CHAPTER XI
FINGER MARK AND IRONWOOD AT LAST
It was another noon in Lost Valley. The summer sun sailed the azure skies in majesty. Little soft winds from the south wimpled the grass of the rolling ranges, shook all the leaves of the poplars. Down the face of the Wall the Vestal’s Veil shimmered and shone like a million miles of lace.
At Corvan wild excitement ruled. Swift things had come upon them, things that staggered the tight-lipped community, even though it was used to speed and tragedy. For one thing, Ellen, pale, sweet flower, had hanged herself in the gaudy apartment of Lola behind the Golden Cloud where the dance-hall woman had peremptorily brought her when they took her off Cleve Whitmore’s shoulder. She left a little note for Courtrey, a pathetic short scrawl, which simply reiterated that she had “ben true to him as his shadow,” and that if he did no longer want her, she did not want herself.
At that pitiful end to a guiltless life, Lola, who 278 knew innocence and sin, sat down on the only carpeted floor in Corvan and wept. When she finished, she was done with Corvan and Lost Valley, ready to move on as she had moved through an eventful life.
For another thing, two strange men had ridden up the Wall from the Bottle Neck a few days back, and they had put through some mysterious doings.
This day at noon these two strangers were riding down on Corvan from up the Pomo way, while from the Stronghold, Buck Courtrey’s men were thundering in with the cattle king at their head. He was grim and silent, black with gathering rage. His news-veins tapped the Valley, he knew a deal that others tried to hide, and he was coming in to reach a savage hand once more toward that supremacy which he knew full well to be slipping from him.
And from the blind mouth in the Rockface at the west where the roofed cut led to the mystery and the grandeur of the Cañon Country, a strange procession came slowly out to crawl across the green expanse––a woman on a silver horse, a rider on a red roan who sat behind the saddle and bore in his arms a man whose heavy head lolled upon his shoulder in all but mortal weakness. 279