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.