The old woman crossed herself and went away, her wrinkled face dim with care. And Tharon dressed herself neatly, put a ribbon on her hair, set her wide hat carefully on her head, buckled on her heavy gun-belt, and went to the corral for El Rey. Her daddy’s saddle was her own now, a huge affair carved and ornamented, profusely studded with silver.
Along the right side below the pommel ran a darker stain, Jim Last’s blood, set before his daughter like a star.
She mounted the silver stallion and went away down along the summer land, a shaft of light shooting through the green of the ranges.
Far over to her left she could see her cattle, beautiful bunches spread like figures in a tapestry. 60 The figures of her riders were small dots on the outskirts.
El Rey, always hard on the bit, always strong-headed, wanted to run and she swung loose her rein and let him go. But run as he might, there was always in his speed that rising note, that seeming of reserve power.
She passed the head of Black Coulee, swung out across the edge of Rolling Cove, thundered down to the ford of the Broken Bend. Here she let the stallion drink, deep draughts that would have slowed a lesser horse. El Rey went up the bank beyond the ford like a charging engine, squared away and stretched out to finish his run. He was within three miles of Corvan, set like a stone in a smooth green surface, before he came down and lifted his shoulders into his gait. With the first rock and swing of the singlefoot, Tharon smiled and settled herself more comfortably in the saddle. This was joy to her, this beautiful syncopation, this poetic marked time that reeled off the miles beneath her and would scarcely have shaken a pebble from her hat-brim.
As she struck the outskirts of the little town the unmistakable sound of El Rey’s iron-shod hoofs brought heads into doors, children at the house corners to look upon her. She came down the main street at a smart clip, to bring up with 61 a slide at the hitch-rail before Baston’s store where the monthly mail was handled. There were horses tied there, and among them she saw what caused her to look twice with a narrowing of her keen eyes––a huge, raw-boned, black, rusty and slug-headed, among the Ironwood bays from Courtrey’s Stronghold.
“H’m,” she told herself quietly, “so there’s where he was expected.”
She tied El Rey to himself, far from the rest, for she knew his imperious temper and that trouble would ensue if he was near strange horses.
Then she went into Baston’s with her meal-sack on her arm. This meal-sack was a part of her accoutrement, a regular carry-all for such small purchases as she must take home––a roll of print for Paula, some tobacco for the men, a dozen spools of the linen thread which was so much prized among the women of Lost Valley.