Presently she sat up and felt quickly for the gun-b.u.t.ts in their scabbards. Then she parted the willows and looked out over the rolling slopes and levels. True enough. A horseman was coming in from the west, making for the Silver Hollow, but Tharon smiled and her fingers relaxed on the gun. This man rode straight--like a lance, she thought--and his mount was brown, a good-enough common horse, but no steed of Lost Valley.

Captain lacked the fire, the ramping keenness of the Ironwoods, the spirit and dash of the Finger Marks. For a long time the girl in the willows watched them. Then as they came near she rose and caught El Rey's bridle.

He was no gentleman, this big blue-silver king. He was savage and wild and imperious. He hated other horses with a quick hatred sometimes and had been known to wreak this sudden rage upon them in sickening fury.

So Tharon held him with a strong brown hand wrapped in the chain below the Spanish spade bit in his mouth. She stood beside him, waiting, a slim, golden creature, tawny of hair and blue of eye, and the great horse towered above her mightily, his silver mane blowing up above his arching neck in the little wind that came from the south.

They made a picture that Kenset never forgot, as he swung round the willows and faced them.

El Rey screamed and pounded with his striped hoofs, but Tharon jerked him down with no gentle hand.

"Be still, you bully!" she said sharply.

"Why, Miss Last!" cried the forest man, "I'm so glad to meet you!"

There was the genuine delight of a boy in his voice, and Tharon caught the note. The sweet, disarming smile parted her lips and she was all girl at the moment, artless, innocent, unstained by the shadow of lawlessness and crime that seemed to ever hang above her in Kenset's thoughts.

"Are you?"

"I certainly am."

He swung down, gave Captain a drink at the edge of the spring farthest from El Rey, dropped the rein when he had finished, and swung around to face the girl. He took off his wide hat and wiped his forehead with a square of linen finer than anything of its kind she had ever seen.

Then he stood for a moment looking straight into her eyes with his smiling dark ones. It seemed to Tharon that this man was always smiling.

"This is your spring, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes. The Silver Hollow. Th' Gold Pool is farther south toward th'

Black Coulee. There was another one, fine as this, perhaps a better one, up on th' Cup Rim Range, but Courtrey blew her up, d.a.m.n him! She was called th' Crystal." Kenset caught his breath, mentally, all but physically, and put up a hand to cover his lips.

This _was_ another type of woman from any he had ever met, in truth.

The oath, rolling roundly over her full red lips, was as unconscious as the long breath that lifted her breast at the memory of that outrage.

"We replaced her with a well--an' it's a corker. Mebby better than th' old Crystal, though she was a lovely thing. As clear as--as ice that's frozen hard without a ripple of white. You know that kind?"

"Yes," said Kenset gravely.

"Well," sighed Tharon, "she's gone, an' there ain't no use cryin' over spilt milk. What you ben a-doin' sence I helped you hang th'

picture?"

"Won't you sit down?" Kenset stepped aside. "It is uncomfortable to stand through a visit--and I mean to have a long talk-fest with you, if you will be so kind."

Tharon flung herself down at the spring's edge, eased the right gun from under her hip, leaned on her elbow and prepared to listen.

"Fire away," she said.

Kenset laughed.

"For goodness' sake!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "I said visit. That takes two.

What have you been doing?"

"Well, everythin', mostly. Made a new shirt for Billy, for one thing.

An' I showed Courtrey th' picture o' this."

She patted the blue gun that lay half in her lap, its worn scabbard black against her brown skirt.

Kenset sobered at once. As ever when he let his mind dwell on that dark shadow which sat so lightly on this girl, he had no feeling for mirth.

A very real chill went down his spine and he looked intently into her eyes.

"How?" he asked, "what did you do?"

But Tharon shook her head.

"Nothin' you'd understand," she said quietly.

"I can show you something you will understand," he said, and reached for Captain's bridle. He pulled the horse around and pointed to the saddle horn.

"See that?"

She looked up quickly. With the sure instinct of a dweller in a gun man's land she knew the meaning of the splintered wood of the pommel, the torn and ragged leather that had covered it.

"h.e.l.l!" she said softly, "where did you get that?"

"At the mouth of Black Coulee, at dusk a week ago."

For a long moment Tharon studied the saddle. Then her gaze dimmed, lengthened, went beyond into infinitude. The pupils of her eyes drew down to tiny points of black against the brilliant blue.

At last she turned and held out a hand, rising from her elbow.

"I beg your pardon, Mister," she said quaintly, "fer that day at the Holdin' an' th' meal I offered an' took, an' fer my words. I know now that you are--that you were--straight. I don't yet know what you may mean in Lost Valley with your talk of Government, but I do know you ain't a Courtrey man."

Kenset took the hand. It was firm and shapely and vibrant with the young life there was in her. He laid his other one over it and held it in a close clasp for a moment.

"I mean only right," he said, "sanity and law and decency. I think I have a big problem to handle here--aside from my work on the forest--a problem I must solve before I can be effective in that work--and I am more sincerely glad than I can say that my friend, the outlaw, took that warning shot at me. It ruined a perfectly good saddle, but it has made one point clear to you. I am no Courtrey man, and that's a solemn fact."

"An' I ain't ashamed to say I'm glad, too," said Tharon.

So, with the sun shining in the cloud-flecked heavens and the little winds blowing up from the south to ruffle the hair at the girl's temples, these two sat by the Silver Hollow and talked of a thousand things, after the manner of the young, for Kenset found himself reverting to the things of youth in the light of Tharon's grave simplicity.

They looked into each other's eyes and found there strange depths and lights. They were aliens, strangers, groping dimly for a common ground, and finding little, though presently they fell once more upon the law in Lost Valley and earnestness deepened into gravity.

"Miss Last," said Kenset, thrilling at his daring, "why must this law dwell in these?" and he reached a hand to tap the gun on her lap.

"Why? That very question'd show your ignorance to any Lost Valley man.

Because it's all there is. You've seen Courtrey. You've seen Steptoe Service. Can't you judge from them?"