lapped a hand against a doubled
fist. His eyes were sparkling like harbour lights, his voice was like
the sound of running fire.

"Do?" he cried. "Do? We'll stand behind her so tight they can't see
daylight through, an' we'll fight with an' for her every inch o' that
way, every word o' that law, every drop o' that blood! Who says
Last's ain't on th' map in Lost Valley?" Tharon smiled and touched him
again.

"Billy," she said softly, "you're after my own heart. Now get to bed.
I want t' think."

CHAPTER III

THE MAN IN UNIFORM

Spring was warming swiftly into summer. Where the gently sloping
ranges went up in waves and swells toward the uplands at the east, the
bright new green had turned to a darker shade. The tiny purple and
white flowers had disappeared to give place to sturdier ones of
crimson and gold. The veil of water that fell sharply down the face of
the Wall for a thousand feet at the Valley's southern end had thinned
to sheerest gauze. In the Canon Country the snow had disappeared from
most of the high points. Red, black, yellow, the great face of the
encircling Wall stood in everlasting majesty, looking down upon the
level cup of Lost Valley. The unspeakable upheaval of peaks and crags,
of canyons and splits and unfathomable depths, was almost a sealed book
to the denizens of the Valley. There were those who knew False Ridge.

There were those who said they knew more. Many a man had adventured
therein, and few had returned to tell of their adventures. Canon Jim
had not returned. Not that he was a loss to the community, or that
they mourned him, but his absence pointed again to the formidable
secretive power of the Canon Country.

Tharon Last, standing in her western door, could look across the
Valley's deceptive miles and see the huge black seams and fissures
that rent the grim face. These splits and canyons were peculiar in that
none came down to the Valley's floor, their yawning doorways being, in
every instance, set from two hundred to five hundred feet up the
Wall.

Often the girl watched them in the changing lights and her active mind
formed many a conjecture concerning them.

"Some day," she told young Paula, "I'll go into the Canon Country and
see it for myself."

"Saints forbid, Senorita!" said Paula, who had no love for the
mysterious, and who was more Mexic than Porno, "there are demons and
devils there!"

"Yes, I doubt not, Paula," said Tharon grimly. "They say Courtrey
kno