“Go to it,” he said aloud, clinching his fists on his saddle horn, “this is part of my duty. The Big Chief was right when he said, ‘If you help the Service to tame Lost Valley you’ve got your work cut out.’ It’s a man-size job. I mustn’t doubt my ability.”
CHAPTER VI
EL REY AND BOLT
Tharon Last and all her followers held themselves in readiness for anything in the days that followed the taking of the herds from Courtrey’s range.
They locked their doors at night, stood double guard at corral and stable. Mothers scattered throughout Lost Valley gathered in their little ones and watched the slopes and levels when their men were out.
But a strange quietness seemed to settle down upon them. That for which they waited did not materialize. Courtrey and his gun men rode into Corvan and up and down the Valley on mysterious missions which were as unsettling as open depredations, but nothing happened. In fact, Courtrey, burning with the new desire that was beginning to obsess him, was working out a new design.
He began to draw away from Lola. His triweekly visits to the Golden Cloud dropped off a bit. He took to drifting about from saloon to 129 saloon, to being less pronounced in his frequenting of one or two places.
His cold eyes, however, set in their narrow slits beneath the heavy brows, picked out every settler that he met and promised vague things for the future. He knew to a man who had ridden up from Last’s that day, and he meant that not one should escape full payment––some time. Now he thought of the girl who had defied him and he waited with leaping pulse. The memory of that kiss, taken by violence at her western door, was with him night and day. She stood for right and the dignity of order. He meant, for a time, to play her hand.