So Billy let her alone, as did the rest. She went her ways, saw to the garden and made the butter in the cool springhouse, and sat in the window seat in the twilights. She liked to have the men come in as usual, but the talk these times was desultory, failing and brightening with forced topics, to fail again and drop into silence while 32 the dim red lights of the smokers glowed in the shadows.
Time and again she stirred and sighed, and they knew that once again she waited for Jim Last, listened for the clip-clap of El Rey coming home along the sounding ranges.
Once, on a night when there was no moon and the tree-toads sang in the cottonwoods by the spring, the girl, sitting so in the familiar window, suddenly dropped her head on her knees and sobbed sharply in the silence.
“Never again!” she said thickly from the folds of her denim skirt, “I’ll never see him comin’ home again!”
The riders stirred. Sympathy ached in their hearts, but not a man had speech to comfort her. It was Billy, the impulsive, who reached a hand to her shoulder and gripped it hard. Tharon reached up and touched the hand in gratitude.
It was about this time, when the master of Last’s Holding had lain a month beneath the staring mound under the pine tree out to the east where they had buried Harkness, that José finished a work of art. For many days he had laboured secretly in a calf-shed out behind the small corrals, and in his slim dark fingers there was beauty unleashed. Finest carving he knew, since his forbears, peons across the Border, had spent 33 their lives upon the beams of the Missions. None had taught José. It was in his blood. Therefore, from a block of the hard grey stone of the region, which was almost like granite, he fashioned a cross, as tall as Tharon herself, struck it out freehand and true, and set upon its austere face fine tracery of vines and Jim Last’s name. He took into the secret Billy and Curly, since these two he was sure of, and together they hauled the huge thing out and set it up.
When Tharon, looking to the east with dawn, as was her habit, beheld this silent tribute to the man she had so loved, she leaned her forehead against the deep window-case and wept from the depths.
Then she went out to see it and with a knife she set her own mark thereon––a tiny cross scratched in the headpiece, another in the arm that stretched toward all that was mortal of poor Harkness.
“Two,” she said, dry-eyed, while the glorious dawn shot up to bathe the world in glory, “full pay for you both.”