For the next few days following the short, awkward visit of the stranger Tharon felt a prickle of uneasiness under her skin at every thought of it. There was something in the memory that confused and distressed her, a feeling of failure, of a lack in her that put her in a bad light to herself. She knew that, instinctively, she had been protecting her own, that since Last's had stepped out in the light against Courtrey she must take no chance. But should she have taken back the common courtesy of the offered meal? Would it not have been better to let him stay and meet Conford who would have been in at noon? She vexed herself a while with these questions, and then dismissed them with her cool good sense. "It's done," she told herself, "an' can't be helped. An' yet, there was somethin' about him, somethin' that made me think of Jim Last himself--somethin' in his quiet eyes--as if they had both come from somewhere outside Lost Valley where they grow different men. It was a--bigness, a softness. I don't know." And with that last wistful thought she forgot all about the incident and the man, for the prediction of Jameson that dusk at the head of Rolling Cove became reality. Dixon, who lived north along the Wall near the Pomo settlement, lost ten head of steers, all white and deeply earmarked, unmistakable cattle that could not be disguised. Courtrey was resenting the vague something in the air that was crystallizing into resistance about him. Word of the stealing ran about the Valley like a grass fire, more boldly than usual. It came to Last's in eighteen hours, brought by a horseman who had carried it to many a lonely homestead. Tharon received it with a thrill of joy. "Good enough," she said, "no use wasting time." And she sent out a call for the thirty men. CHAPTER V THE WORKING OF THE LAW It was a clear, bright morning in early summer. All up and down Lost Valley the little winds wimpled the grass where the cattle grazed, and brought the scent of flowers. In the thin, clear atmosphere points and landmarks stood out with wonderful boldness. The homesteads set in the endless green like tiny gems, the stupendous face of the Wall, stretching from north to south and sheer as a plumb line for a thousand feet, was fretted with a myriad of tiny seams and crevasses not ordinarily visible. Far up at the Valley's head against the huge uplift of the jumbled and barren rocklands the scattered squat buildings of the Stronghold brooded like a monster.