Tharon of Lost Valley Part 10

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 hards.h.i.+p 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 m.u.f.fled 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 hards.h.i.+ps. 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 doc.u.ment. 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 gra.s.s and rushes, thick mats on the floor made in like manner and of a tough, long-fibred gra.s.s 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, wors.h.i.+pped 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 superst.i.tious 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 h.e.l.l, 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.