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Updated: May 31, 2025
"If you, Miss Last," he said straightly, "will give me your word to do no shooting, something like that will be pulled off here, and shortly." He looked directly at Tharon, and for the first time in her life she felt the strength of a gaze she couldn't meet not fully. But Tharon shook her head. "I'm sworn," she said simply. Kenset's face lost a bit of colour.
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.
"All right!" cried Tharon aloud. "Come on, you bastards! It's the king you come against an' Jim Last's blood! You'll never put a hand on either." She struck her heels into El Rey's flanks, leaned over her pommel, wished she was on the king's bare back, reached her hands far out along the reins and began to call in his ear. "Yeeoo! Yeeoo!
Some day I'll draw an' my father's killer must beat me to it." Without another word Tharon backed out on the porch, the door swung to at the pull of an unseen hand on the iron strap by the hinge.
So Tharon held him with a strong brown hand wrapped in the chain below the Spanish spade bit in his mouth. She stood beside him, waiting, a slim, golden creature, tawny of hair and blue of eye, and the great horse towered above her mightily, his silver mane blowing up above his arching neck in the little wind that came from the south.
She stepped clear by the table, stood at attention a second, and, with a peculiar outward whirl, lightning-quick, of her two wrists, had him covered with the big blue guns. He nodded. "Good as I learned ye," he whispered, "make it better." "I will," promised Tharon swiftly. The man closed his eyes, swayed, recovered as Conford caught him, and brightened again. "Now th' under-sling."
As the last arrow fell, flared a moment, then merely smoked, an insulting laugh came from aloft, and my Indians uttered fierce exclamations and cuddled their rifle-stocks close to their cheeks, fairly trembling for a shot. "Dogs of Oneidas!" called the Erie. "Go howl for your dead pig of a Stockbridge slave." "The Mole wears his scalp with Tharon!" retorted the Grey-Feather, choking with fury.
Silver-blue roan, silver-pointed, slim, graceful, springy, she had not a single dark spot on her except the sharp black bars of the finger marks outside her knees. "You darlin'!" said Tharon as she wheeled in line. Then came Jack on Westwind, and he was another buckskin, paler than Golden, most marvelously pointed in pure chestnut brown.
Like Bolt, Courtrey's body turned a complete somersault and lay still, at sudden peace. Tharon Last and El Rey went on like an arrow they could not stop. When at last she did draw the great king down she was far and away from the spot. She turned her head, panting and dizzy, and looked back.... She could see the prone red heap that was Bolt a little way beyond that other, lesser, darker heap....
So they sat about in the great room, black with the darkness of the soft spring night, and like the true worshippers they were, they did not speak. Only the red butts of their cigarettes glowed and faded, to glow again and again fade out. Tharon sat curled in the window, her graceful limbs drawn up to her chin, her eyes half closed, her keen ears open like a forest creature's.
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