Kenset of the foothills was very busy. Between study of his maps and the endless riding of their claimed areas he was out from dawn till dark.

He found, indeed, that none but he, of late years, had ridden those sloping forest covered skirts. Some one, sometime, must have done so, else the maps themselves would not have been, but what marks they must have left were either gone through the erosion of the elements or been wantonly destroyed.

He fancied the former had been the case, for he saw no signs of destruction, and the very curiosity of the denizens of the Valley precluded familiarity with forest work.

So he laid out for himself the labour of a dozen men and went at it with a vim that kept him at high tension. Therefore he had little time to think of Tharon Last and the strange life 158 in Lost Valley. Only when he rode between given points, unintent on the land around, did he give up to his speculations. At such times his mind invariably went back to that first day at Baston’s steps and he saw her again as he had seen her then, tense, stooping, her elbows bent above the guns at her hips, coming backward along the porch, feeling for the steps with her foot.

Always he saw the ashen whiteness of her cheeks beneath her blowing hair.

Always he frowned at the memory and always he felt a thrill go down his nerves. What was she, anyway, this wild, sweet creature of the wilderness who held herself aloof from his friendship, and said that she was “sworn?”

Kenset, sane, quiet, peace loving, shook himself mentally and tried not to think of her. But day after day he came down along the edges of the scattered woods where the cattle grazed––on the forest lands––and looked over to where the Holding lay like a greener spot on the green stretches.

He thought of her, living in this feudal hold, mistress of her riders, her cattle, and her wonderful racing horses of the Finger Marks, sweet, fair, wholesome––with the six-guns at her slender hips!

If only he, Kenset, could take those weapons from her clinging hands, could wipe out of her young heart the calm intent to kill! 159

It was preposterous! It was awful!

Bred to another life, another law, another type of woman, he could not reconcile this girl of Lost Valley with anything he knew.

He went over in his mind again and again the serene calmness of her in his cabin that day of the race with Courtrey, and shook his head in puzzlement.

But why should he trouble himself about her at all?

He had come here in his Government’s service to reclaim its forest, to look after its interest.

Why should he bother with the moral code of Lost Valley?

But reason as he might, the face of Tharon Last came back to haunt him, waking or asleep.

He knew that it troubled him and was, in a way, ashamed. So he worked hard at his tasks, relocated boundaries, marked them with a peculiar blaze in convenient trees which looked something like this:

and set up monuments with odd and undecipherable hieroglyphics upon them.

And with each blaze, each mark and monument and sign, he drew closer in about him the net of suspicion and disapproval which was weaving in Lost Valley, for there was not one but ran the gamut of close inspection and speculation by Courtrey’s men, by the settlers who came many miles over from the western side of the Valley for the purpose, and by Tharon’s riders.

Low mutters of disapproval growled in the Valley.

Who was this upstart, anyway, to come setting signs and marks in the land that had been theirs from time immemorial? What mattered the little copper-coloured badge on his breast? What mattered it that he was beginning to send out word of his desire to work with and for the cattlemen of Lost Valley, the settlers, the homesteaders?

What was this matter of “grazing permits” of which he had spoken at the Stronghold?

Permits?

They had grazed their cattle where and when they chose––and could––from their earliest memory.

They asked no leave from Government.

When Kenset rode into Corvan he was treated with exaggerated politeness by those with whom 161 he had to deal, with utter unconsciousness by all the rest. To cattleman and settler alike he was as if he had not been.

None spoke to him in the few broad streets, none asked him to a bar to drink.

Serene, quiet, soft spoken, he came and went about his business, and sneers followed him covertly.

It was not long after Tharon’s visit to the cabin in the glade, that Kenset, riding alone along the twilight land, passed close to the mouth of Black Coulee one day at dusk. He rode loosely, slouching sidewise in his saddle, for he had been to Corvan for his monthly mail and a few supplies tied in a bag behind his saddle, and he carried his broad hat in his hand.

The little cool wind that blew in from the narrow gorge of the Bottle Neck and spread out like an invisible fan, breathed on his face with a grateful touch. The day had been hot, for the summer was opening beautifully, and he had ridden Captain far. Therefore he jogged and rested, his arms hanging listlessly at his sides, his thoughts two thousand miles away.

At the mouth of Black Coulee where the sinister split of the deep wash came up to the level, there grew a fringe of wild poplar trees. They were beautiful things, tall and straight and thickly covered 162 with a million shiny leaves that whirled and rustled softly in the wind, showing all their soft white silver sides when the breeze came up from the south as it did this day. There was water in Black Coulee, many small springs, not deep enough nor steady enough to count for water in a range country, but sufficient to keep the poplars growing on the rim of the great wash, to stand them thick on the caving sides. Whole benches of earth with their trees upon them slipped down these sides from time to time, making of the Coulee a mysterious labyrinth of thickets and shelves, of winding ways and secret places.

Kenset had heard a few wild stories about Black Coulee. Sam Drake had talked a bit more than most men of Lost Valley would have talked, and he had listened idly.

Now as he rode up along the levels and neared the dark mouth of the cut he studied it with appraising eyes. It was sinister enough, in all truth, a deep, dark place behind its veil of poplars, secretive, hushed.

The red light that dyed Lost Valley so wondrously at the hour of the sun’s sharp decline above the peaks and ridges of the CaÑon Country was awash in all the great sunken cup, save at the west under the Rockface where the shadows were already dark. 163

Kenset drank in the beauty of the scene with smiling eyes. Already a love for this hidden paradise had grown wonderfully in his heart. He felt as if he had never lived before, as if he had never known beauty.

And so, dreaming a little of other scenes, smiling to himself, he jogged along on Captain and was nearly past the frowning mouth of the Coulee, when there came the sharp snap of a rifle in the stillness, and Captain changed his feet, sagged and quivered, then caught himself and leaped ahead. For one amazed moment Kenset thought the horse was hit. Then, as he straightened in his saddle and dropped his hand to catch up his hanging rein, he looked quickly down. Where he was accustomed to the smooth feel of the pommel beneath his palm there was a sharp raw edge. A splinter of wood stood up and a small flare of leather hung to one side.

A bullet, singing out of Black Coulee, had carried away part of the pommel.

Kenset shut his lips in a new line, gathered up his rein and drew the horse down to a walk with an iron hand.

Slowly, without a backward glance, he rode on across the darkening levels. He was no fool.

He knew he had had his warning. 164

Very well. He would give back his acceptance of that warning.

He had said to Courtrey that night at the Stronghold that he had come to stay.

No bunch of lawless bullies were going to scare him out.

No other shot followed. He had not expected one.

For a time after that he went about his work as usual. Nothing happened; he had no outward sign of the distaste with which he was regarded by all factions alike, it seemed.

He met Courtrey face to face in Corvan one day and spoke to him civilly, but Courtrey did not speak. Wylackie Bob did, however––a sneering salutation that was a covert insult. Kenset touched his hat with dignity and passed on.

“Of all th’ tenderfeet!” said Baston, watching the small by-play. “I b’lieve you could spit on him, boys.”

“I don’t,” spoke up Old Pete, shuffling by on his bandy legs, “sometimes that quiet, soft-spoken kind rises––an’ then hell’s to pay in their veecinity.”

But Wylackie looked at the weazened snow-packer with his snake-like eyes and snapped out a warning. 165

“Some folks takes sides too quick, sometimes.”

But Old Pete went on about his business. He knew, as did all the Valley, that a price was on his head with Courtrey’s band for the daring leap which had saved the life of Tharon Last that day in spring.

Sooner or later that price would be paid, but Old Pete was true western stuff. He had lived his life, had had his day, and he was full of pride at the turn of fate which had made him a hero in a way at the end.

All the Valley stood off and admired Jim Last’s daughter.

Pete basked in the reflected light. And Tharon herself had taken his gnarled old hand one day in Baston’s store and called him a thoroughbred.

Folks in Lost Valley were chary of words, conservative to the last degree. That simple word, the handclasp, the look in the clear blue eyes, had been his eulogy.

It was whispered about, as was every smallest happening, and came to the ears of Courtrey himself, who had promised those vague things for the future on the fateful night. But Courtrey was playing a waiting game. He was obsessed with the image of Tharon. Sooner or later he meant to have her, to install her at the Valley’s head. He had always had what he wanted. Therefore, 166 he expected to have this girl with the challenging eyes, the maddening mouth, like crimson sumac.

Ellen?

Already he was setting in motion a thing that was to take care of Ellen.

The thing in hand now was to placate Tharon, the mistress of Last’s, to play the overwhelming lover.

Courtrey knew better than to go near the Holding. Bully that he was he yet had sense enough to know that no fear of him dwelt in the huge old house under the cottonwoods. If Tharon herself did not shoot him, one––or all––of her riders would. The day of the armed band riding down to take her was, if not past, passing fast. He recalled the look of the settlers––poor spawn that he hated––whirling their solid column behind her to face him that day from the Cup Rim’s floor.

No. Courtrey meant to have the girl some day––to hold in his arms that ached for her loveliness, the strong, resistant young body of her––to sate his thief’s mouth with kisses. But he would call her to him of her own will, would taste the savage triumph of seeing her come suing for his mercy.

If Tharon meant to break Courtrey, he meant no less to break her. 167

Outlawry––mob law––they were pitted against each other.

And, lifting its head dimly through the smother of hatred, of wrong, of repression and reprisal, another law was struggling toward the light in Lost Valley––the sane, quiet law of right and equality, typified by the smiling, dark-eyed man of the cabin in the forest glade.

Courtrey sent word to Tharon––an illy spelled letter, mailed at Baston’s––that he had meant nothing by that race above the Black Coulee, except another kiss. There was Courtrey’s daring in the affronting words.

She sent the letter back to him––riding in on El Key alone––with the outline of a gun traced across it.

“Th’ little wildcat!” grinned the man, “she’s sure spunky!”

Once again Tharon met Kenset in the days that followed. Riding by the Silver Hollow she stopped one breathless afternoon, drank of the snow-cold waters, shared them with El Rey, dropped the rein over the stallion’s head and flung herself full length on the earth beside the spring. A clump of willow trees grew here, for every spring in Lost Valley had its lone sentinels to call its presence across the stretching miles. As the 168 girl lay flat on her back with her hands beneath her head, she looked up into the blue heart of the arching skies where the fleecy white clouds sailed, and a sense of sweetness and peace came down upon her like a garment.

“You’re sure some lovely spot, Lost Valley,” she said aloud, “an’ no mistake. I know, more’n ever as th’ days go by that Jim Last was only jokin’ when he told me of those other places out below, big as you, lovely as you. It just ain’t possible. Is it, El Rey, old boy?”

And she moved a booted foot to the king’s striped hoof and tapped it smartly.

El Rey, always aloof, always touchy, never sure of temper, jumped and snorted. The girl laughed and crossed her feet and fell to speculating idly about the world that lay beyond Lost Valley. Little she knew of it. Only the brief words of her father from time to time, the reluctant speech of Last’s riders, for the master of the Holding had laid down the law concerning this.

His daughter was of the Valley, content. He meant her to be so always. The man who had instilled into her young mind a discontent with her environment, a longing for the “flesh-pots” of the world as he had styled it once, would have had short shrift at Last’s. He 169 would have received his time and “gone packing” swiftly.

And Tharon was content.

Barring the loneliness that had come with Jim Last’s death, she was well content.

So she lay by the willows and hummed a sliding tune, a soft, sweet thing of minors and high notes falling, like rippling waters, and lazily watched the high white clouds sail by.

And as she lay she became conscious of something else in the drowsing land beside herself and her horse. She felt it first, this presence––a thin, dim vibration that sang in the earth beneath her. It stopped the wordless song on her lips, stilled the breath in her throat, set every nerve in her to listening, as it were.

Presently she sat up and felt quickly for the gun-butts in their scabbards. Then she parted the willows and looked out over the rolling slopes and levels. True enough. A horseman was coming in from the west, making for the Silver Hollow, but Tharon smiled and her fingers relaxed on the gun. This man rode straight––like a lance, she thought––and his mount was brown, a good-enough common horse, but no steed of Lost Valley.

Captain lacked the fire, the ramping keenness of the Ironwoods, the spirit and dash of the Finger Marks. For a long time the girl in the 170 willows watched them. Then as they came near she rose and caught El Rey’s bridle.

He was no gentleman, this big blue-silver king. He was savage and wild and imperious. He hated other horses with a quick hatred sometimes and had been known to wreak this sudden rage upon them in sickening fury.

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.

They made a picture that Kenset never forgot, as he swung round the willows and faced them.

El Rey screamed and pounded with his striped hoofs, but Tharon jerked him down with no gentle hand.

“Be still, you bully!” she said sharply.

“Why, Miss Last!” cried the forest man, “I’m so glad to meet you!”

There was the genuine delight of a boy in his voice, and Tharon caught the note. The sweet, disarming smile parted her lips and she was all girl at the moment, artless, innocent, unstained by the shadow of lawlessness and crime that 171 seemed to ever hang above her in Kenset’s thoughts.

“Are you?”

“I certainly am.”

He swung down, gave Captain a drink at the edge of the spring farthest from El Rey, dropped the rein when he had finished, and swung around to face the girl. He took off his wide hat and wiped his forehead with a square of linen finer than anything of its kind she had ever seen.

Then he stood for a moment looking straight into her eyes with his smiling dark ones. It seemed to Tharon that this man was always smiling.

“This is your spring, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes. The Silver Hollow. Th’ Gold Pool is farther south toward th’ Black Coulee. There was another one, fine as this, perhaps a better one, up on th’ Cup Rim Range, but Courtrey blew her up, damn him! She was called th’ Crystal.” Kenset caught his breath, mentally, all but physically, and put up a hand to cover his lips.

This was another type of woman from any he had ever met, in truth.

The oath, rolling roundly over her full red lips, was as unconscious as the long breath that lifted her breast at the memory of that outrage.

“We replaced her with a well––an’ it’s a corker. 172 Mebby better than th’ old Crystal, though she was a lovely thing. As clear as––as ice that’s frozen hard without a ripple of white. You know that kind?”

“Yes,” said Kenset gravely.

“Well,” sighed Tharon, “she’s gone, an’ there ain’t no use cryin’ over spilt milk. What you ben a-doin’ sence I helped you hang th’ picture?”

“Won’t you sit down?” Kenset stepped aside. “It is uncomfortable to stand through a visit––and I mean to have a long talk-fest with you, if you will be so kind.”

Tharon flung herself down at the spring’s edge, eased the right gun from under her hip, leaned on her elbow and prepared to listen.

“Fire away,” she said.

Kenset laughed.

“For goodness’ sake!” he ejaculated, “I said visit. That takes two. What have you been doing?”

“Well, everythin’, mostly. Made a new shirt for Billy, for one thing. An’ I showed Courtrey th’ picture o’ this.”

She patted the blue gun that lay half in her lap, its worn scabbard black against her brown skirt.

Kenset sobered at once. As ever when he let his mind dwell on that dark shadow which sat so lightly on this girl, he had no feeling for mirth. 173

A very real chill went down his spine and he looked intently into her eyes.

“How?” he asked, “what did you do?”

But Tharon shook her head.

“Nothin’ you’d understand,” she said quietly.

“I can show you something you will understand,” he said, and reached for Captain’s bridle. He pulled the horse around and pointed to the saddle horn.

“See that?”

She looked up quickly. With the sure instinct of a dweller in a gun man’s land she knew the meaning of the splintered wood of the pommel, the torn and ragged leather that had covered it.

“Hell!” she said softly, “where did you get that?”

“At the mouth of Black Coulee, at dusk a week ago.”

For a long moment Tharon studied the saddle. Then her gaze dimmed, lengthened, went beyond into infinitude. The pupils of her eyes drew down to tiny points of black against the brilliant blue.

At last she turned and held out a hand, rising from her elbow.

“I beg your pardon, Mister,” she said quaintly, “fer that day at the Holdin’ an’ th’ meal I offered an’ took, an’ fer my words. I know now that you are––that you were––straight. I don’t 174 yet know what you may mean in Lost Valley with your talk of Government, but I do know you ain’t a Courtrey man.”

Kenset took the hand. It was firm and shapely and vibrant with the young life there was in her. He laid his other one over it and held it in a close clasp for a moment.

“I mean only right,” he said, “sanity and law and decency. I think I have a big problem to handle here––aside from my work on the forest––a problem I must solve before I can be effective in that work––and I am more sincerely glad than I can say that my friend, the outlaw, took that warning shot at me. It ruined a perfectly good saddle, but it has made one point clear to you. I am no Courtrey man, and that’s a solemn fact.”

“An’ I ain’t ashamed to say I’m glad, too,” said Tharon.

So, with the sun shining in the cloud-flecked heavens and the little winds blowing up from the south to ruffle the hair at the girl’s temples, these two sat by the Silver Hollow and talked of a thousand things, after the manner of the young, for Kenset found himself reverting to the things of youth in the light of Tharon’s grave simplicity.

They looked into each other’s eyes and found there strange depths and lights. They were aliens, strangers, groping dimly for a common ground, 175 and finding little, though presently they fell once more upon the law in Lost Valley and earnestness deepened into gravity.

“Miss Last,” said Kenset, thrilling at his daring, “why must this law dwell in these?” and he reached a hand to tap the gun on her lap.

“Why? That very question’d show your ignorance to any Lost Valley man. Because it’s all there is. You’ve seen Courtrey. You’ve seen Steptoe Service. Can’t you judge from them?”

“Surely, so far as they two go. A bad man and a bad sheriff. But they are not all the officers of this County. Where and who is your Superior Judge?”

“Poor ol’ Ben Garland. Weaker’n skim milk. Scared to say his soul’s his own.”

There was infinite scorn in her voice.

“No, it’s Steptoe Service, or nothin’.”

Kenset thought a moment.

“Who’s the Coroner?” he asked presently.

“Jim Banner,” she answered quickly, “as straight a man as ever lived. Brave, too. He’s been shot at more’n once fer takin’ exception to some raw piece o’ work in this Valley, fer pokin’ his nose in, so to speak. Jim Last used to say he was th’ only man at the Seat, which is Corvan, you know, of course.”

“District Attorney?” 176

“Tom Nord. Keen as a razor an’ married to Courtrey’s sister. Now do you see why this is th’ law?” She, too, tapped the gun.

Kenset frowned and looked down along the green range. He thought of the unpainted pine building in Corvan which was the Court House. A strange personnel, truly, to invest it with authortity!

“I see,” he said briefly, “but there must be some way out. This is not the right way, the way that must come and last.”

Tharon’s lips drew into the thin line that made them like her father’s. “It’s th’ law that’s here,” she said and there was an instant coldness in her voice, “an’ it’s th’ law that’ll last until Courtrey or I go down.”

The man, watching, saw that thinning of the lips, the hardening of all the young lines of her face. He knew he had blundered. Talk was cheap. It was action that counted in Lost Valley.

With a quick motion he reached over and caught the girl’s hand and drew it to him, covering it with both of his.

Her eyes followed, came to rest on his face, cool, appraising, waiting.

She was, in all that had counted in his life, crude, untutored, basic.

Yet that calm look made his impulsive action 177 seem unpardonable in the next second. However a warm surge of feeling shot through him with the quiet resting of that firm brown hand between his own, and he held it tighter. Kenset had thought he was sophisticated, that little or nothing could stir him deeply––not since Ethel Van Riper had gone to Europe as the bride of the old Count of Easthaven. That had been four years back. He had been pretty young then, but the young feel deeply.

Now he held a gun woman’s hand in the thin shade of a willow clump in the heart of Lost Valley––and the blood surged in his ears, the levels and slopes danced before his vision.

“Miss Tharon,” he said, for the first time using her given name, “I beg your pardon. You are strong, simple, serene. You know your land and its ways. I am an alien, an interloper––but I can’t bear to think of you as waiting for the time to kill a man––or to be killed in the killing. It sickens me.”

Tharon snatched her hand from his and leaped to her feet.

“Don’t talk like that!” she cried passionately, “I don’t like to hear it! I thought you were a real man, maybe, but you’re not! You––you’re a woman! A soft woman––I hate th’ breed!”

Her face was flushed, for what reason Kenset, 178 stunned by her vehement words, could not tell. She flung the rein up and followed it, leaping to saddle like a man.

“I tol’ you we couldn’t be friends!” she cried, her eyes blazing with sudden fire, “there ain’t no manner of use a-tryin’.”

Kenset, springing forward, caught El Rey’s bit. The stallion reared and struck, but he held him down.

“There is use, Tharon,” he panted. “It’s vital! Since that day on Baston’s steps, when you backed out past me I have had you in my mind––my thoughts by day and night––there is use, and I’ll keep your hands from blood––Courtrey’s or any other––if it takes my life––so help me God!”

The girl leaned down and her blue eyes blazed in his face.

“An’ make me false to th’ crosses on Jim Last’s stone?” she cried. “No––not you or anybody else––could do that trick! Let go!”

The next moment she had whirled out from the flickering shade of the willows and was gone around toward the north––there was only the sound of hoofs ringing on the earth. Kenset, left alone where the Silver Hollow bubbled softly above its snowy sands, passed a trembling hand across his eyes and stood as in a trance. 179

What did it mean? What had he promised? What vital emotion had gripped him that his usually quiet tongue had rushed into that torrential speech that dealt with life and death? What was Tharon Last to him?

A figure of the old West! A romantic gun woman with her weapons on her hips! A rider of wild horses!

Slowly, as if he had gained an added weight of years, he reined Captain and swung himself up. He rode east from the spring toward the lacy and far-reaching skirts of the forest, and for the first time he saw the rolling country with tragic eyes.

It held deep issues––life and death and the passing or continuing of rÉgimes and and dynasties––but it was a wondrous country, and, come good or bad, it had become his own. He swung around in his saddle and looked far back across the Valley. He saw the golden light on its uncounted acres, the shadow falling at the foot of the great Rockface, the mighty Wall itself with the silver ribbon of the Vestal’s Veil falling straight down from the upper rim, the distant town, looking always like a dull gem in a dark setting, and a thrill shot to his heart.

Yes, if he lived to do his work in the hidden 180 Valley––if he was shot this night on his own doorstep, it was his country.

He who was alien in every way, was yet native.

Something in the depths of him came down as from far distant racial haunts and was at home.

So he rode slowly up among the scattered oaks with his hands folded on the mutilated pommel, and he knew that his lines were definitely cast.

Tharon Last rode into the Holding and dismounted in unwonted silence.

There was a frown between her brows, an unusual thing. She turned the stallion into his corral, dragged off the big saddle to hang it on its peg, flung the studded bridle on a post.

The men were not in yet. Far toward the north beyond the big corrals she could see the cattle grazing toward home. A surge of savage joy in her possessions flooded over her. These things were her own. They were what Jim Last had worked for all his life.

Not one hoof or hide should Courtrey take without swift reprisal.

Not one inch should he push her from her avowed purpose––not though all the strangers in the world came to Lost Valley and prated of blood-guilt.

But for some vague reason which she could not 181 have analyzed had she wished, she went to the paled-in garden where the silver waters trickled and searched among the few flowers growing there for some blossom, sweeter, tenderer, more mild and timid than usual for the pale hands of the Virgin in the deep south room.

With the posy in her fingers she slipped quietly to her sanctuary and knelt before the statue, pensive, frowning, vaguely stirred. She whispered the prayers that Anita had taught her, but she found with a start that the words were meaningless, that she was saying them mechanically.

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.

When she came out to the life and bustle of the ranch house the cattle were streaming into the far corrals under their dust, the riders were shouting, young Paula sang in the kitchen, and Anita passed back and forth about the evening meal.

There was a slim moon in the west above the 182 CaÑon Country. The skies were softly alight, high and vaulted, deep and mysterious and sweet.

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. Down in the Valley itself there could be seen the lights of Corvan which never went out from dusk to dawn. Far to the north a black blot might have been visible with a fuller moon––Courtrey’s herds bedded on the range, the only stock in the Valley so privileged.

Along the foot of the Rockface in the early evening a tiny procession had crawled, three burros, their pack-saddles empty save for a couple of sacks tied across each, and a weazened form that followed them––Old Pete, the snow-packer, bound on his nightly journey to the CaÑon Country for the bags of snow for the cooling of the Golden Cloud’s refreshments.

He was a little old man, grotesque and misshapen, yet he followed briskly after the burros, which were the fastest travelers of their kind in the land. He rolled on his bandy legs and kept 183 the little animals on a constant trot with the wisp of stick he carried and the deep, harsh cries that heralded his coming for a mile ahead and sent the echoes reverberating between the caÑon walls. 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 floor of this cut or caÑon, which was so narrow that the laden burros had a “narrow squeak” to pass, as Pete said, lifted sharply. It rose smoothly underfoot in the pitch darkness, for the cut was roofed in the living rock five hundred feet above, and climbed for a mile. It was a dead, flat place, without sound, for the footsteps of the burros and the man fell dully on the soft and sliding floor, and it seemed to have no acoustic properties.

At the end of the mile this snake-like split in the solid rock came suddenly out into a broader, more steeply pitched caÑon whose walls went straight up to the open skies above. Here there were heaps and piles and long slides of dead stone, weathered and powdered, that had fallen from 184 time to time from the parent walls. This in turn led up and on to other breaks and splits and cuts, all open, all lifting to the upper world, and all as blind and dangerous to follow as any deathtrap that old Dame Nature ever devised. Here, at any crosscut, any debouching caÑon, a man might turn to his undoing, might travel on and up and never reach those beckoning heights, seen clearly from some blind pocket he had wandered into, might never find his way back to the original caÑon among the continuous cuts that met and crossed and passed each other among the towering points and sheets.

But Old Pete knew where he was going. Not for nothing had he threaded these passages for fifteen years. He knew the CaÑon Country for the lower part better than any man in the Valley, if Courtrey be excepted.

So this night he climbed and shouted to his burros and thought no more of the sounding splits, for here the echoes raved, than he would have thought of the open plains below.

He passed on and up to where a certain cut lay full, year after year, of packed and hardened snow. For fifteen years Old Pete had visited this cut, a deeper drop into the nether world of rock, and cut his supplies from its surface. Every season he took what he needed, leaving a widening 185 circle at the edge from which he worked, where the cut he traveled passed the mouth of the pent caÑon, and every year the snows, sifting from high above, leveled it again. There was no known outlet for this glacier-like pack, no sliding chance, yet it was always on a certain level––each summer seeming to lose just what it gained in winter. It lay level at the mouth of the passing cut, was never filled higher.

Starting at dusk from Corvan, Pete reached his destination around two o’clock, filled his sacks, tied them on his mules and started down, coming out of the Rockface in time to meet the dawn that quivered on the eastern ramparts.

But this night Old Pete, sturdy, fearless, unarmed, was not to see the accustomed pageant of the rising sun, the fleeing veils of shadows shifting on the Valley floor that he had watched with silent joy for all these years.

This night he was well down along his backward way, shouting in the darkness, for the slim moon had dropped down behind the lofty peaks above, when all the echoes in the world, it seemed, let loose in the caÑons and all the weight of the universe itself came pressing hard upon his dauntless heart with the crack of a gun.

“Th’ price!” whispered Old Pete as he fell sprawling on his face, “fer pure flesh!” With 186 which cryptic word he bade farewell to the sounding passes, the tenets of manhood as he conceived them, the valour, and the grumbling at life in general.

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.

It was Wan Lee, Old Pete’s bÊte noir, who found them there and ran shouting through the crowd of belated players in the saloon’s big room, his pig-tail flying, his almond eyes popping, to upset a table and batter on his master’s door and scream that the “bullos” were here, “allesame lone,” and that there was blood all spattered on the hind one’s rump!