At Last’s Holding a change had taken place. The sun of spring still shone as brightly, the work of the place went on as usual. The riders went at dawn and came at dusk, their herds lowing across the rolling green spaces, the days were as busy as they had ever been, but it seemed as if Last’s waited for something that would never happen, for some one who would never come. Conford, quiet, forceful, businesslike, carried on the work without a ripple. To a casual eye all things were as they had been. But to the keen eyes in the tanned faces of Last’s riders the change was appallingly apparent. They saw it creep day by day into their lives, felt it in the very atmosphere, and it was grim and promising.
Old Anita felt it and watched with dim and wistful eyes. Pretty young Paula from the Pomo Indian settlement far to the north of the Valley under the Rockface felt it and was more silent, 30 cat-like of step than ever. José, always full of laughter at his outside work, was sobered.
For this change was not material, but spiritual, and it had to do with Tharon, who was now the mistress of Last’s.
She no longer sang her wordless songs, no longer played for hours on the little old melodeon by the western door. Something had gone from the brightness of her face, a shadow had come instead. She was just as swift and gentle in her care for all the things of every day, as efficient and painstaking, but she did not laugh, and the tiny lines that had characterized her father’s blue eyes, began to show distinctly about her own.
They began to take on the look of great distances, as if she gazed far.
And for exactly three hours each day there could be heard the monotonous bark-bark-bark of the big guns Jim Last had given her in his final hour. To Billy Brent there was something terrible in this. Bred to violence and the quick disasters of the country as he was, he could not reconcile this grim practice with Tharon Last, the sane and loving girl who could not bear the sight of suffering.
“I tell you, Curly,” he complained to his friend of nights when they came in and lounged in the soft dusk by the bunk-house, “it’s unnatural. 31 Not that I don’t pay full respect to Jim Last’s memory, an’ him th’ best man in all this hell-bent Valley, but it ain’t right an’ natural fer no woman t’ do what she’s doin’. Ain’t she Jim Last’s own daughter already with th’ guns? Sure. Can drive a nail nigh as far as he could. Quick as Wylackie Bob on th’ draw an’ as certain, now. Then why must she keep it up?”
Curly, more silent in his ways but given to thought, studied the stars that rode the darkening heavens and shook his head.
“Let her alone,” he said once, “it was Last’s command, an’ he knew what he was about even if he was toppin’ th’ rise of the Big Divide.
“He said ‘you’ll have to pro––’––you rec’lect? He meant protect an’ unless I miss my guess, Billy, he’d have added ‘yourself’ if th’ hand of Ol’ Man Death hadn’t stopped his words. Somethin’ happened out there in th’ Cup Rim that day when Last got his that had to do with Tharon, an’ he knew she’d be in danger. Let her alone.”