What did he want her to be? One moment he ached with her loveliness––the next he shuddered at her savagery.
He did not want her to be anything! Why not go out to the dim and half-remembered world that he had left, the world of lights, padded floors and marble steps, leave this impossible land with its blood and wrongs? Nay, he could not leave Lost Valley. He was as much a part of it as the grim Rockface itself, the Vestal’s Veil eternally shimmering in its thousand feet of beauty. Life or death, for Kenset, it must be here.
So he waited and listened and watched the stars wheeling in everlasting majesty, and he found his hands falling now and again upon the gun-butts at his sides!
Near dawn Banner awoke, refreshed and stronger, and made him lie down for a few hours’ sleep.
When he awoke the sun was well up along the heavens and Banner was offering him a piece of dry bread and some jerky, spiced and smoked and 198 as dry and sweet as anything he had ever eaten in all his life.
“They’re comin’,” said the man, “thar’s five comin’ from down along th’ Wall at th’ south––that’ll be Jameson, Hill and Thomas, an’ some others––an’ I see about ten or twelve, near’s I can make out, driftin’ in from up toward th’ Pomo settlement. Thar’s a dust cloud movin’ up from th’ Bottle Neck, too. They’ll be here by one o’clock at th’ furdest.”
And they were, a grim, silent group of men, determined, watchful, bent on the second step of the program to which they had pledged themselves that night at Last’s Holding. Tharon was there, too, and with her Bent Smith on Golden.
It was a goodly number who left their horses in charge of Hill and Dixon at the blind mouth and entered the long black cut. They climbed in low spoken quiet, their voices sounding back upon them with an odd dead effect. They went faster than Old Pete was wont to travel, for they meant to reach the spot of the tragedy before the early shadows should begin to sift down from the high world above. Tharon went eagerly, her eyes dilated.
Always she had dreamed of the Cañon Country. Always she had wondered what it was like. When she left the mouth of the black roofed cut 199 and came out into the narrow, rockwalled cañon with its painted faces reaching up into the very skies, she gasped with amaze. Above her head she could see the endless cuts and crosscuts, the standing spires and narrow wedgelike walls that made a labyrinthian maze.
Billy, close beside her, as always, watched her with a pensive sadness.