She had none to mourn her, she thought a trifle sadly––well Anita and Paula, of course, and there were her riders. Billy would grieve––he’d kill some one if she were killed––and Conford and Jack.
A warm glow pervaded her being. Yes, she had folks, even if she was the last of her blood.
But she didn’t intend to be killed. She was right, and she had listened enough to Anita to believe with a superstitious certainty, that right was invulnerable. For instance, if she and Courtrey should draw at the same second, she believed absolutely, that because she was in the right, her bullet would travel a bit the swifter, her aim be truer. She felt in her heart with a profound conviction that some day she would kill Courtrey. She thought of his wife, Ellen, a pale flower of a woman, white as milk, with hair the colour of unripe maize, and wondered if she loved the man who made her life hell, so the Valley whispered. Tharon wondered how it would seem to love a man, as women who were wives must love their men––if the agony of loss to Ellen could be as acute and terrifying as hers had been ever since that soft night in spring when her best friend, Jim Last, had come home on El Rey. 85
She thought of the grey look on his face, of the pinched line at his nostrils’ base, and the tears came miserably under her lids, she laid her head on the cloth mat that covered the wide window ledge and wept like any child for a time. Then she wiped her face with her hands, sighed, and fell again to thinking.
An hour later as she rose to make ready for bed, she thought she caught a faint sound out where the little rock-bordered paths ran in what she was pleased to call her garden, since a few hardy flowers grew by the spring’s trickle, and she held her breath to listen. It was nothing, however, she thought, and turned into the deep room.
Only the tree-toads, long since silent, knew that a cigarette, carefully shielded in a palm, glowed in the darkness.
Two days after this a visitor came to Last’s. From far down they saw him coming, in the mid-morning while the work of the house went forward. Paula, bringing a pan of milk from the springhouse spied him first and stopped to satisfy her young eyes with the unwonted appearance of him. She looked long, and hurried in to tell her mistress.
“Señorita,” she said excitedly, “see who comes! 86 A stranger who has different clothes from any other. He rides not like Lost Valley men, either, being too stiff and straight. Come, see.”
And Tharon, busy about the kitchen in her starched print dress, dropped everything at once to run with Paula to the western door of the living room that they might look south.
“Muchachas both,” complained old Anita, “the milk is spilled and the pan dulce burns in the oven! Tch, tch!”