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Updated: June 20, 2025
To Billy there was something fateful, bodeful in the dead darkness, the stillness. It seemed to him as if he left forever behind him the open life of the ranges, the gay and careless days of riding after Tharon's cattle. For five years he had lived at Last's, under master and mistress, content, happy. The half-remembered world of below had never called him.
She drew her trembling fingers across her eyes, wet her lips which felt dry as ashes. The same ache that had come with Jim Last's final smile was already in her heart, but intensified a thousand times. She felt all suddenly, as if there was nothing in Lost Valley worth while, nothing in all the world!
Jim Last had had great stacks of paper, neat, glazed sheets with faint lines upon them, made somewhere in that mysterious "below" and brought in by pack train. It was on one of these, with the distinctive words "Last's Holding" printed at the top, that the thirty men had signed themselves into the new law of the Valley. To Tharon these sheets had always been magic, invested with grave dignity.
He saw the gun woman crouch and stoop, saw her hands flash in Jim Last's famous backhand flip, saw the red flame spurt from her hips, and the Pomo half-breed flung up his hands and fell in a heap, his face in the grass. He did not move. Only a long ripple passed over his body. He was still as the ageless rocks, as much a part of eternity. For a moment Billy stood, the gun hanging in his hand.
No she was herself again Tharon Last, Jim Last's girl, the gun woman of Lost Valley and yonder went her father's killer. She leaned down and called again in El Rey's ear. No slightest spurt of speed rewarded her nothing but the rising note. Then she saw that the distance was widening just a tiny bit. Truly it was widening.
He was th' only man dared face him an' hold his own. Last's was th' only head th' weaker faction had, its master their only leader. While he lived we had some show, us leetle fellers. Now there ain't no leader. Th' ranchers'll go out fast now. It'll be a one-man valley." In the soft darkness Tharon took the extended hand, held it a moment and laid her other one upon it.
Slim, spirited, wiry, eager heads up, manes flying, bright hoofs flashing in the late sunlight, they came home to Last's after a long day's work, fresh as when they went out at dawn. "Nothin' ever floors them," Tharon said aloud to herself. "Wonderful creatures."
There was an odd note in his voice, as if under the play there was a purpose. For a second Tharon held her breath. "What you mean, Billy?" she asked so sharply that the boy jumped. Then he laughed, still in that light fashion. "What I said," he affirmed doggedly. But the mistress of Last's took a clutch on his hand that was authority in force and leaned down to look anxiously in his face.
See," she dropped his hand and pointed to the east where the tall pine lifted to the stars, "out yonder there's a cross at Jim Last's grave an' there's my mark on it. Th' settlers have a leader still an' I name myself that leader. I'm set against Courtrey, now an' forever.
Farther: as every fresco of this early date has been retouched again and again, and often painted half over, and as, if there has been the least care or respect for the old work in the restorer, he will now and then follow the old lines and match the old colours carefully in some places, while he puts in clearly recognizable work of his own in others, two critics, of whom one knows the first man's work well, and the other the last's, will contradict each other to almost any extent on the securest grounds.
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