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Why not go out to the dim and half-remembered world that he had left, the world of lights, padded floors and marble steps, leave this impossible land with its blood and wrongs? Nay, he could not leave Lost Valley. He was as much a part of it as the grim Rockface itself, the Vestal's Veil eternally shimmering in its thousand feet of beauty. Life or death, for Kenset, it must be here.
A little north of Corvan he had followed the Rockface close for a distance, then suddenly turned back on his tracks and disappeared, burros and all. This was the invisible entrance to the Cañon Country, a narrow mouth that opened sidewise into the very breast of the thousand-foot Wall and led back along a thin sheet of rock that stood between the gorge and the Valley.
The free winds and the rolling earth filled him with a sort of madness. He ran with joy and the surety of unbounded power. The rider, left far behind, watched them anxiously for a time, thought of following, glanced at his cattle, remembered the gun man's heritage and turned to his business. The sun was well down over the western Rockface when Tharon and El Rey came back to Last's Holding.
The long blue shadows had swept out from the Rockface, covering first the homesteads under the Wall, then the great grazing stretches, then Corvan, then the open levels again, then the mouth of Black Coulee and lastly sweeping eastward to hush the life at Last's Holding in that soft, sweet quiet which comes with the day's work done.
World-silence, profound as eternity, hung tangibly above Lost Valley and the Wall, the eastern ramparts of the shelving mountains, the rocklands at the north. There was little sound in all this sleeping wilderness. Bird life was rare. The waters that fell at seasons from the open mouths of the cañons half way up the Rockface were dried.
He was silent, lost in some world of his past, then spoke. 'It will be a long time before the Commodore ventures so far from its hole, to steal the flesh of those yet living. With this he seemed to come back to himself. He turned to the girl, contented. 'There is much work to do. He reached above and behind her on the rockface to the place where he had set the pelt to dry.
The little burros, placid and faithful, went on and saw the pageant of the dawn from the hidden gateway in the Wall, crept down the Rockface, single file, and at their accustomed hour stood at their accustomed place before the Golden Cloud.
"Rockface is about as enormous as a biscuit. Anybody could have told you." "That's the strangest part of it," recollected Hastings. "You see, I had a curious hunch about it; I felt a little forsaken. I was actually surprised and irritated that somebody I didn't know who wasn't waiting to meet me.
They passed each other with hostile eyes and trigger fingers were unusually limber. The air was pregnant with change. Buck Courtrey was conspicuous by his absence. He was not seen in the town, neither was he at the Stronghold. There were soft whispers afloat that he was with the Pomos up under the Rockface at the north.
Ail the wide expanse of Lost Valley was still and sweet with dawn, smiling as if with a new and wondrous peace, the Vestal's Veil shimmered on the Rockface, the distant peaks above the Cañon Country cut the skies. She scanned the little world about and felt this peace press down upon her soul as if the questions all were answered, the duty done.
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