haron Last came
out in broad day and took back their own from Courtrey's herds, there
was one at the Stronghold who laughed quietly to himself in sympathy
with the defy.

"Good enough," he told the wide sky and the silence as he rode herd
under the beetling rocklands, "hope t' God some one gits him good an'
plenty."

But Courtrey was hard to get. His aides and lieutenants were picked
men. He was like a king in his domain.

But if strife and ferment seethed under the calm surface in Lost
Valley, its surges died before they reached the rolling slopes where
the forests came down to the eastern plains. Up among the pines and
oaks, the ridges and the age-worn, tumbled rocks David Kenset had
found his ideal spot, his glade where the pines stood guard and a
talking stream ran down. High on the wooded slopes he had set his
mark, begun that home of which he had told Tharon. From Corvan he had
hired three men, a teamster by the name of Drake and his two sons, and
together they had felled and dressed trees enough for a cabin, laid
them up with clay brought five miles on mule-back, roofed the
structure with shakes made on the spot with a froe, and the result was
pleasing, indeed, to this man straight from the far eastern cities.

The cabin faced southwest, set at an angle to command the circled
glade, the dropping slopes, the distant range lands, the wooded line
of the Broken Bend, and farther off the levels and slants of the
gently undulating Valley, with the mighty Rockface of the Wall rising
like a mystery beyond. Kenset cut all trees at the west and south of
the glade, thus forming a splendid doorway into his retreat, through
which all this shone in, like those wonderful etched landscapes one
sometimes sees in tiny toys that fit the narrowed eye.

Before the cabin was finished, Starret, who ran the regular
pack-train, brought in a string of trunks and boxes which caused much
curious comment in Corvan. These came up, after much delay, to be
dumped in the door yard of the house in the glade, and Kenset felt as
if the gateway to the outside world might close and he care very
little.

Here was the wilderness, in all verity, here was work, that greatest
of boons, here were health and plenty and the hazard of outlawry, that
he was beginning to dimly sense under the calmly flowing currents of
Lost Valley.

And here was Romance, as witness the slim girl who had backed out from
a group of men that first day of his coming--back