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:
