The curve of her cheek, golden with tan and red with the hue of youth, was more to him than all the sunsets the world had ever seen.
A deep light shone in his young eyes which, had the girl been wise, she might have seen. But Tharon was as elemental as the kitten chasing a moth out by the pansy bed, and could look in a man’s face with the unconscious eyes of a child.
Now she watched the pageant of the dying day in a rapt delight.
“Billy,” she said presently, “I’ve often wondered if there’s another place in all the world as lovely as our Valley. Jim Last told me once that there were places so much bigger out below, that we wouldn’t be a patchin’ to them. Don’t seem like there could be.”
She lifted her slim body up along the doorpost and looked long and earnestly all up and down the 73 wonderful stretch of country that lay along the Wall from north to south. She could see the tiny dots that went for the different homesteads, scattered here and there. Up at the head there lay, hard against the frowning hills, the squat, wide blur that was Courtrey’s Stronghold. Her lips compressed at sight of it.
“Nope,” she said, shaking her head, “I don’t believe he meant it. He used to tease me a lot, you know. It’s an awful big valley, an’ no mistake.”
The rider, who had drifted up along the Wall five years before, looked down at the playing kitten and smiled with a lean crinkling of his cheeks.
“It’s a sure-enough big place, Tharon,” he said gravely, “an’ it’s lovely as Eden.”
“Huh?” said Tharon, “where’s that, Billy?”
The boy sobered and looked up into her blue eyes.