Old Ben Garland on the judge's bench, was furtive, scared, nervous, fiddling with his papers and clearing his throat from time to time. The county clerk at 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!