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Read Ebook: Tharon of Lost Valley by Roe Vingie E Vingie Eve Johnson Frank Tenney Illustrator
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Ebook has 1623 lines and 57349 words, and 33 pages
This horse was no denizen of Lost Valley. It was an utter alien. Its colour was a dingy black, as if it had recently been through fire, its coat rough and unkempt. Its long head was heavy and slug-like, its nose of the type known among horsemen as Roman. It was roughly built, raw-boned and angular, and of so stupendous a size that the man atop, who was six foot tall himself, seemed small by comparison.
However, for all its ugliness, it possessed a seeming of vast power, a suggestion of great strength.
The stranger looked the group over with his keen, hard eyes, and spoke in a slow drawl.
"I reckon," he said, "I'm a-ridin' th' wrong trail. I hain't expected hyar."
And turning abruptly, without another word, he jogged away around the house and started down the long slope already greying with the coming night.
The foreman and the five punchers clamped over to the corner of the kitchen and watched him in speculative silence. Tharon came along and stood by Billy, her hand on the boy's arm. To Billy that sober touch confused the distances, set the strange rider dancing on the slope.
"H'm," said Conford, his grey eyes narrow, "come from far an's goin' somewheres. I'll watch that duck. He looks like he's a record man to me."
At supper there was much speculation about the stranger.
"I'll lay a month's pay he come from Texas," said Billy, casting a side glance at his pal Curly, "them long lankys usually do. An' somehow it shows in their eyes, sort o' fierce an'--"
Billy was a bit abashed, but he stubbornly supported his contention that the stranger was a bad-man from Texas.
"Plenty bad-men right here in Lost Valley," said the girl quietly, "an' th' breed ain't dyin' out as I can see. Th' settlers need a new leader--now that Jim Last's gone." And she fell to playing absently with her fork upon the cloth.
The boys changed the subject hurriedly.
"I found a dead brandin' fire in th' Cup Rim yesterday, Burt," said Masters, "quite a scrabbled space around it. Looked like some one'd branded several calves."
"Don't doubt it," said the foreman. "Careful as we are there's always likely to be stragglers. An' to be a straggler's to be a goner in this man's land."
"Unless he belongs t' Last's," said the irrepressible Billy. "I'll lay that fer every calf branded by Courtrey's gang we'll get back two."
"You bet your boots an' spurs throwed in, we won't," said the boy fervently.
As they rose from the table with all the racket of out-door men there came once more the sound of a horse's hoofs on the hard earth outside.
Last's Holding was a vast sounding-board. No one on horseback could come near without advertising his arrival far ahead.
This time it was no stranger. Tharon went to the western door to bid him 'light.
It was John Dement from down at the Rolling Cove. He was a thin, worn man, who looked ten years beyond his forty, his face wrinkled by the constant fret and worry of the constant loser.
Tonight he was strung up like a wire. His voice shook when he returned the hearty greetings that met him.
"Boys," he said abruptly, "an' Tharon--I come t' tell ye all good-bye."
"Good-bye! John, what you mean?"
Tharon went forward and put a hand on his arm. Her blue eyes searched his face.
The man stood by his horse and struck a tragic fist in a hard palm.
"That's it. I give up. I'm done. I'm goin' down the wall come day--me an' my woman an' th' two boys. Got our duffle ready packed, an' Lord knows, it ain't enough t' heft th' horses. After five year!"
There was the sound of the hopeless tears of masculine failure in the man's tragic voice. His fingers twisted his flabby hat.
"Hold up," said Conford, pushing nearer, "straighten out a bit, Dement. Now, tell us what's up."
"Th' last head--th' last hoof--run off last night as we was comin' in with 'em a leetle mite late. Had ben up Black Coulee way, an' it got dark on us. Just as we got abreast o' th' mouth of th' Coulee, where th' poplars grow, three men come a-boilin' out. They was on fast horses--o' course--an' right into th' bunch they went, hell-bent. Stampeded the hull lot. You know my bunch'd got down t' about a hundred head--don't know what I ben a-hangin' on fer, only a man hates t' give up an' own hisself beat out. An' my woman--she's a fighter.
"She kep' standin' at my back like, oh, like--well, she kep' a-sayin' 'We'll win out yet, John, you see. Right'll win ev'ry time.' You see we are just ready to get th' patent on our land. She couldn't give that up, seems like. All this time gone an' nothin' gained. So we ben a-hangin' on when things went from bad to worse. Th' herd's been a-goin' down an' down. Calves with their tongues slit so's they'd lose their mothers--fed up in some coulee by hand an' branded. Knowed 'em by my own colour cattle, w'ich I drove in here five year ago--th' yellers.
There was the bitterness of utter defeat and hatred in the shaking voice. The tree-toads, beginning their nightly chorus from the wet places below the cottonwoods, emphasized the dreariness of the recital, the ancient hopelessness of the weak beneath the heel of the oppressor.
Dement ceased speaking and stood in silhouette against the last yellow-and-black of the dead sunset. The protruding apple in his hawk-like throat worked up and down grotesquely.
For a long moment there was utter silence.
Then he began again.
"I knowed I wasn't welcome in th' Valley when I hadn't ben here more'n six months. Th' first leetle string o' fence I put up fer corrals went down, mysterious, as fast as I could fix it. Th' woman's garden was broke open an' trampled to dust by cattle, drove in. Winter ketched us with mighty leetle t' eat in th' way o' truck. Next year she guarded it herself some nights, sleepin' by day, an' oncet she took a shot at some one that come prowlin' around. They let her fence alone after that, but what'd they do outside? Killed all th' hogs we had one night an' piled 'em in a heap in th' front door yard! That was hint enough, but I kep' a-thinkin' that ef we behaved decent like, an' minded our own business we sartainly must win out. We did," he added grimly after a little pause, "like hell. An' how many others of th' settlers has gone through th' like? We ain't no tin gods ourselves, I own, but we got t' fight fire with fire. Only I ain't got no more light-wood," he finished quaintly, "I got to quit."
There was another silence while the tree-toads sang. Then the man held out his hand, hardened and warped with the unceasing toil of those tragic years.
"Good-bye, Tharon," he said, "I wisht Jim Last was here. With him gone Lost Valley's in Courtrey's hand an' no mistake. He was th' only man dared face him an' hold his own. Last's was th' only head th' weaker faction had, its master their only leader. While he lived we had some show, us leetle fellers. Now there ain't no leader. Th' ranchers'll go out fast now. It'll be a one-man valley."
In the soft darkness Tharon took the extended hand, held it a moment and laid her other one upon it.
"John Dement," she quietly said, "I want you to go home an' bar your house for fight. Fix up your fences, unpack your duffle. In the morning my riders will drive down to your place a hundred head o' cattle. You put your brand on em. There's goin' to be no one-man doin's in Lost Valley yet awhile--not while Jim Last's daughter lives. See," she dropped his hand and pointed to the east where the tall pine lifted to the stars, "out yonder there's a cross at Jim Last's grave--an' there's my mark on it. Th' settlers have a leader still--an' I name myself that leader. I'm set against Courtrey, now an' forever. I mean to fight him t' th' last inch o' ground in Lost Valley, th' last word o' law, th' last drop o' blood, both his an' mine. You go down among 'em--th' settlers--an' take 'em that word from me. Tell 'em Jim Last's daughter stands facin' Courtrey, an' she'll need at her back t' fight him every man in Lost Valley that ain't a coward."
When the settler had gone, incoherent and half-incredulous, Conford drew a long breath and looked at his mistress in the dusk.
"Tharon, dear," he said so gently that his words were like a caress "you're jest a-breakin' your riders' hearts. You're heapin' anxiety on us mountain-high. Now what on earth'll we do?"
Young Billy Brent pushed near and slapped a hand against a doubled fist. His eyes were sparkling like harbour lights, his voice was like the sound of running fire.
"Do?" he cried. "Do? We'll stand behind her so tight they can't see daylight through, an' we'll fight with an' for her every inch o' that way, every word o' that law, every drop o' that blood! Who says Last's ain't on th' map in Lost Valley?" Tharon smiled and touched him again.
"Billy," she said softly, "you're after my own heart. Now get to bed. I want t' think."
THE MAN IN UNIFORM
Spring was warming swiftly into summer. Where the gently sloping ranges went up in waves and swells toward the uplands at the east, the bright new green had turned to a darker shade. The tiny purple and white flowers had disappeared to give place to sturdier ones of crimson and gold. The veil of water that fell sharply down the face of the Wall for a thousand feet at the Valley's southern end had thinned to sheerest gauze. In the Ca?on Country the snow had disappeared from most of the high points. Red, black, yellow, the great face of the encircling Wall stood in everlasting majesty, looking down upon the level cup of Lost Valley. The unspeakable upheaval of peaks and crags, of ca?ons and splits and unfathomable depths, was almost a sealed book to the denizens of the Valley. There were those who knew False Ridge.
There were those who said they knew more. Many a man had adventured therein, and few had returned to tell of their adventures. Ca?on Jim had not returned. Not that he was a loss to the community, or that they mourned him, but his absence pointed again to the formidable secretive power of the Ca?on Country.
Tharon Last, standing in her western door, could look across the Valley's deceptive miles and see the huge black seams and fissures that rent the grim face. These splits and ca?ons were peculiar in that none came down to the Valley's floor, their yawning doorways being, in every instance, set from two hundred to five hundred feet up the Wall.
Often the girl watched them in the changing lights and her active mind formed many a conjecture concerning them.
"Some day," she told young Paula, "I'll go into the Ca?on Country and see it for myself."
"Saints forbid, Se?orita!" said Paula, who had no love for the mysterious, and who was more Mexic than Porno, "there are demons and devils there!"
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