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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.
Question and answer passed swiftly and quietly back and forth between Dixon, Jameson, Hill and Tharon. In a few pregnant moments she knew what had happened in Corvan they knew the secret of False Ridge and the Cup o' God. "An' now these strangers from below they ben a-actin' awful queer, ain't a-feared o' nothin' an' they ben goin' all over like a couple o' hounds.
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.
She left a little note for Courtrey, a pathetic short scrawl, which simply reiterated that she had "ben true to him as his shadow," and that if he did no longer want her, she did not want herself. At that pitiful end to a guiltless life, Lola, who knew innocence and sin, sat down on the only carpeted floor in Corvan and wept.
Then some one reached down and picked him up bodily. Another joined, and they set him on their shoulders, lifting him high. The inarticulate mob cry swelled and deepened and rose to a different sound a shout that gathered volume and roared out across the spaces where Courtrey rode with a menace, a portent. With one accord the mob started on a journey around Corvan.
Corvan saw the silver horse shoot out from its midst and woke from its lethargy. "Th' race!" some one cried, high and shrill, "th' race at last!" The two strangers saw it, and their lips fell open with amaze. Kenset from his low porch saw it and dropped his face on his arms. "Lord God!" he groaned, "it's come! I couldn't hold her! I might have known! I might have known!
He met Courtrey face to face in Corvan one day and spoke to him civilly, but Courtrey did not speak. Wylackie Bob did, however a sneering salutation that was a covert insult. Kenset touched his hat with dignity and passed on. "Of all th' tenderfeet!" said Baston, watching the small by-play. "I b'lieve you could spit on him, boys."
He was thinking of the only man in Corvan whom he had been able to persuade to present Ellen's protest Dick Burtree, one-time lawyer and man of parts in the outside, now a puffed and threadbare vagabond, whose paramount idea was whiskey and more whiskey. But Burtree could talk. Over his mottled and shapeless lips could, on occasion, pour a stream of pure oratory silver as the Vestal's Veil.
Then Kenset gave it to the coroner. "There's your clew, Mr. Banner," he said. "Now we can begin. Let us be going back to Corvan." And so it was that Old Pete, the snow-packer, went back in state to the Golden Cloud, by relays on men's shoulders down the sounding passes, through the dead cut, by pack-horse across the levels, lashed stiffly to the saddle, a pitiful burden.
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.
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