-worn canyons.
Along the floor of the Cup Rim range, sunken and hidden from the upper levels, there rode a compact group of horsemen. They went abreast, in column of fours, and they were armed to the teeth, a bristling presentation. All in all there were forty-two of them and at their head rode Tharon on El Rey, a slim and gallant young figure.
Her bright hair, tied with a scarlet ribbon, shone under her wide hat like an aureole. She talked with Conford who rode beside her, and now and then she smiled, for all the world as if she went to some young folks' gathering, instead of to the first uncertain issue of blind mob law against outlaws.
But if she felt a lightness of excitement in her heart it was more than actuated by the grim and quiet band that followed.
They knew--and she knew, also--that what they did this day, in the open sunlight, meant savage strife and bloodshed for some as sure as death.
For two hours they rode across the sunken range where the cottonwoods and aspens made a lovely and mottled shade, to reach at last the sharp ascent to the uplands above. When they topped the rim and started forward, the huge herds of Courtrey lay spread before them, bright as paint on the living green. Two thousand cattle grazed there in peace and plenty. Here and there a rider sat his horse in idleness. At the first sight of the solidly formed mass coming out of the Cup Rim on to the levels, these riders straightened in their saddles and rode in closer to their charges.
The eyes of the newcomers went over the bright pattern of the grazing cattle. A motley bunch they were, red, black and white, with here and there descendants of the yellows which none but John Dement had ever owned in Lost Valley. Dement, riding near the head of the line saw this and muttered in his beard.
"Thar's some o' mine," he said pointing, "th' very ones that was stampeded. I'd know 'em in hell."
[Illustration: SHE TALKED WITH CONFORD WHO RODE BESIDE HER AND NOW AND THEN SHE SMILED]
With the nearing of the line of horsemen a rider detached himself from the right of the herd and went sailing away across the levels toward the distant Stronghold.
Quick as a flash Tharon Last lifted the rifle that lay ready on her pommel and sent a shot whining toward him.
"Just to show we mean business," she muttered to herself.
The cowboy caught the warning and drew his running horse up to slide ten feet on its haunches.
He had meant to warn his boss, but a chance was one thing, certainty another.
"Dixon--Dement," called Tharon rising in her stirrups, "when we get to work you pick out as near as you can, cattle that look like yours, an' th' same amount--not a head more."
Then they swung forward at a run and swept down along the left flank of the herd. Here a rider raised his arm and fired point blank at the leaders. One-two-three his six-gun counted. He was a lean youngster, scarce more than a boy, a wild admirer of Courtrey, and he stood his defence with a sturdy gallantry that was worthy of a better cause.
"Damn you!" he yelled, standing in his stirrups, "what's this?"
"Law!" pealed the high voice of Tharon as El Rey thundered down toward him. Then Buford, riding midway of the sweeping line, fired and the boy dropped his gun, swayed and clung to his saddle horn as his horse bolted and tore off at a tangent to the right, away from the herd.
"God!" cried the girl hoarsely, "I wish we didn't have to! Did you kill him?"
"No," called Buford sharply, "broke his arm."
Tharon, to whom the high blue vault had seemed suddenly to swing in strange circles, shut her teeth with a click.
Abreast of the cattle she swerved El Rey aside, drew her guns and waited.
In among the grazing cattle, many of which had raised startled heads to eye the intruders, went the men. They worked swiftly and deftly. They knew that they were in plain sight of the Stronghold and expected every moment to see Courtrey and a dozen riders come boiling out. Those cowboys who had been in charge of the herd, sat where they were, without a move. Out of the bright mass the settlers cut first the ten head of steers, as nearly as possible all white, to take the place of Dixon's band. Thomas and Black stood guard over them. Then they went back and took out yellows and yellow-spotted to the number of one hundred. It was fast work, the fastest ever done on the Lost Valley ranges, and every nerve was strained like a singing wire.
Under the dust cloud raised by the plunging hoofs, the whirling horses, the workers kept as close together as possible.
They rounded up the cut-outs, bunched them together compactly and swinging into a half circle, drove them rapidly back toward the oak-fringed edge of the Cup Rim. They passed close to where the slim boy stood by his horse, trying to wind the big red kerchief from his neck about his right arm from which the blood ran in a bright stream. Tharon swung out of her course and shot toward him.
"Here," she cried swiftly, "let me tie it."
"To hell with you," said the lad bitterly, raising blazing eyes to her face. "You've made me false t' Courtrey. I'd die first."
"Die, then!" she flung back, "an' tell your master that th' law is workin' in this Valley at last!"
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.
He laid his hat on the earth beside him and smoothed the sleek, dark hair back from his forehead.
Ellen sat still and watched him with a steady gaze.
She was finding him strange. She looked at his olive drab garments, at the trim leather leggings that encased his lower limbs, at his smooth hands, at his face, and lastly at the dark shield on his breast.
"Law?" she asked succinctly.
"Well," smiled Kenset, "after a fashion."
She moved uneasily in her chair, and the man had a sudden feeling of pity for her.
"Not as you mean, Mrs. Courtrey," he hastened. "I am in the United States Forest Service, if you know what that is."
"No," said Ellen, "I don't know."
"It is simply a service for the conservation of the timber of this country," he explained gently, but he saw that he was not making it clear.
"The saving of the trees," he went on, "the care of the forests."
"Oh," she said, relieved.
"We look after the ranges, protect the woods from fire, and so on."
"Look after th' ranges? How?"
"Regulate grazing, grant permits."
"Permits?"
"Yes." And seeing that at last he had caught her interest, Kenset talked quietly for an hour and told her more than he had vouchsafed any other in Lost Valley about his work.
Gradually, however, he fell to talking to amuse her, for he saw the emptiness behind the big blue eyes, the aching void which there was nothing to fill, neither love nor hope.
As the sun sank lower toward the west Ellen took off the atrocity of calico and starch, and he saw with wonder the amazing beauty of her ropes of hair.
When he ceased talking the silence became profound, for she had nothing to say and speech did not come easy to her anyway. He did not know that at the windows and behind the door-jambs of the deep old house were clustered almost a dozen dusky women and children, drawn from all over the place and listening in utter silence.
Unconsciously he had drifted back to his life in the outside world, encouraged by the absorbing interest of the pale eyes that never left his face. He told Ellen of boat races on the Hudson, of theatres on Broadway, of college pranks and frolics, ranged over half the continent in little story and snatch of description.
Neither one noticed how the shadows were lengthening, nor that the sun had dropped in majesty behind the mighty Wall.
It took the sound of running horses, many of them coming up along the slopes, to bring Kenset back to the present with a snap, to make the woman reach swiftly for the bonnet and clap it on her head.
"Mrs. Courtrey," said Kenset hurriedly, "this has been the first real talk I have had with any of my neighbours, and I want to thank you for it."
"Oh," quavered the woman, "I don't know as I'd ought to a-let you stayed! Mebby I'd oughtn't. But--but seems like you bein' so different, an' I not seein' no one, come day in day out, w'y I--I--"
"Sure," he returned quickly, understanding. "You did just right. I wanted to stay."
Then he rose to his feet and there came the thunder of the horses, the noise of men stopping from a run, dismounting.
Ellen rose and he followed her around the corner of the house to the door yard.
As they waited, Courtrey, clad in dark leather chaps, his guns swinging, came toward them. At sight of Kenset he stopped short and an oath rolled from his lips. The kerchief at his neck was turned knot-back and hung like a glob of crimson blood upon his breast.
Under his hat, set at an angle, his dark hair fluffed strangely.
He was a splendid figure of a man, broad shouldered, slim hipped.
Now he looked hard at the stranger and a slow grin lifted his upper lip.
"What's this?" he said, and there was a light suspicion of thickness in his voice, "my wife got com-ny?"
Kenset heard the woman catch her breath, and the feeling of pity that had taken him at first for her intensified.
"No, Mr. Courtrey," he said advancing, "but you have," and he held out his hand. "I'm Kenset, from the foothills."
Courtrey, not four feet from him, did not look at the hand. Instead the glittering eyes under the hat-brim looked steadily into his with an expression that only one man in a hundred could have interpreted.
That one man, however, stood by the watering trough, his hand on the neck of a drinking horse--Cleve Whitmore who watched Courtrey without blinking.
For a moment Kenset stood so, his hand extended, waiting. Then the colour rose in his face and he drew back the hand, raised it, scrutinized it smilingly, and put it quietly on his hip.
Still smiling he raised his eyes again to Courtrey's face.
"Courtrey," he said, this time without the Mr., "I've come to Lost Valley to
stay. I had hoped to be friends with all my neighbours. It would have made my work easier. However, with or without, I stay."
And he picked up his hat, set it on his head, walked over to the brown horse, flung up the rein, mounted and rode out of the Stronghold in utter silence.
His face was flaming, the blood of outraged dignity and deep anger beat in his temples like a drum. As he rode farther away he heard the embarrassing silence broken by the hoarse shouts of laughter of half drunken men.
"Go to it," he said aloud, clinching his fists on his saddle horn, "this is part of my duty. The Big Chief was right when he said, 'If you help the Service to tame Lost Valley you've got your work cut out.' It's a man-size job. I mustn't doubt my ability." _