Then these lean and quiet men filed out, mounted the waiting horses and went away in the darkness, mysterious figures against the stars.
That night Tharon Last sat late by the deep window in her own room at the south of the 82 ranch house. It was a huge old room, high walled and sombre. There were bright blankets hung like pictures on the walls, baskets marvelously woven of grass and rushes, thick mats on the floor made in like manner and of a tough, long-fibred grass that grew down in a swale beyond the Black Coulee, while in one corner there shone pale in the darkness the one great treasure of that unknown mother, an almost life-size statue of the Holy Virgin.
Of this beautiful thing Tharon had stood in awe from babyhood.
A half fearful reverence bowed her before it on those rare times when Anita, throwing back to her Mexic ancestors, worshipped with vague rites at its feet.
Always its waxen hands bore offerings, silent tribute from the girl’s still nature. Sometimes these were the prairie flowers, little wild things, sweet and fragile. Sometimes they were sprays of the water vines that grew by the wonderful spring of the Holding.
Again they were strings of bright beads, looped and falling in glistening cascades over the tarnished gilt robes of the Virgin.
Under the deep window there was a wide couch, piled high with a narrow mattress of wild goose feathers and covered with a crimson blanket. 83 Here the girl sat with her arms on the sill and looked out into the darkness that covered the Valley. She thought of the thirty men who had signed her paper, riding far and by in the sounding basin, returning to their uncertain homes. She thought of her father asleep under his peaceful cross, of young Harkness beside him.
She thought of Courtrey and Service and Wylackie Bob, of Black Bart and the stranger from Arizona. They were a hard bunch to tackle.
They had the Valley under their thumbs to do with as they pleased, like the veriest Roman potentate of old. Her daddy had told her once, when she was small and lonely of winter nights, strange old tales of rulers and their helpless subjects. Jim Last could talk when he needed, though he was a man of conserved speech.
Yes, Courtrey was like a king in Lost Valley, absolute. She thought of the many crimes done and laid to his door since she could remember, of countless cattle run off, of horses stolen and shamelessly ridden in grinning defiance of any who might dare to identify them, of Cap Hart killed on the Stronghold’s range and left to rot under the open skies, a warning like those birds of prey that are shot and hung to scare their kind. Her soft lips drew themselves into a hard line, very like 84 Jim Last’s, and the heart in her ratified its treaty with the thirty men.