"Saints forbid!" cried Paula instantly. "Then keep your sighs for Jose an' mind your manners. Pick up that bundle." Swiftly and obediently the girl did as she was told, unrolling the wrapper from the package. She brought to light the meal-sack which Tharon had dropped that day on Baston's porch. A slow flush stained Tharon's cheeks at the sight, and she went abruptly into the house. When the riders came in at night she told them in detail about the whole affair, for Last's and its men were one, their interests the same. They held counsel around the long table in the dining room under the hanging lamp, and Conford at her right was spokesman for the rest. "He's somethin' official, all right, I make no doubt, Tharon," he said when he had listened attentively, "but what or who I don't know. I heard from Dixon about him comin' into Corvan that day, an' that he had rode far. No one knows his business, or what he's in Lost Valley for. He's some mysterious." "He's goin' to stay, so he told me," went on the girl, "goin' to build a house up where the pines begin an' means to ride. But how'll he live? What an' who will he ride for? He said for Government." "What's he mean by that?" "Search me." "Wasn't there nothin' about him different? Nothin' you could judge him by?" asked Billy. "Yes, there was. He wore somethin' on his breast, a sign, a dull-like thing with words an' letters on it." "So?" said Conford quickly, "what was it like, Tharon? Can't you describe it?" "Can with a pencil," said Tharon, rising. "Come on in." She went swiftly to the big desk in the other room and rummaged among its drawers for paper and pencil. These things were precious in Lost Valley. Jim Last had had great stacks of paper, neat, glazed sheets with faint lines upon them, made somewhere in that mysterious "below" and brought in by pack train. It was on one of these, with the distinctive words "Last's Holding" printed at the top, that the thirty men had signed themselves into the new law of the Valley. To Tharon these sheets had always been magic, invested with grave dignity. Anything done upon them was of import, irrevocable. Thus had Jim Last inscribed the semi-yearly letters that went down the Wall with the cattle, or for supplies. Now she spread a shining pad under the light, sat down in her father's chair and began, carefully and minutely to reproduce the badge that meant authority of a sort, yet was not a sheriff's star. The riders, clustered at her shoulder, watched the thing take shape and form. At the end of twenty painstaking minutes Tharon straightened and looked up in the interested faces. "There," she said, "an' its dull copper colour!" And this was the shield with its unknown heraldry which Conford took up and studied carefully for a long time.