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 knows th' Canons, an' when he's there, it's peopled, an' no mistake! "But it must be beautiful--beautiful! Why--there's a thousand feet of crevasse on every hand, I know, steps an' benches an' weathered faces that no man can climb. They say there's bright waters that tumble down like th' Vestal's Veil and sink into holes without an outlet. Just go away in the rock. There's strange flowers an' stunted trees. An' they tell of th' Cup of God, a hidden glade so beautiful that th' eye of man has never seen its like. All my life it's called me, th' Canon Country. "Don't you believe, Paula, that there's somethin' there for me? Some reason why I know I must some day go into its heart an' give myself up to it for a time? If I was free," she finished with a sigh, "if I was my own woman, wholly, I'd go soon. There's rest an' peace up there, I know--and a place to think of Jim Last without such bitterness that my heart turns t' gall." She shook her bright head against the doorpost and shut her soft lips into a straight line. "Nope," she finished sadly, "I ain't my own woman yet."