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Updated: June 20, 2025
When the riders came in at night she told them in detail about the whole affair, for Last's and its men were one, their interests the same. They held counsel around the long table in the dining room under the hanging lamp, and Conford at her right was spokesman for the rest.
He did not go near Last's again, though his business took him far and by in the Valley, for the big maps, hung on a rack beyond his fireplace, covered full half the ranges thereof and stretched away into the mysterious and illimitable forests that went up and away into the eastern mountains.
So old Pete, the snow-packer, had paid the price of gallantry. The bullet he had averted from Tharon Last's young head that day in the Golden Cloud but sheathed itself to wait for him. All the Valley knew it. Not a soul beneath the Rockface but knew beyond a shadow of a doubt who, or whose agents, had followed Pete that night to the Cañon Country.
His eyes were sparkling like harbour lights, his voice was like the sound of running fire. "Do?" he cried. "Do? We'll stand behind her so tight they can't see daylight through, an' we'll fight with an' for her every inch o' that way, every word o' that law, every drop o' that blood! Who says Last's ain't on th' map in Lost Valley?" Tharon smiled and touched him again.
"Tharon," said Billy Brent this day, clanking around the corner of the adobe house, his leather chaps flapping with every step, his yellow hair curling boyishly under his hat-brim. "Tharon, I got bad news for you." There was genuine distress in his grey eyes. "Yes?" asked the mistress of Last's, straightening up. "Yes, sir, an' I hate like hell t' tell it." "Out with it, Billy. What's wrong?"
It was a gift he had given her, nothing less, and she made up her mind that Old Pete should sleep in peace under the pointing pine at Last's Holding and that his cross should also stand beside those other two in the carved granite. Billy, watching, read her mind with the half-tragic eyes of love. Kenset, seemingly unconscious, but keenly alive to everything, was at great loss to do so.
It was about this time, when the master of Last's Holding had lain a month beneath the staring mound under the pine tree out to the east where they had buried Harkness, that José finished a work of art. For many days he had laboured secretly in a calf-shed out behind the small corrals, and in his slim dark fingers there was beauty unleashed.
Conford, quiet, forceful, businesslike, carried on the work without a ripple. To a casual eye all things were as they had been. But to the keen eyes in the tanned faces of Last's riders the change was appallingly apparent. They saw it creep day by day into their lives, felt it in the very atmosphere, and it was grim and promising. Old Anita felt it and watched with dim and wistful eyes.
Her mind had been at the Silver Hollow, seeing again the forest man's dark eyes, so grave, so quiet, so deep her right hand was conscious as it had never been in all her life before. She heard a strange man's condemning voice, felt the warmth of his hands pressed upon hers. The mistress of Last's shook herself, both mentally and physically, and set herself to resay her prayers.
They looked across the woman's shoulder, and from that moment she was to stand between, though what there could be in common between the man in the U. S. service and the common rider from Last's was not apparent. El Rey was eager for flight and by the time Tharon's foot was in the stirrup he was up on his hind feet, fore feet beating the air, silver mane like a flying cloud.
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