A sigh lifted his breast, but he stifled it at birth and turned with the others back toward the corrals. Tharon, running toward the deep room where the Virgin stood in Her everlasting beauty, unfastened her soft white dress as she ran. Inside she flung herself on her knees before the Holy Mother and poured out a trembling prayer. 224
“Not that! Oh, Mary, not that! Let it not be that!” she whispered thickly. Then she was up, into her riding clothes––was out where the boys were hurriedly saddling the Finger Marks. Presently she was on El Rey and shooting like a silver shaft in the summer dusk down along the green levels toward the east. They rode in silence, Conford, Bent, Jack, Curly, Billy and herself, and a thousand thoughts were boiling miserably in two hearts.
El Rey, Golden, Redbuck, Drumfire, Westwind and Sweetheart, they went down along the sounding dark plain, a magnificent band. The whole earth seemed to resound to the thunder of their going, and for once in their lives her beauties could not run fast enough for the mistress of Last’s.
They went like the wind itself, and yet they were slow to Tharon.
Out of the open levels there swung up to meet them and to fade into the night, the standing willows by the Silver Hollow. The sloping stretches began to lift, dotted by the oaks and digger-pines for whose sake Kenset had come to Lost Valley. They shot through them, up along the sharply lifting skirts of the hills, in between the guarding pines that formed the gateway to the little glade where the singing stream went 225 down and the cabin stood at the head. Tharon’s throat was tight, as if a hand pressed hard upon it. The high tops of the pines seemed to cut the sky grotesquely. There was no light at the dim log house, no sound in the silent glade. Off to the right they heard the low of the little red cow which served the forest man with milk.
They pounded to a sliding stop in the cabin’s yard and Conford called sharply into the silent darkness.
“Kenset! Hello––Kenset!”
Tharon held her breath and listened. There was no sound except a night bird calling from the highest pine-tip.
Carefully the men dismounted.
“You stay up, Tharon, dear,” the foreman said quietly, “until we look around.”