rrulous with age, mumbled in the
twilight when the rose and the lavendar lights swept down the eastern
ramparts and across the rolling range lands, and the girl gleaned
scattered pictures of a gentle and lovely creature who had come with
her father out of a mystic country somewhere "below."

"Below" meant down the river and beyond, an unnamable region.

In the big living room there was one relic of this mysterious mother,
a tiny melodeon, its rosewood case a trifle marred by unknown
hardships, its ivory keys yellow with age. It had two small pedals and
two slender sticks which fitted therein and pushed the bellows up and
down when one trampled upon them. And to Tharon this little old
instrument was wealth of the Indies. The low piping of its reedy notes
made an accompaniment of surpassing sweetness when she sat before it
and sang her wordless melodies. And just as she found music in her
throat without conscious effort, so she found it in her fingers, deep,
resonant chords for her running minors, thin, trickling streams of
lightness for her own slow notes.

The sun had turned to the west in its majestic course and Tharon, the
noon work over, drew up the spindle-legged stool and sat down to play
to herself and Anita. The old woman, half Mexic, half Indian, drowsed
in a low chair by the eastern window, her toil-hard hands clasped in
her lap, a black _reboso_ over her head, though the day was warm as
summer. A kitten frisked in the sunlight at the open door, wild ducks,
long domesticated, squalled raucously down the yards, some cattle
slept in the huge corrals and the little world of Last's Holding was
at peace. It seemed that only the girl idling over the yellowed keys,
was awake.

For a long and happy hour Tharon sat so, sometimes opening her pretty
throat in ambitious flights of sound, again humming lowly--and that
was enchanting, as if one sang lullabies to flaxen heads on
shoulders.

And it did enchant one--a man who stood for the better part of that
hour at the edge of the deep window in the adobe wall and watched the
singer.

He was a splendid figure of a man, tall, broad, muscular, built for
strength and endurance. His face was unduly lined, even for his age,
which was near fifty, but the eyes under the arched black brows were
vital as a hawk's. He wore the customary garments of the Lost Valley
men, broad sombrero, flannel shirt, corduroys and cowboy boots,
stitched and decorated above their high heels. At h