ummaged among
its drawers for paper and pencil. These things were precious in Lost
Valley.

Jim Last had had great stacks of paper, neat, glazed sheets with faint
lines upon them, made somewhere in that mysterious "below" and brought
in by pack train. It was on one of these, with the distinctive words
"Last's Holding" printed at the top, that the thirty men had signed
themselves into the new law of the Valley.

To Tharon these sheets had always been magic, invested with grave
dignity.

Anything done upon them was of import, irrevocable.

Thus had Jim Last inscribed the semi-yearly letters that went down the
Wall with the cattle, or for supplies.

Now she spread a shining pad under the light, sat down in her father's
chair and began, carefully and minutely to reproduce the badge that
meant authority of a sort, yet was not a sheriff's star.

The riders, clustered at her shoulder, watched the thing take shape
and form. At the end of twenty painstaking minutes Tharon straightened
and looked up in the interested faces.

"There," she said, "an' its dull copper colour!"

And this was the shield with its unknown heraldry which Conford took
up and studied carefully for a long time.

"'Forest Service,'" he read aloud, "'Department of Agriculture.' Well,
so far as I can see, it ain't so terrifyin'. That last means raisin'
things, like beets an' turnips an' so on, an' as for th' forest part,
why, if he stays up in his 'fringe o' pines' I guess we ain't got no
call to kick. Don't you worry, Tharon, about this new bird."

"I'm a darned sight more worried about that other one, th' Arizona
beauty which Courtrey's got in."

"Forget th' gun man, Burt," said Billy, "this feller's a heap more
interestin' to me, for I've got a hunch he's a poet. Now who on this
footstool but a poet would come ridin' into Lost Valley with his badge
o' beets an' his line o' talk about 'fringes o' pines' an' 'runnin'
streams,' to quote Tharon?"

"Even poets are human, you young limb," drawled Curly in his soft
voice, "an' I'm sorry for him if he starts your 'interest,' so to
speak. He'll need all his poetic vision t' survive."

"I hope, Billy," said Tharon severely, and with lofty inconsistency,
"that you'll remember your manners an' not start anything. Last's is
in for trouble enough without any side issues."

"True," said the boy instantly, "I'll promise to leave th' poet
alone."

Then the talk fell about the new well that had taken the p