“He’s goin’ to stay, so he told me,” went on the girl, “goin’ to build a house up where the pines begin an’ means to ride. But how’ll he live? What an’ who will he ride for? He said for Government.”
“What’s he mean by that?”
“Search me.”
“Wasn’t there nothin’ about him different? Nothin’ you could judge him by?” asked Billy.
“Yes, there was. He wore somethin’ on his breast, a sign, a dull-like thing with words an’ letters on it.”
“So?” said Conford quickly, “what was it like, Tharon? Can’t you describe it?”
“Can with a pencil,” said Tharon, rising. “Come on in.”
She went swiftly to the big desk in the other room and rummaged among its drawers for paper and pencil. These things were precious in Lost Valley. 96
Jim Last had had great stacks of paper, neat, glazed sheets with faint lines upon them, made somewhere in that mysterious “below” and brought in by pack train. It was on one of these, with the distinctive words “Last’s Holding” printed at the top, that the thirty men had signed themselves into the new law of the Valley.
To Tharon these sheets had always been magic, invested with grave dignity.