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Ah, Ellen was thinking of the long past day when this man had found her in the barren rocklands and taken her with the high hand of a lover. She, too, drifted away from the chilling courtroom with its judge and its petty officials.... And then all suddenly she knew that men were talking and about her.
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.
Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach.
Through it ran the Broken Bend, coming in from the high and jumbled rocklands at the north, going out along the sheer cliffs at the south. Out of its ideal loneliness there were but two known ways, and both were worth a man's best effort. Down the river one might drive a band of cattle, bring in a loaded pack train, single file against the wall. That was a twelve days' trip.
"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.
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.
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.
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