t his table made a great deal out of the ceremony
of swearing in the witnesses--Wylackie Bob, Black Bart, Arizona and
one young Wylackie Indian woman who worked at the Stronghold. Cleve
put up only the serving women whom he had sent in, some seven of them,
every one of whom loved their mistress with the faithful fidelity of a
dog. These women knew Ellen Courtrey as not even the master of the
Stronghold himself knew her. They knew her in her idle hours, at her
small tasks, at her bedside, in the loving solicitude she displayed
for all of them--and they knew her on her knees in prayer, for Ellen
had a strange and simple religion, half Catholic and half Pomo
paganism.

In the straight-backed chair they gave her Ellen sat like a statue,
sweet and still, a thing so obviously good that it seemed even
Courtrey himself must weaken to behold her. But not Courtrey. He was
on fire with the vision of Tharon Last on the Cup Rim's floor, shaking
her fist toward him in challenge--at Baston's steps calling him a
murderer and worse--at her western door, striking him from her with
the strength of a man. He saw the signal fire flaring across the
darkened Valley--and nothing on earth or in Heaven could have softened
him to the woman who bound him away from this fighting girl, this gun
woman whom he was breaking to him slowly but surely. He visioned her
in Ellen's room at the Stronghold--and the breath came fast in his
throat.

And Ellen?

Ah, Ellen was thinking of the long past day when this man had found
her in the barren rocklands and taken her with the high hand of a
lover. She, too, drifted away from the chilling courtroom with its
judge and its petty officials.... And then all suddenly she knew that
men were talking--and about her. She heard the drone of question and
answer--the rambling statements of the stranger, Arizona, accusing her
of strange things--of asking him to take her on rides in Courtrey's
absence--of swinging with him nights in the hammock by the watering
trough!

She sat and listened with parted lips and large innocent eyes fixed on
the man in wonder. Cleve Whitmore clenched his hands until the nails
cut deep, but he held his tongue and controlled his face. Only the
blazing blue eyes spoke. She knew that Black Bart tried to tell
something, that he made some mistake or other and had to begin all
over again. There was a long and tedious time in here when she looked
away out the window to where the prairie grass was