What was Tharon Last, anyway? What did she mean by those words of hers about his law and hers? That they were not the same sort of law––that he and she would not agree?
They could not be friends, she had said.
Well, Kenset was not so sure of that. There was something about this girl of the guns that sent a thrill tingling in his blood already, made him recall each expression of her speaking face, each line of her lean young figure. 119
He did not go near Last’s again, though his business took him far and by in the Valley, for the big maps, hung on a rack beyond his fireplace, covered full half the ranges thereof and stretched away into the mysterious and illimitable forests that went up and away into the eastern mountains.
It was as if some fateful Power at Washington had set down a careless finger on a map of the U.\S.\A., and said to Kenset, “Here is your country,” without knowledge or interest. Sometimes he wondered if there was another forest in the land as utterly lost as this, as little known.
But with this wonder came a thrill. He had read romances of the great West in his youth and felt a vague regret that he had not lived in the rollicking days of ’49. Now as he rode his new domain he smiled to himself and thought that out of a modern college he had been set back half a century. Here was the rule of might, if he was not mistaken. Here was romance in its most vital and appealing form. Yes, he felt himself lucky.
So he took up his life and his duties with a vim. He rode early and late, took notes and gathered data for his first reports, and set up for himself in Lost Valley a spreading antagonism.
If he rode herd on the range lands, the timber sections, there were those who rode herd on him. Not a movement of his that was not reported faithfully 120 to Courtrey, not a coming or going that was not watched from start to finish.
And the cattle king narrowed his eyes and listened to his lieutenants with growing disapproval.
“Took up land, think?” he asked Wylackie Bob. “Homesteadin’?”