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The high tops of the pines seemed to cut the sky grotesquely. There was no light at the dim log house, no sound in the silent glade. Off to the right they heard the low of the little red cow which served the forest man with milk. They pounded to a sliding stop in the cabin's yard and Conford called sharply into the silent darkness. "Kenset! Hello Kenset!" Tharon held her breath and listened.
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.
Billy, Curly, Bent Smith, Jack Masters and Conford, the foreman, they all had a love-look for her, and the girl felt it like a circling guerdon. She was grateful for the sense of security that seemed to emanate from her father's riders, a bit wistful withal, as if, for the first time in her life, she needed something more than she had always had.
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'."
Therefore, the next morning saw a disgusted bunch of cowboys and Indian vaqueros setting to with a will at a spot much nearer the Holding than the Crystal had been, and it took a much shorter time to reach water in a good gravel bed than any one had dreamed. In three days the thing was done and Conford presented himself, smiling. "Now, Miss Secrecy," he said, "come on with th' mystery."
In two hours Kenset was on his way to the blind mouth of the pass that led into the Cañon Country, Tharon was shooting back to the Holding on El Rey to put things on a watching basis there, while Conford and Billy went south and west to rouse the Vigilantes. With Kenset rode Banner, weak and not quite steady in his saddle, but a fighting man notwithstanding.
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.
As she did so there came the sound of hoofs on the hard earth at the corner of the house, and a stranger came sharply into sight. He drew up and nodded. Conford, just turning away, turned quickly back and came forward. "Howdy," he said. The man, tall, lean, dark, returned the salute with another nod. He was covered with dust, as if he had ridden far and been a long time coming.
"Th' settlers," said Conford. "All right. Until they are here we'll guard the mouth of this cañon that leads into the Rockface, as I understand it. Now take me to this man Banner." At a low, rambling house in the outskirts of Corvan they found Jim Banner, sitting on the edge of his bed, undeniably sick from some acute attack.
Courtrey or no Courtrey, she could not fight it down. So, on a golden day when all the boys were out with the herds and only the Indian vaqueros left in charge by Conford were at the stables, she flung the big saddle with its silver studs and its sombre stain on El Rey, mounted and went out and away like the wind itself.
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