g 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 cop