wind. Strange flowers nodded on tall stems in glade and opening,
peeped from the flat earth by stone and moss-bed. Few birds were here,
though squirrels were plentiful.

Sometimes he saw a horseman sitting on some slant watching him
intently. These invariably rode rapidly away on being discovered, not
troubling to return his salute of a hand waved high above him.

"Funny tribe," he told himself, half puzzled, half irritated, "their
manners seem to be peculiarly their own. As witness the offered meal
so calmly 'taken back' by the young highway-woman of Last's
Holding."

That had rankled. Sane as Kenset was, as cool and self-contained, he
could not repress a cold prickle of resentment at that memory.

He had gone to the Holding in such good faith, actuated by a lively
desire to see Tharon again after that one amazing meeting at Baston's
steps, and he had been so readily received at first, so coolly turned
out at last. But he had not forgotten the look in the girl's blue
eyes, nor the disarming smile which had seemed to make it reasonable.

She merely did not hold with law, and wanted him to have no false
impressions. This incident furnished him with more food for thought
than he was aware of in those first long days when he rode the silent
forest.

What was Tharon Last, anyway? What did she mean by those words of hers
about his law and hers? That they were not the same sort of law--that
he and she would not agree?

They could not be friends, she had said.

Well, Kenset was not so sure of that. There was something about this
girl of the guns that sent a thrill tingling in his blood already,
made him recall each expression of her speaking face, each line of her
lean young figure.

He did not go near Last's again, though his business took him far and
by in the Valley, for the big maps, hung on a rack beyond his
fireplace, covered full half the ranges thereof and stretched away
into the mysterious and illimitable forests that went up and away into
the eastern mountains.

It was as if some fateful Power at Washington had set down a careless
finger on a map of the U.\S.\A., and said to Kenset, "Here is your
country," without knowledge or interest. Sometimes he wondered if
there was another forest in the land as utterly lost as this, as
little known.

But with this wonder came a thrill. He had read romances of the great
West in his youth and felt a vague regret that he had not lived in the
rollicking days of '49.