iven, hot and tired, into John
Dement's corrals, the ten white steers were bedded by Black's Spring
over toward the Wall. They had farther to go and would not reach
Dixon's until the morning.

And with each band there was a group of determined men.

* * * * *

Word of this exploit ran all over the Valley in a matter of hours. To
each faction it had a deep significance.

But speech concerning it was sparse as it had ever been anent the
doings of Courtrey. A man's tongue was a prisoner to his common sense
those days.

To Tharon Last, busy at her tasks about the Holding, it was a vital
matter. She felt a strong surge, an uplift within her. She had begun
the task she had set herself and solemn joy pervaded her being.

But of all those whom it affected there was none to whom it meant what
it did to Courtrey himself. In him it set loose something which burned
in him like a consuming fire. Where he had thought of Tharon Last
before with a certain intent, now he thought of her in a sort of
madness. He was a king himself, in a manner, an eagle, a prowler of
great spaces, a rule-or-ruin force. Down there on the sloping floor of
the Cup Rim had been a fit mate for him in the slim girl who had
shaken her fist back at him in strong defiance.

He felt his blood leap hot at the thought of her. She was built of
fighting stuff. No pale willy-nilly, like some he knew who wept whole
fountains daily. No--neither was she like Lola of the Golden Cloud,
past-master of men because she had belonged to many.

Courtrey, who had run life's gamut himself, thought of Tharon Last's
straight young purity with growing desire.

It began to obsess him with a mania. His temper, bad at all times,
became worse. Ellen, the veriest slave through her devotion to him,
found her life at the Stronghold almost unbearable.

She was a white woman, like a lily, with transparent flesh where the
blue veins showed. Her pale blue eyes, like the painted eyes of a
china doll, were red with constant tears under their corn-silk lashes.
The pale gold hair on her temples was often damp with the sweat that
comes with agony of soul.

"It jes' seems I can't live another minute, Cleve," she would tell her
brother who lived at the Stronghold, "seems like I don't want to. Th'
very sunlight looks sad t' me, an' I hate th' tree-toads that are
singin' eternal down in th' runnel."

This brother, her only relative, would stir uneas