THE SHOT IN THE CANONS
Kenset of the foothills was very busy. Between study of his maps and
the endless riding of their claimed areas he was out from dawn till
dark.
He found, indeed, that none but he, of late years, had ridden those
sloping forest covered skirts. Some one, sometime, must have done so,
else the maps themselves would not have been, but what marks they must
have left were either gone through the erosion of the elements or been
wantonly destroyed.
He fancied the former had been the case, for he saw no signs of
destruction, and the very curiosity of the denizens of the Valley
precluded familiarity with forest work.
So he laid out for himself the labour of a dozen men and went at it
with a vim that kept him at high tension. Therefore he had little time
to think of Tharon Last and the strange life in Lost Valley. Only
when he rode between given points, unintent on the land around, did he
give up to his speculations. At such times his mind invariably went
back to that first day at Baston's steps and he saw her again as he
had seen her then, tense, stooping, her elbows bent above the guns at
her hips, coming backward along the porch, feeling for the steps with
her foot.
Always he saw the ashen whiteness of her cheeks beneath her blowing
hair.
Always he frowned at the memory and always he felt a thrill go down
his nerves. What was she, anyway, this wild, sweet creature of the
wilderness who held herself aloof from his friendship, and said that
she was "sworn?"
Kenset, sane, quiet, peace loving, shook himself mentally and tried
not to think of her. But day after day he came down along the edges of
the scattered woods where the cattle grazed--on the forest lands--and
looked over to where the Holding lay like a greener spot on the green
stretches.
He thought of her, living in this feudal hold, mistress of her riders,
her cattle, and her wonderful racing horses of the Finger Marks,
sweet, fair, wholesome--with the six-guns at her slender hips!
If only he, Kenset, could take those weapons from her clinging hands,
could wipe out of her young heart the calm intent to kill!
It was preposterous! It was awful!
Bred to another life, another law, another type of woman, he could not
reconcile this girl of Lost Valley with anything he knew.
He went over in his mind again and again the serene calmness of her in
his cabin that day of the race with Courtrey, and shook his head in
puzzlement.
But why should he trouble himself about her at all?
He had come here in his Government's service to reclaim its forest, to
look after its interest.
Why should he bother with the moral code of Lost Valley?
But reason as he might, the face of Tharon Last came back to haunt
him, waking or asleep.
He knew that it troubled him and was, in a way, ashamed. So he worked
hard at his tasks, relocated boundaries, marked them with a peculiar
blaze in convenient trees which looked something like this:
and set up monuments with odd and undecipherable hieroglyphics upon
them.
And with each blaze, each mark and monument and sign, he drew closer
in about him the net of suspicion and disapproval which was weaving in
Lost Valley, for there was not one but ran the gamut of close
inspection and speculation by Courtrey's men, by the settlers who came
many miles over from the western side of the Valley for the purpose,
and by Tharon's riders.
Low mutters of disapproval growled in the Valley.
Who was this upstart, anyway, to come setting signs and marks in the
land that had been theirs from time immemorial? What mattered the
little copper-coloured badge on his breast? What mattered it that he
was beginning to send out word of his desire to work with and for the
cattlemen of Lost Valley, the settlers, the homesteaders?
What was this matter of "grazing permits" of which he had spoken at
the Stronghold?
Permits?
They had grazed their cattle where and when they chose--and
could--from their earliest memory.
They asked no leave from Government.
When Kenset rode into Corvan he was treated with exaggerated politeness
by those with whom he had to deal, with utter unconsciousness by all
the rest. To cattleman and settler alike he was as if he had not been.
None spoke to him in the few broad streets, none asked him to a bar to
drink.
Serene, quiet, soft spoken, he came and went about his business, and
sneers followed him covertly.
It was not long after Tharon's visit to the cabin in the glade, that
Kenset, riding alone along the twilight land, passed close to the
mouth of Black Coulee one day at dusk. He rode loosely, slouching
sidewise in his saddle, for he had been to Corvan for his monthly mail
and a few supplies tied in a bag behind his saddle, and he carried his
broad hat in his hand.
The little cool wind that blew in from the narrow gorge of the Bottle
Neck and spread out like an invisible fan, breathed on his face with a
grateful touch. The day had been hot, for the summer was opening
beautifully, and he had ridden Captain far. Therefore he jogged and
rested, his arms hanging listlessly at his sides, his thoughts two
thousand miles away.
At the mouth of Black Coulee where the sinister split of the deep wash
came up to the level, there grew a fringe of wild poplar trees. They
were beautiful things, tall and straight and thickly covered with a
million shiny leaves that whirled and rustled softly in the wind,
showing all their soft white silver sides when the breeze came up from
the south as it did this day. There was water in Black Coulee, many
small springs, not deep enough nor steady enough to count for water in
a range country, but sufficient to keep the poplars growing on the rim
of the great wash, to stand them thick on the caving sides. Whole
benches of earth with their trees upon them slipped down these sides
from time to time, making of the Coulee a mysterious labyrinth of
thickets and shelves, of winding ways and secret places.
Kenset had heard a few wild stories about Black Coulee. Sam Drake had
talked a bit more than most men of Lost Valley would have talked, and
he had listened idly.
Now as he rode up along the levels and neared the dark mouth of the
cut he studied it with appraising eyes. It was sinister enough, in all
truth, a deep, dark place behind its veil of poplars, secretive,
hushed.
The red light that dyed Lost Valley so wondrously at the hour of the
sun's sharp decline above the peaks and ridges of the Canon Country
was awash in all the great sunken cup, save at the west under the
Rockface where the shadows were already dark.
Kenset drank in the beauty of the scene with smiling eyes. Already a
love for this hidden paradise had grown wonderfully in his heart. He
felt as if he had never lived before, as if he had never known
beauty.
And so, dreaming a little of other scenes, smiling to himself, he
jogged along on Captain and was nearly past the frowning mouth of the
Coulee, when there came the sharp snap of a rifle in the stillness,
and Captain changed his feet, sagged and quivered, then caught himself
and leaped ahead. For one amazed moment Kenset thought the horse was
hit. Then, as he straightened in his saddle and dropped his hand to
catch up his hanging rein, he looked quickly down. Where he was
accustomed to the smooth feel of the pommel beneath his palm there was
a sharp raw edge. A splinter of wood stood up and a small flare of
leather hung to one side.
A bullet, singing out of Black Coulee, had carried away part of the
pommel.
Kenset shut his lips in a new line, gathered up his rein and drew the
horse down to a walk with an iron hand.
Slowly, without a backward glance, he rode on across the darkening
levels. He was no fool.
He knew he had had his warning.
Very well. He would give back his acceptance of that warning.
He had said to Courtrey that night at the Stronghold that he had come
to stay.
No bunch of lawless bullies were going to scare him out.
No other shot followed. He had not expected one.
For a time after that he went about his work as usual. Nothing
happened; he had no outward sign of the distaste with which he was
regarded by all factions alike, it seemed.
He met Courtrey face to face in Corvan one day and spoke to him
civilly, but Courtrey did not speak. Wylackie Bob did, however--a
sneering salutation that was a covert insult. Kenset touched his hat
with dignity and passed on.
"Of all th' tenderfeet!" said Baston, watching the small by-play. "I
b'lieve you could spit on him, boys."
"I don't," spoke up Old Pete, shuffling by on his bandy legs,
"sometimes that quiet, soft-spoken kind rises--an' then hell's to pay
in their veecinity."
But Wylackie looked at the weazened snow-packer with his snake-like
eyes and snapped out a warning.
"Some folks takes sides too quick, sometimes."
But Old Pete went on about his business. He knew, as did all the
Valley, that a price was on his head with Courtrey's band for the
daring leap which had saved the life of Tharon Last that day in
spring.
Sooner or later that price would be paid, but Old Pete was true
western stuff. He had lived his life, had had his day, and he was full
of pride at the turn of fate which had made him a hero in a way at the
end.
All the Valley stood off and admired Jim Last's daughter.
Pete basked in the reflected light. And Tharon herself had taken his
gnarled old hand one day in Baston's store and called him a
thoroughbred.
Folks in Lost Valley were chary of words, conservative to the last
degree. That simple word, the handclasp, the look in the clear blue
eyes, had been his eulogy.
It was whispered about, as was every smallest happening, and came to
the ears of Courtrey himself, who had promised those vague things for
the future on the fateful night. But Courtrey was playing a waiting
game. He was obsessed with the image of Tharon. Sooner or later he
meant to have her, to install her at the Valley's head. He had always
had what he wanted. Therefore, he expected to have this girl with the
challenging eyes, the maddening mouth, like crimson sumac.
Ellen?
Already he was setting in motion a thing that was to take care of
Ellen.
The thing in hand now was to placate Tharon, the mistress of Last's,
to play the overwhelming lover.
Courtrey knew better than to go near the Holding. Bully that he was he
yet had sense enough to know that no fear of him dwelt in the huge old
house under the cottonwoods. If Tharon herself did not shoot him,
one--or all--of her riders would. The day of the armed band riding
down to take her was, if not past, passing fast. He recalled the look
of the settlers--poor spawn that he hated--whirling their solid column
behind her to face him that day from the Cup Rim's floor.
No. Courtrey meant to have the girl some day--to hold in his arms that
ached for her loveliness, the strong, resistant young body of her--to
sate his thief's mouth with kisses. But he would call her to him of
her own will, would taste the savage triumph of seeing her come suing
for his mercy.
If Tharon meant to break Courtrey, he meant no less to break her.
Outlawry--mob law--they were pitted against each other.
And, lifting its head dimly through the smother of hatred, of wrong,
of repression and reprisal, another law was struggling toward the
light in Lost Valley--the sane, quiet law of right and equality,
typified by the smiling, dark-eyed man of the cabin in the forest
glade.
Courtrey sent word to Tharon--an illy spelled letter, mailed at
Baston's--that he had meant nothing by that race above the Black
Coulee, except another kiss. There was Courtrey's daring in the
affronting words.
She sent the letter back to him--riding in on El Key alone--with the
outline of a gun traced across it.
"Th' little wildcat!" grinned the man, "she's sure spunky!"
* * * * *
Once again Tharon met Kenset in the days that followed. Riding by the
Silver Hollow she stopped one breathless afternoon, drank of the
snow-cold waters, shared them with El Rey, dropped the rein over the
stallion's head and flung herself full length on the earth beside the
spring. A clump of willow trees grew here, for every spring in Lost
Valley had its lone sentinels to call its presence across the
stretching miles. As the girl lay flat on her back with her hands
beneath her head, she looked up into the blue heart of the arching
skies where the fleecy white clouds sailed, and a sense of sweetness
and peace came down upon her like a garment.
"You're sure some lovely spot, Lost Valley," she said aloud, "an' no
mistake. I know, more'n ever as th' days go by that Jim Last was only
jokin' when he told me of those other places out below, big as you,
lovely as you. It just ain't possible. Is it, El Rey, old boy?"
And she moved a booted foot to the king's striped hoof and tapped it
smartly.
El Rey, always aloof, always touchy, never sure of temper, jumped and
snorted. The girl laughed and crossed her feet and fell to speculating
idly about the world that lay beyond Lost Valley. Little she knew of
it. Only the brief words of her father from time to time, the
reluctant speech of Last's riders, for the master of the Holding had
laid down the law concerning this.
His daughter was of the Valley, content. He meant her to be so always.
The man who had instilled into her young mind a discontent with her
environment, a longing for the "flesh-pots" of the world as he had
styled it once, would have had short shrift at Last's. He would have
received his time and "gone packing" swiftly.
And Tharon was content.
Barring the loneliness that had come with Jim Last's death, she was
well content.
So she lay by the willows and hummed a sliding tune, a soft, sweet
thing of minors and high notes falling, like rippling waters, and
lazily watched the high white clouds sail by.
And as she lay she became conscious of something else in the drowsing
land beside herself and her horse. She felt it first, this presence--a
thin, dim vibration that sang in the earth beneath her. It stopped the
wordless song on her lips, stilled the breath in her throat, set every
nerve in her to listening, as it were.
Presently she sat up and felt quickly for the gun-butts 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, damn 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 ejaculated, "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.
"Hell!" 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?"
"Surely, so far as they two go. A bad man and a bad sheriff. But they
are not all the officers of this County. Where and who is your
Superior Judge?"
"Poor ol' Ben Garland. Weaker'n skim milk. Scared to say his soul's
his own."
There was infinite scorn in her voice.
"No, it's Steptoe Service, or nothin'."
Kenset thought a moment.
"Who's the Coroner?" he asked presently.
"Jim Banner," she answered quickly, "as straight a man as ever lived.
Brave, too. He's been shot at more'n once fer takin' exception to some
raw piece o' work in this Valley, fer pokin' his nose in, so to speak.
Jim Last used to say he was th' only _man_ at the Seat, which is
Corvan, you know, of course."
"District Attorney?"
"Tom Nord. Keen as a razor an' married to Courtrey's sister. Now do
you see why this is th' law?" She, too, tapped the gun.
Kenset frowned and looked down along the green range. He thought of
the unpainted pine building in Corvan which was the Court House. A
strange personnel, truly, to invest it with authortity!
"I see," he said briefly, "but there must be some way out. This is not
the right way, the way that must come and last."
Tharon's lips drew into the thin line that made them like her
father's. "It's th' law that's here," she said and there was an
instant coldness in her voice, "an' it's th' law that'll last until
Courtrey or I go down."
The man, watching, saw that thinning of the lips, the hardening of all
the young lines of her face. He knew he had blundered. Talk was cheap.
It was action that counted in Lost Valley.
With a quick motion he reached over and caught the girl's hand and
drew it to him, covering it with both of his.
Her eyes followed, came to rest on his face, cool, appraising,
waiting.
She was, in all that had counted in his life, crude, untutored,
basic.
Yet that calm look made his impulsive action seem unpardonable in the
next second. However a warm surge of feeling shot through him with the
quiet resting of that firm brown hand between his own, and he held it
tighter. Kenset had thought he was sophisticated, that little or
nothing could stir him deeply--not since Ethel Van Riper had gone to
Europe as the bride of the old Count of Easthaven. That had been four
years back. He had been pretty young then, but the young feel deeply.
Now he held a gun woman's hand in the thin shade of a willow clump in
the heart of Lost Valley--and the blood surged in his ears, the levels
and slopes danced before his vision.
"Miss Tharon," he said, for the first time using her given name, "I
beg your pardon. You are strong, simple, serene. You know your land
and its ways. I am an alien, an interloper--but I can't bear to think
of you as waiting for the time to kill a man--or to be killed in the
killing. It sickens me."
Tharon snatched her hand from his and leaped to her feet.
"Don't talk like that!" she cried passionately, "I don't like to hear
it! I thought you were a real man, maybe, but you're not! You--you're
a woman! A soft woman--I hate th' breed!"
Her face was flushed, for what reason Kenset, stunned by her vehement
words, could not tell. She flung the rein up and followed it, leaping
to saddle like a man.
"I tol' you we couldn't be friends!" she cried, her eyes blazing with
sudden fire, "there ain't no manner of use a-tryin'."
Kenset, springing forward, caught El Rey's bit. The stallion reared
and struck, but he held him down.
"There is use, Tharon," he panted. "It's vital! Since that day on
Baston's steps, when you backed out past me I have had you in my
mind--my thoughts by day and night--there is use, and I'll keep your
hands from blood--Courtrey's or any other--if it takes my life--so
help me God!"
The girl leaned down and her blue eyes blazed in his face.
"An' make me false to th' crosses on Jim Last's stone?" she cried.
"No--not you or anybody else--could do that trick! Let go!"
The next moment she had whirled out from the flickering shade of the
willows and was gone around toward the north--there was only the sound
of hoofs ringing on the earth. Kenset, left alone where the Silver
Hollow bubbled softly above its snowy sands, passed a trembling hand
across his eyes and stood as in a trance.
What did it mean? What had he promised? What vital emotion had gripped
him that his usually quiet tongue had rushed into that torrential
speech that dealt with life and death? What was Tharon Last to him?
A figure of the old West! A romantic gun woman with her weapons on her
hips! A rider of wild horses!
Slowly, as if he had gained an added weight of years, he reined
Captain and swung himself up. He rode east from the spring toward the
lacy and far-reaching skirts of the forest, and for the first time he
saw the rolling country with tragic eyes.
It held deep issues--life and death and the passing or continuing of
regimes and and dynasties--but it was a wondrous country, and, come
good or bad, it had become his own. He swung around in his saddle and
looked far back across the Valley. He saw the golden light on its
uncounted acres, the shadow falling at the foot of the great Rockface,
the mighty Wall itself with the silver ribbon of the Vestal's Veil
falling straight down from the upper rim, the distant town, looking
always like a dull gem in a dark setting, and a thrill shot to his
heart.
Yes, if he lived to do his work in the hidden Valley--if he was shot
this night on his own doorstep, it was his country.
He who was alien in every way, was yet native.
Something in the depths of him came down as from far distant racial
haunts and was at home.
So he rode slowly up among the scattered oaks with his hands folded on
the mutilated pommel, and he knew that his lines were definitely
cast.
* * * * *
Tharon Last rode into the Holding and dismounted in unwonted silence.
There was a frown between her brows, an unusual thing. She turned the
stallion into his corral, dragged off the big saddle to hang it on its
peg, flung the studded bridle on a post.
The men were not in yet. Far toward the north beyond the big corrals
she could see the cattle grazing toward home. A surge of savage joy in
her possessions flooded over her. These things were her own. They were
what Jim Last had worked for all his life.
Not one hoof or hide should Courtrey take without swift reprisal.
Not one inch should he push her from her avowed purpose--not though
all the strangers in the world came to Lost Valley and prated of
blood-guilt.
But for some vague reason which she could not have analyzed had she
wished, she went to the paled-in garden where the silver waters
trickled and searched among the few flowers growing there for some
blossom, sweeter, tenderer, more mild and timid than usual for the
pale hands of the Virgin in the deep south room.
With the posy in her fingers she slipped quietly to her sanctuary and
knelt before the statue, pensive, frowning, vaguely stirred. She
whispered the prayers that Anita had taught her, but she found with a
start that the words were meaningless, that she was saying them
mechanically.
Her mind had been at the Silver Hollow, seeing again the forest man's
dark eyes, so grave, so quiet, so deep--her right hand was conscious
as it had never been in all her life before. She heard a strange man's
condemning voice, felt the warmth of his hands pressed upon hers.
The mistress of Last's shook herself, both mentally and physically,
and set herself to resay her prayers.
When she came out to the life and bustle of the ranch house the cattle
were streaming into the far corrals under their dust, the riders were
shouting, young Paula sang in the kitchen, and Anita passed back and
forth about the evening meal.
* * * * *
There was a slim moon in the west above the Canon Country. The skies
were softly alight, high and vaulted, deep and mysterious and sweet.
World-silence, profound as eternity, hung tangibly above Lost Valley
and the Wall, the eastern ramparts of the shelving mountains, the
rocklands at the north. There was little sound in all this sleeping
wilderness.
Bird life was rare. The waters that fell at seasons from the open
mouths of the canyons half way up the Rockface were dried. Down in the
Valley itself there could be seen the lights of Corvan which never
went out from dusk to dawn. Far to the north a black blot might have
been visible with a fuller moon--Courtrey's herds bedded on the range,
the only stock in the Valley so privileged.
Along the foot of the Rockface in the early evening a tiny procession
had crawled, three burros, their pack-saddles empty save for a couple
of sacks tied across each, and a weazened form that followed them--Old
Pete, the snow-packer, bound on his nightly journey to the Canon
Country for the bags of snow for the cooling of the Golden Cloud's
refreshments.
He was a little old man, grotesque and misshapen, yet he followed
briskly after the burros, which were the fastest travelers of their
kind in the land. He rolled on his bandy legs and kept the little
animals on a constant trot with the wisp of stick he carried and the
deep, harsh cries that heralded his coming for a mile ahead and sent
the echoes reverberating between the canyon walls. A little north of
Corvan he had followed the Rockface close for a distance, then
suddenly turned back on his tracks and disappeared, burros and all.
This was the invisible entrance to the Canon Country, a narrow mouth
that opened sidewise into the very breast of the thousand-foot Wall
and led back along a thin sheet of rock that stood between the gorge
and the Valley. The floor of this cut or canyon, which was so narrow
that the laden burros had a "narrow squeak" to pass, as Pete said,
lifted sharply. It rose smoothly underfoot in the pitch darkness, for
the cut was roofed in the living rock five hundred feet above, and
climbed for a mile. It was a dead, flat place, without sound, for the
footsteps of the burros and the man fell dully on the soft and sliding
floor, and it seemed to have no acoustic properties.
At the end of the mile this snake-like split in the solid rock came
suddenly out into a broader, more steeply pitched canyon whose walls
went straight up to the open skies above. Here there were heaps and
piles and long slides of dead stone, weathered and powdered, that had
fallen from time to time from the parent walls. This in turn led up
and on to other breaks and splits and cuts, all open, all lifting to
the upper world, and all as blind and dangerous to follow as any
deathtrap that old Dame Nature ever devised. Here, at any crosscut,
any debouching canyon, a man might turn to his undoing, might travel on
and up and never reach those beckoning heights, seen clearly from some
blind pocket he had wandered into, might never find his way back to
the original canyon among the continuous cuts that met and crossed and
passed each other among the towering points and sheets.
But Old Pete knew where he was going. Not for nothing had he threaded
these passages for fifteen years. He knew the Canon Country for the
lower part better than any man in the Valley, if Courtrey be
excepted.
So this night he climbed and shouted to his burros and thought no more
of the sounding splits, for here the echoes raved, than he would have
thought of the open plains below.
He passed on and up to where a certain cut lay full, year after year,
of packed and hardened snow. For fifteen years Old Pete had visited
this cut, a deeper drop into the nether world of rock, and cut his
supplies from its surface. Every season he took what he needed,
leaving a widening circle at the edge from which he worked, where the
cut he traveled passed the mouth of the pent canyon, and every year the
snows, sifting from high above, leveled it again. There was no known
outlet for this glacier-like pack, no sliding chance, yet it was
always on a certain level--each summer seeming to lose just what it
gained in winter. It lay level at the mouth of the passing cut, was
never filled higher.
Starting at dusk from Corvan, Pete reached his destination around two
o'clock, filled his sacks, tied them on his mules and started down,
coming out of the Rockface in time to meet the dawn that quivered on
the eastern ramparts.
But this night Old Pete, sturdy, fearless, unarmed, was not to see the
accustomed pageant of the rising sun, the fleeing veils of shadows
shifting on the Valley floor that he had watched with silent joy for
all these years.
This night he was well down along his backward way, shouting in the
darkness, for the slim moon had dropped down behind the lofty peaks
above, when all the echoes in the world, it seemed, let loose in the
canyons and all the weight of the universe itself came pressing hard
upon his dauntless heart with the crack of a gun.
"Th' price!" whispered Old Pete as he fell sprawling on his face, "fer
pure flesh!" With which cryptic word he bade farewell to the sounding
passes, the tenets of manhood as he conceived them, the valour, and
the grumbling at life in general.
The little burros, placid and faithful, went on and saw the pageant of
the dawn from the hidden gateway in the Wall, crept down the Rockface,
single file, and at their accustomed hour stood at their accustomed
place before the Golden Cloud.
It was Wan Lee, Old Pete's _bete noir_, who found them there and ran
shouting through the crowd of belated players in the saloon's big
room, his pig-tail flying, his almond eyes popping, to upset a table
and batter on his master's door and scream that the "bullos" were
here, "allesame lone," and that there was blood all spattered on the
hind one's rump!