For a long time Tharon Last sat in the starlight and watched the crests of the distant mountains fringed with the silver of the moon that was rising behind them, and her throat ached with tears. All these things that hurt her, these unknown, tangled things that she knew dimly meant Life, had come to her with the advent of Kenset in Lost Valley. She wished pa.s.sionately for a fleeting moment that he had never come, that the old swinging, rushing life of the ranges had never known his holding influence. Then she felt again the hammering of his heart beneath her palms, and nothing mattered in all the world beside.

It was a thing beyond her ken, something ordered by fate. She must go on, blindly as running waters, regardless of all that drowned.

But she loosed her hand from Billy's, leaned to his shoulder, put her arm about his neck and drew his face to hers. Softly, tenderly, she kissed him upon the lips, and she did not know that that was the cruelest thing she had ever done in all her kindly life, did not see the deathly pallor that overspread his face.

"I'm goin' to th' Canon Country, Billy," she said simply, "to find th'

Cup o' G.o.d an' Kenset."

Then she straightened in her saddle and gave El Rey the rein.

It was two of the clock by the starry heavens when these two riders entered the blind opening in the Rockface and disappeared. El Rey, the mighty, tossed his great head and whistled, stamped his hoofs in the dead sift of the silencing floor. He had never before lost sight of the sky, never felt other breath in his nostrils than the keen plain's wind.

Now he shook himself and halted, went on again, and again halted, to be urged forward by Tharon's spurred heels in his flanks. Up through the eerie pa.s.s they went without speech, for each heart was filled to overflowing with thoughts and fears.

To Billy there was something fateful, bodeful in the dead darkness, the stillness. It seemed to him as if he left forever behind him the open life of the ranges, the gay and careless days of riding after Tharon's cattle.

For five years he had lived at Last's, under master and mistress, content, happy. The half-remembered world of below had never called him. The light on the table under the swinging lamp with Tharon's face therein, the murmur of the stream through her garden, the whisper of the cottonwoods, these had been sufficient. He had, subconsciously, thanked his Maker for these things, had served them with a whole heart. They had been his all, his life. Now the cottonwoods seemed far away, remote, the life of the deep ranch house a thing of long ago.

All these things had given way to something that sapped the sunlight from the air, the very blueness from the vaulted skies, something that had come with the quiet man of the pine-tree badge. So Billy sighed in the darkness and sat easily on Drumfire, his slim left hand fidgeting with the swinging rein.

And Tharon was lost, too, in a maze of thoughts. She sat straight as a lance, tense, alive, keen, staring into the narrow bore of the high ceiled cut, thinking feverishly. Was Kenset really alive? Had Courtrey been square with her? Or was he even now lying stiff and stark somewhere in the high cuts, his dark eyes dull with death, that beating heart forever stilled? She caught her breath with a whistling sigh, felt her head swim at the picture. If he was--_if_--_he_--_was_--!

She fingered the big guns at her hip and savagery took hold of her.

Courtrey's left wrist to match his right. Then some pretty work about him to make him wait--then a shot through his stomach--he would spit blood and reel, but he wouldn't die--the butcher!--for a little while, and she would taunt him with Harkness--and Jim. Last shot in the back--with Old Pete--and with--with Kenset--the one man--Oh, the one man in all the world whose quiet smile was unforgettable, whose vital hands were upon hers now, like ghost-hands, would always be upon hers if she lived to be old like Anita or died at dawn today! And Kenset had counseled her to peace! To keep the stain of blood from her own hands! She laughed aloud, suddenly, a ghastly sound that made cold chills go down her rider's spine, for it was the mad laughter of the blood-l.u.s.t! Billy knew that Jim Last in his best moments was never so coldly a killer as his daughter was tonight.

So they traversed the roofed cut and came out into the starlight of the first canon. Up this they went in single file. They pa.s.sed the place where Albright had found the dark spray on the canon wall, the standing rock where the gun with the untrue firing pin had kicked away its sh.e.l.l. A little farther on was the disturbed and trampled heap of slide which had held Old Pete's body. In silence they rode on, the horses' hoofs striking a million echoes from the reverberating crosscuts.

The moon was shining above, but here there was only a sifted light, a ghostly radiance of starlight and painted walls. Tharon, riding ahead, went unerringly forward as if she traveled the open ways of the Valley floor. She turned from the main canon toward the left and pa.s.sed the mouth of Old Pete's snow-bed. Between this and that standing spire and pinnacle she went, with a strong certainty that presently stirred Billy to speech.

"Tharon, dear," he said gently, "hadn't we better leave a mark or two along this-a-way? Ain't you got no landmarks?"

"Can if you want," the girl said briefly, "I don't need landmarks."

"Then how you know the way? There ain't no one knows th' Canon Country--but Courtrey."

"I don't know it," she said simply but with profound conviction. "I'm _feelin'_ it, Billy. I know I'm goin' straight to th' Cup o' G.o.d. I'm blind as a bat, it seems, yet goin' straight."

She lifted a hand and crossed herself.

"Goin' straight--Mary willin'--an' I'll come back straight. It lies up there an' to th' left again." She made a wide gesture that swept up and out, embracing the towering walls, the half-seen peaks against the stars.

Billy shut his lips and said no more.

Up there lay False Ridge, the sinister, dropping spine that came down from the uplands outside where the real great world began, and lured those who traveled down it to crumbling precipice and yawning pit, to sliding slope and slant that, once ridden down, could never be scaled again, according to the weird stories that were told of it.

But if Tharon went to the Canons, there lay his trail, too. If she went down False Ridge to death in the pits and waterless cuts, he asked no better lot than to follow--the faithful dog at her foot, the shadow at her shoulder.

And so it was that dawn crept up the blue-velvet of the night sky and sent its steel-blue light deep in the painted splits, and they rode unerringly forward up the sounding pa.s.ses.

When the light increased enough to show the way they came abruptly to the spot where it was necessary to leave the horses. The floor of the canon up which they were traveling lifted sharply in one huge step, breast-high to a man.

Tharon in the lead halted and looked for a moment all up and down the wondrous maze of pale, tall openings that encompa.s.sed them all round.

She turned in her saddle and looked back the way they had come. There was darker shadow, going downward, but here and there those pale mouths gaped, long ribbons of s.p.a.ce dropping from the heights above down to their level.

Up any one a man might turn and lose himself completely, for they in turn were cut and ribboned with other mouths, leaving spires and walls and faces a thousand-fold on every hand.

Tharon, even in the tensity and preoccupation of the hour, drew in her breath and the pupils of her blue eyes spread.

"Th' Canon Country!" she said softly, "I always knew it would be like this--too great to tell about! I knew it would hold somethin' for me--always knew it--either life an' its best--or death."

There was a simple grandeur about the earnest words, and Billy, his face grey in the steely light, felt the heart in his breast thrill with their portent.

No matter what the Canons held for her--either that glorious fulfillment of life, or the simple austerity of death--he would have a part in it, would have served her to the last, true to the love he bore her, true to himself.

And nothing--nothing under G.o.d's heaven, save death itself--could ever wipe out the memory of that kiss, given from the depths of her loving heart, the sign-manuel of her undying affection and friendship, the one and only touch of her inviolate red lips that he had ever known the Mistress of Last's to give to any man, save Jim Last himself.

He wiped a hand across his forehead, damp with more than the night cold, and dismounted.

"We'll leave th' horses here," he said. "I've an extra rope to string across an' make a small corral."

He did not add that he would fasten this slim barrier lightly, so that a horse that really wanted to break out--in the frantic madness of thirst, say,--might do so.

Then he set about his task--but Tharon stood with strained eyes looking up--and up--and ever up to the dimly appearing, looming spine of False Ridge.

Over there, she knew in her heart, lay the hidden Cup o' G.o.d, with its secret, the secret that meant all the world to her.

CHAPTER X

THE UNTRUE FIRING PIN

Tharon turned back and looked long at El Rey. She wondered if she would ever see the great silver-blue stallion again, ever feel the wind singing by her cheeks, ever hear the thunder of his running on the hollow ranges. She saw the stain of Jim Last's blood on the big studded saddle and a pain like death stabbed her.

"I'll get him," she had promised on that tragic day, "so help me G.o.d!"

and had made the sign of the Cross.

What did she now?

Cast away all certainty of that fulfilment because a man--a man almost a stranger--lay somewhere in the Canon Country, crawled somewhere along False Ridge, perhaps, wounded and sick with fever.

"Oh, hurry!" she whispered as Billy made secure his last light knot in the rope gateway across the cut and came to join her.

She scrambled up the bench in the canon floor, gained her feet and went forward at a rush.

"Steady, Tharon," warned the rider, "you ain't used to climbin'. Save your wind."