hands--or did he fear something worse, infinitely
worse--to see Courtrey, famous gun man, beat her to it!

He shuddered and sweat in the clear cold of the starlit night and
searched his bewildered heart. He could find no answer save and except
the weary one that Tharon Last must be holden from her sworn course.

Tharon Last who looked at him with those deep blue eyes and spoke so
coolly of this promised killing! He recalled the earnest frown between
her brows, the simple directness of her duty as she saw it and told it
to him.

Either way--either way--she was lost to him forever--There he caught
himself and started all over again.

What was she to him?

What could she ever be? She with her strange soul, _her lack of
soul_!

What did he want her to be? One moment he ached with her loveliness--the
next he shuddered at her savagery.

He did not want her to be anything! Why not go out to the dim and
half-remembered world that he had left, the world of lights, padded
floors and marble steps, leave this impossible land with its blood and
wrongs? Nay, he could not leave Lost Valley. He was as much a part of
it as the grim Rockface itself, the Vestal's Veil eternally shimmering
in its thousand feet of beauty. Life or death, for Kenset, it must be
here.

So he waited and listened and watched the stars wheeling in
everlasting majesty, and he found his hands falling now and again upon
the gun-butts at his sides!

Near dawn Banner awoke, refreshed and stronger, and made him lie down
for a few hours' sleep.

When he awoke the sun was well up along the heavens and Banner was
offering him a piece of dry bread and some jerky, spiced and smoked
and as dry and sweet as anything he had ever eaten in all his life.

"They're comin'," said the man, "thar's five comin' from down along
th' Wall at th' south--that'll be Jameson, Hill and Thomas, an' some
others--an' I see about ten or twelve, near's I can make out, driftin'
in from up toward th' Pomo settlement. Thar's a dust cloud movin' up
from th' Bottle Neck, too. They'll be here by one o'clock at th'
furdest."

And they were, a grim, silent group of men, determined, watchful, bent
on the second step of the program to which they had pledged themselves
that night at Last's Holding. Tharon was there, too, and with her Bent
Smith on Golden.

It was a goodly number who left their horses in charge of Hill and
Dixon at the blind mouth and entered the long black cut. They climbed