UNBROKEN BREAD
Jameson, Hill and Thomas were as good as their word. During the week
that followed the spectacular denouncement of Courtrey and Service at
Baston's store, they went quietly to every settler in the Valley and
declared themselves. In almost every instance they met with eager
pledges of approval. They knew, every man of them, that this slow
banding together for resistance against Courtrey and his power meant
open war. For years they had suffered indignities and hardship without
protest. While Jim Last lived they had had a sort of leader, an
example, though they had feared to follow in his lead too strongly.
They had copied his methods of guarding possessions, of corraling
every cattle-brute at night, of keeping every horse under bars. Last
had looked Courtrey in the face. The rest dared not.
Now with Last gone, they felt the lack, as if a bastion had been
razed, leaving them in the open. Secrecy in Lost Valley had been
brought to a work of art. They could hold their tongues.
But with the new knowledge Tharon Last took on a light, a halo.
Men spoke in whispers about her daring. They felt it themselves.
Word of her lightning quickness with her daddy's guns, of her
accuracy, went softly all about and about, garbled and accentuated.
They said she could shoot the studs from the sides of a man's belt and
never touch him. They said she could drive a nail farther than the
ordinary man could see. They said she could draw so swiftly that the
motion of the hands was lost.
A slow excitement took the faction of the settlers.
But out at Last's Holding a grave anxiety sat upon Tharon's riders.
Conford knew--and Billy knew--and Curly knew more about Courtrey's
intent than some of the others. Young Paula, half asleep in the deep
recesses of the house, had witnessed that furious encounter by the
western door on the soft spring day when Jim Last had come home to die
at dusk. She knew that the look in Courtrey's eyes had been
covetousness--and she had told Jose. Jose, loyal and sensible, had
told the boys. So now there was always one or more of them on duty
near the mistress of Last's on one pretext or another. To Tharon, who
knew more than all of them put together, this was funny.
It stirred the small mirth there was in her these days, and often she
sent them away, to have them turn up at the most unexpected times and
places.
"You boys!" she would say whimsically, "you think Courtrey's goin' to
cart me off livin'?"
"That's just what we are afraid of, Tharon," answered Conford gravely
once, "we know it'd not be _livin'_."
And Tharon had looked away toward Jose's cross, and frowned.
"No," she said, "an' it won't be any way, _livin'_ or dead."
One night toward the end of that week a strange cavalcade wound up
along the levels, past the head of Black Coulee, forded the Broken
Bend in silence save for the stroke of hoof and iron shoe on stone,
and went toward Last's. There were thirty men, riding close, and they
had nothing to say in the darkness.
At the Holding Tharon Last waited them on her western doorstep.
As they rode in along the sounding-board the muffled ringing of the
hoofs seemed to the girl as the call of clarions. The heart in her
breast leaped with a strange thrill, a gladness. She felt as if her
father's spirit stood behind her waiting the first step toward the
fulfillment of her promise.
The riders stopped in the soft darkness. There was no moon and the
very winds seemed to have hushed their whispers in the cottonwoods.
"Tharon," said the man who rode in the lead, and she recognized the
voice of Jameson from the southern end of the Valley, "we've come."
That was all. A simple declaration, awaiting her disposal.
Conford, not half approving, his heart heavy with foreboding, stood at
his mistress' shoulder and waited, too.
For a long moment there was no sound save the eternal tree-toads at
their concert. Then the girl spoke, and it seemed to those shadowy
listeners that they heard again the voice of Jim Last, sane,
commanding, full of courage and conviction.
"I'm glad," said Tharon simply, "th' time has come when Lost Valley
has got t' stand or fall forever. Courtrey's gettin' stronger every
day, more careless an' open. He's been content to steal a bunch of
cattle here, another there, a little at a time. Now he's takin' them
by th' herds, like John Dement's last month. He's got a wife, an' from
what I've always heard, she's a sight too good fer him. But he wants
more--he wants _me_. He's offered me th' last insult, an' as Jim
Last's daughter I'm a-goin' to even up my score with him, an' it's got
three counts. You've all got scores against him."
Here there were murmurs through the silent group.
"Th' next outrage from Courtrey, on any one of us, gets all of us
together. For every cattle-brute run off by Courtrey's band, we'll
take back one in open day, all of us ridin'. We'll have to shoot, but
I'm ready. Are you?"
Every man answered on the instant.
"Then," said the girl tensely, "get down an' sign."
There was a rattle of stirrups and bits, a creak of leather as thirty
men swung off their horses.
Tharon stepped back in the lighted room. Her men stood there against
the walls. The settlers came diffidently in across the sill, lean,
poor men for the most part, their strained eyes and furrowed faces
showing the effect of hardships. Not a man there but had seen himself
despoiled, had swallowed the bitter dose in helplessness.
Most of them were married and had families. Some of them had killings
to their record. Many of them were none too upright.
Jameson was a good man, and so was Dan Hill. Thomas was merely weak.
Buford was a gun man who had protected his own much better than the
rest. McIntyre was like him. One by one they came forward as Tharon
called them by name, and leaning down, put their names or their marks
to a sheet of paper which bore these few simple lines:
"We, the signers named below, do solemnly promise and pledge ourselves
to stand together, through all consequences of this act, for the
protection of our lives and property. For every piece of property
taken from any one of us, we shall go together and take back it, or
its worth, from whoever took it. For every person killed in any way,
but fair-and-open, we promise to hang the murderer."
Billy had drafted the document. Tharon, whom Jim Last had taught her
letters, read it aloud. The names of Last's Holding headed it. The
thirty names and marks--and of the latter there were many--stretched
to the bottom of the sheet.
When it was done the girl folded it solemnly and put it away in the
depths of the big desk. Old Anita, watching from the shadows of the
eating room beyond, put her _reboso_ over her head and rocked in
silent grief. She had seen tragic things before.
Then these lean and quiet men filed out, mounted the waiting horses
and went away in the darkness, mysterious figures against the stars.
That night Tharon Last sat late by the deep window in her own room at
the south of the ranch house. It was a huge old room, high walled and
sombre. There were bright blankets hung like pictures on the walls,
baskets marvelously woven of grass and rushes, thick mats on the floor
made in like manner and of a tough, long-fibred grass that grew down
in a swale beyond the Black Coulee, while in one corner there shone
pale in the darkness the one great treasure of that unknown mother, an
almost life-size statue of the Holy Virgin.
Of this beautiful thing Tharon had stood in awe from babyhood.
A half fearful reverence bowed her before it on those rare times when
Anita, throwing back to her Mexic ancestors, worshipped with vague
rites at its feet.
Always its waxen hands bore offerings, silent tribute from the girl's
still nature. Sometimes these were the prairie flowers, little wild
things, sweet and fragile. Sometimes they were sprays of the water
vines that grew by the wonderful spring of the Holding.
Again they were strings of bright beads, looped and falling in
glistening cascades over the tarnished gilt robes of the Virgin.
Under the deep window there was a wide couch, piled high with a narrow
mattress of wild goose feathers and covered with a crimson blanket.
Here the girl sat with her arms on the sill and looked out into the
darkness that covered the Valley. She thought of the thirty men who
had signed her paper, riding far and by in the sounding basin,
returning to their uncertain homes. She thought of her father asleep
under his peaceful cross, of young Harkness beside him.
She thought of Courtrey and Service and Wylackie Bob, of Black Bart
and the stranger from Arizona. They were a hard bunch to tackle.
They had the Valley under their thumbs to do with as they pleased,
like the veriest Roman potentate of old. Her daddy had told her once,
when she was small and lonely of winter nights, strange old tales of
rulers and their helpless subjects. Jim Last could talk when he
needed, though he was a man of conserved speech.
Yes, Courtrey was like a king in Lost Valley, absolute. She thought of
the many crimes done and laid to his door since she could remember, of
countless cattle run off, of horses stolen and shamelessly ridden in
grinning defiance of any who might dare to identify them, of Cap Hart
killed on the Stronghold's range and left to rot under the open skies,
a warning like those birds of prey that are shot and hung to scare
their kind. Her soft lips drew themselves into a hard line, very like
Jim Last's, and the heart in her ratified its treaty with the thirty
men.
She had none to mourn her, she thought a trifle sadly--well Anita and
Paula, of course, and there were her riders. Billy would grieve--he'd
kill some one if she were killed--and Conford and Jack.
A warm glow pervaded her being. Yes, she had folks, even if she was
the last of her blood.
But she didn't intend to be killed. She was right, and she had
listened enough to Anita to believe with a superstitious certainty,
that right was invulnerable. For instance, if she and Courtrey should
draw at the same second, she believed absolutely, that because she was
in the right, her bullet would travel a bit the swifter, her aim be
truer. She felt in her heart with a profound conviction that some day
she would kill Courtrey. She thought of his wife, Ellen, a pale flower
of a woman, white as milk, with hair the colour of unripe maize, and
wondered if she loved the man who made her life hell, so the Valley
whispered. Tharon wondered how it would seem to love a man, as women
who were wives must love their men--if the agony of loss to Ellen
could be as acute and terrifying as hers had been ever since that soft
night in spring when her best friend, Jim Last, had come home on El
Rey.
She thought of the grey look on his face, of the pinched line at his
nostrils' base, and the tears came miserably under her lids, she laid
her head on the cloth mat that covered the wide window ledge and wept
like any child for a time. Then she wiped her face with her hands,
sighed, and fell again to thinking.
An hour later as she rose to make ready for bed, she thought she
caught a faint sound out where the little rock-bordered paths ran in
what she was pleased to call her garden, since a few hardy flowers
grew by the spring's trickle, and she held her breath to listen. It
was nothing, however, she thought, and turned into the deep room.
Only the tree-toads, long since silent, knew that a cigarette,
carefully shielded in a palm, glowed in the darkness.
Two days after this a visitor came to Last's. From far down they saw
him coming, in the mid-morning while the work of the house went
forward. Paula, bringing a pan of milk from the springhouse spied him
first and stopped to satisfy her young eyes with the unwonted
appearance of him. She looked long, and hurried in to tell her
mistress.
"Senorita," she said excitedly, "see who comes! A stranger who has
different clothes from any other. He rides not like Lost Valley men,
either, being too stiff and straight. Come, see."
And Tharon, busy about the kitchen in her starched print dress,
dropped everything at once to run with Paula to the western door of
the living room that they might look south.
"_Muchachas_ both," complained old Anita, "the milk is spilled and the
_pan dulce_ burns in the oven! Tch, tch!"
But the young creatures in the west door cared naught for her
grumbling.
"Who can it be, to come so, Senorita?" wondered Paula, her brown cheek
beside her mistress, "is he not handsome!"
"For mercy sake, Paula," chided Tharon laughing, "I believe you'd look
for beauty in th' ol' Nick himself if he rode up. But I've seen this
man before."
"Where? When?"
"In town that day I met Courtrey an' Service. I remember seen' him
come into line as I backed out--he was standin' between th' racks an'
th' porch, somewhere." And she narrowed her eyes and studied the rider
as he came jogging up across the range.
"H'm," she said presently, "he does ride funny. I bet he ain't rode
range much in _his_ life. Stiff as a ramrod, an' no mistake."
Then with an unconscious grace and poise that set well upon her as the
mistress of Last's, Tharon moved into the open door and waited.
As the stranger came closer both girls subjected him to a frank and
careful scrutiny that in any other place than Lost Valley would have
been rudeness itself.
Here it catalogued the stranger, set the style of his welcome.
It left him stripped of surprise, outwardly, before he was within
speaking distance.
It told the observers that he was young, of some twenty-six or seven,
that his face, the first point taken in with lightning swiftness--was
different from most faces they had ever seen, that it was open,
smiling, easy, that he was straight as a ramrod, indeed, that he rode
as if he feared nothing in the earth or the heavens, that he carried
no gun, that he wore the peculiar uniform that Tharon had noticed
before, and that there was something on his breast, a dark shield of
some sort which made them think of Steptoe Service and his disgraced
sheriff's star. This thought brought a frown to Tharon's brows, and it
was there to greet the stranger when he rode up to the step and
halted, his smart tan hat in his hand. The morning sun burned warmly
down on his dark hair, which was brushed straight back from his
forehead in a way unknown in those parts. His dark eyes, slow and deep
but somehow merry, took in the pretty picture in the door.
"Miss Last?" he asked in a low voice.
"Yes," said Tharon promptly and waited.
Every one waited in Lost Valley for a stranger to make known his
business. Paula drew back behind her mistress.
The man sat still on his horse and waited, too. The silence became
profound. The hens cackling about the barns intruded sharply.
"Well," he said presently, "I am a stranger, and I came to see you."
The girl in the doorway felt a hot surge of discomfort flare over her
for the first time in her life for such a reason.
There was something in the low voice that implied a lack, accused her
of something. She resented it instantly.
"If that is so," she said slowly, "light."
The man laughed delightedly, and swung quickly down, dropping his
rein. Tharon noticed that. That much was natural. He held his hat
against his breast with one hand and came forward with the same
quickness, holding out the other. Tharon was not used to shaking
hands with strange men. She gave her hand diffidently, because he so
evidently expected it, and took it away swiftly.
"My name," he said, "is Kenset--David Kenset, and I am from
Washington, D. C."
He might as well have said Timbuctoo. Tharon Last knew little outside
her own environment. Words and names that had to do with unknown
places were vague things to her.
"Yes?" she answered politely, "I make no doubt you've come far. Come
in. Dinner'll soon be ready," and she moved back from the door with a
smile that covered her pitiful ignorance as with a garment of gold.
When Tharon smiled like that she was wholly adorable, and the man knew
it at once.
Why she had so quickly invited him in before he had fully declared
himself, she did not know, unless it was because of that lack in her
which his first words had implied.
Old Anita, whose manners were the simple and perfect ones of the
Mexican coupled to a kindly heart, had taught her how to comport.
Her easy and constant association with the riders and _vaqueros_ had
dulled her somewhat, but she could be royal on occasion.
Now she simply stepped back in the deep cool room where the _ollas_
swung in the windows, smiled--and she was changed entirely from the
girl of a few moments before.
The man came in, laid his hat on the flat top of the melodeon, walked
over to a chair and sat down. There was an ease about him, a
taking-for-granted, that amazed Tharon beyond words.
Then he looked frankly at her and began to talk as if he had known her
always.
"I've come to live in Lost Valley, Miss Last," he said, "for a long
while, I think. Wish me luck."
"Come here to live?" said Tharon, "a settler? Goin' to homestead?"
He shook his head.
"No."
A quick suspicion seized her. Perhaps Washington was like Arizona, a
place from which they imported gun men. Only this man wore no gun, and
he had not a look of prowess. No. This man was different.
"Then what you goin' to do?" she asked as frankly as a child.
"First," he said, "I'm going up where the pines grow yonder and build
myself a house," and he waved a hand toward the east where the ranges
rolled up to the thickening fringes of the forest that marched back
into the ramparts of the trail-less hills.
"I want to find an ideal spot, a glade where the pines stand round the
edges, with a spring of living water running down, and where I can
look down and over the magnificent reaches of Lost Valley. I shall
make me a home, and then I shall work."
"Ride?" asked the girl succinctly.
"Ride? Of course, that will be a great part of that work."
"Who for?"
He looked at her sharply.
"Who for?"
"Yes. What outfit?"
There was a hard quality in her voice. If he had come in to ride for
Courtrey, why he must know at once that Last's was no friend of his,
now or ever.
He caught the drift of her thought in part.
"For no outfit, Miss Last," he said with a gentle dignity. "I am in
the employ of the United States Government."
A swift change came over Tharon's face.
Government!
That was no word to conjure by in Lost Valley. Steptoe Service prated
of Gov'ment. It was a farce, a synonym for juggled duty, a word to
suggest the one-man law of the place, for even Courtrey, who made the
sheriffs--and unmade them--did it under the grandiloquent name of
Government. She looked at him keenly, and there was a sudden hardening
in her young eyes.
"Then I reckon, Mister," she said coolly, "that you an' me can't be
friends."
"What?"
"No, sir."
"Are you in earnest?"
"Certainly am," said Tharon. "I ain't on good terms at present with
anything that has t' do with law."
David Kenset leaned forward and looked into her face with his deep,
compelling eyes.
"I guessed as much from my first knowledge of you the other day," he
answered, "but we are on unfamiliar ground. You have a wrong
conception of Government, a perverted idea of law and what it stands
for."
"All right, Mister," said the girl rising. "We won't argy. I asked you
t' dinner, but I take it back. I ask ye t' forgive me my manners, but
th' sooner we part th' better. Then we won't be a-hurtin' each other's
feelin's. I'm fer law, too, but it ain't your kind, an' we ain't
likely to agree."
She picked up his hat from where it lay on the melodeon and fingered
it a bit, smiling at him in the ingenuous manner that was utterly
disarming.
A slow dark flush spread over the man's face. He laughed, however, and
in reaching for the hat, caught two of her fingers, whether purposely
or not, Tharon could not tell.
"Admirable hospitality in the last frontier," he said. "But perhaps I
should not have expected anything different."
"You make me ashamed," said Tharon straightly, "but Last's ain't
takin' chances these days. You may belong to Government, an' you may
belong to Courtrey, an' I'm against 'em both."
She walked with him to the door, stepped out, as if with some thought
to soften her unprecedented treatment of the stranger under her roof.
She noted the trim figure of him in its peculiar garb, the proud
carriage, the even and easy comportment under insult.
From his saddle he untied a package wrapped in paper.
"Will you please take this?" he asked lightly, holding it out. "Just
on general principles."
But she shook her head.
"I can't take no favours from you when I've just took stand against
you, can I?" she asked in turn.
"Well, of all the ridiculous----"
The man laughed again shortly, tossed the package on the step,
mounted, whirled and rode away without a backward glance.
Tharon stood frowning where he left her until the brown horse and its
rider were well down along the levels toward Black Coulee.
Then a sigh at her shoulder recalled her and she turned to see the
wistful dark face of Paula gazing raptly in the same direction.
"He was so handsome, Senorita," said the girl, "to be so hardly dealt
with."
"Paula," said the mistress bitingly, "will you remember who you're
talkin' to? Do you want to go back to th' Pomos under th' Rockface?"
"Saints forbid!" cried Paula instantly.
"Then keep your sighs for Jose an' mind your manners. Pick up that
bundle."
Swiftly and obediently the girl did as she was told, unrolling the
wrapper from the package.
She brought to light the meal-sack which Tharon had dropped that day
on Baston's porch.
A slow flush stained Tharon's cheeks at the sight, and she went
abruptly into the house.
When the riders came in at night she told them in detail about the
whole affair, for Last's and its men were one, their interests the
same.
They held counsel around the long table in the dining room under the
hanging lamp, and Conford at her right was spokesman for the rest.
"He's somethin' official, all right, I make no doubt, Tharon," he said
when he had listened attentively, "but what or who I don't know. I
heard from Dixon about him comin' into Corvan that day, an' that he
had rode far. No one knows his business, or what he's in Lost Valley
for. He's some mysterious."
"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.
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.
Anything done upon them was of import, irrevocable.
Thus had Jim Last inscribed the semi-yearly letters that went down the
Wall with the cattle, or for supplies.
Now she spread a shining pad under the light, sat down in her father's
chair and began, carefully and minutely to reproduce the badge that
meant authority of a sort, yet was not a sheriff's star.
The riders, clustered at her shoulder, watched the thing take shape
and form. At the end of twenty painstaking minutes Tharon straightened
and looked up in the interested faces.
"There," she said, "an' its dull copper colour!"
And this was the shield with its unknown heraldry which Conford took
up and studied carefully for a long time.
"'Forest Service,'" he read aloud, "'Department of Agriculture.' Well,
so far as I can see, it ain't so terrifyin'. That last means raisin'
things, like beets an' turnips an' so on, an' as for th' forest part,
why, if he stays up in his 'fringe o' pines' I guess we ain't got no
call to kick. Don't you worry, Tharon, about this new bird."
"I'm a darned sight more worried about that other one, th' Arizona
beauty which Courtrey's got in."
"Forget th' gun man, Burt," said Billy, "this feller's a heap more
interestin' to me, for I've got a hunch he's a poet. Now who on this
footstool but a poet would come ridin' into Lost Valley with his badge
o' beets an' his line o' talk about 'fringes o' pines' an' 'runnin'
streams,' to quote Tharon?"
"Even poets are human, you young limb," drawled Curly in his soft
voice, "an' I'm sorry for him if he starts your 'interest,' so to
speak. He'll need all his poetic vision t' survive."
"I hope, Billy," said Tharon severely, and with lofty inconsistency,
"that you'll remember your manners an' not start anything. Last's is
in for trouble enough without any side issues."
"True," said the boy instantly, "I'll promise to leave th' poet
alone."
Then the talk fell about the new well that had taken the place of the
old Crystal and which was proving a huge success.
"Can't draw her dry," said Bent Smith, "pulled all of three hours with
Nick Bob an' Blue Pine yesterday an' never even riled her.
"She's good as th' Gold Pool or th' Silver Hollow now."
"You're some range man t' make any such a comparison," said Curly with
conviction, "there ain't no artificial water-well extent that can hold
a candle t' th' real livin' springs of a cattle country, when they're
such bubblin', shinin' beauties as th' Springs of Last's."
"You're right, Curly," said Tharon quietly from under the light,
"there's nothin' like them. They must be th' blessin's of God, an' no
mistake. They're th' stars at night, an' th' winds an' th' sunshine.
They're th' lovers of th' horses, th' treasure of th' masters. I love
my springs."
"So do th' herds," put in Jack Masters. "They'll come fast at night
now because they can smell th' water far off, an' it's gettin' pretty
dry on th' range."
"Yes," sighed Tharon, "it's summer now, an' Jim Last died in spring. A
whole season gone."
A whole season had gone, indeed, since that tragic night.
Last's Holding had missed its master at each turn and point. A
thousand times did Conford, the foreman, catch himself in the act of
going to the big room to find him at his desk, a big, vital force,
intent on the accounts of the ranch, a thousand times did he long for
his keen insight. The _vaqueros_ missed him and his open hand.
The very dogs at the steps missed him, and so did El Rey, waiting in
his corral for the step that did not come, the strong hand on his
bit.
And how much his daughter missed him only the stars and the pale
Virgin knew.
For the next few days following the short, awkward visit of the
stranger Tharon felt a prickle of uneasiness under her skin at every
thought of it. There was something in the memory that confused and
distressed her, a feeling of failure, of a lack in her that put her in
a bad light to herself.
She knew that, instinctively, she had been protecting her own, that
since Last's had stepped out in the light against Courtrey she must
take no chance. But should she have taken back the common courtesy of
the offered meal? Would it not have been better to let him stay and
meet Conford who would have been in at noon?
She vexed herself a while with these questions, and then dismissed
them with her cool good sense.
"It's done," she told herself, "an' can't be helped. An' yet, there
was somethin' about him, somethin' that made me think of Jim Last
himself--somethin' in his quiet eyes--as if they had both come from
somewhere outside Lost Valley where they grow different men. It was
a--bigness, a softness. I don't know."
And with that last wistful thought she forgot all about the incident
and the man, for the prediction of Jameson that dusk at the head of
Rolling Cove became reality.
Dixon, who lived north along the Wall near the Pomo settlement, lost
ten head of steers, all white and deeply earmarked, unmistakable
cattle that could not be disguised.
Courtrey was resenting the vague something in the air that was
crystallizing into resistance about him.
Word of the stealing ran about the Valley like a grass fire, more
boldly than usual.
It came to Last's in eighteen hours, brought by a horseman who had
carried it to many a lonely homestead.
Tharon received it with a thrill of joy.
"Good enough," she said, "no use wasting time."
And she sent out a call for the thirty men.