But of all those whom it affected there was none to whom it meant what it did to Courtrey himself. In him it set loose something which burned in him like a consuming fire. Where he had thought of Tharon Last before with a certain intent, now he thought of her in a sort of madness. He was a king himself, in a manner, an eagle, a prowler of great spaces, a rule-or-ruin force. Down there on the sloping floor of the Cup Rim had been a fit mate for him in the slim girl who had shaken her fist back at him in strong defiance. He felt his blood leap hot at the thought of her. She was built of fighting stuff. No pale willy-nilly, like some he knew who wept whole fountains daily. No--neither was she like Lola of the Golden Cloud, past-master of men because she had belonged to many. Courtrey, who had run life's gamut himself, thought of Tharon Last's straight young purity with growing desire. It began to obsess him with a mania. His temper, bad at all times, became worse. Ellen, the veriest slave through her devotion to him, found her life at the Stronghold almost unbearable. She was a white woman, like a lily, with transparent flesh where the blue veins showed. Her pale blue eyes, like the painted eyes of a china doll, were red with constant tears under their corn-silk lashes. The pale gold hair on her temples was often damp with the sweat that comes with agony of soul. "It jes' seems I can't live another minute, Cleve," she would tell her brother who lived at the Stronghold, "seems like I don't want to. Th' very sunlight looks sad t' me, an' I hate th' tree-toads that are singin' eternal down in th' runnel." This brother, her only relative, would stir uneasily at such times and the fire that shot from his eyes, light, too, under the same corn-silk lashes, was a rare thing. Nothing but this had ever set it burning. He was a slight man, narrow-chested and thin. They had been from run-down stock, these two, a strain that seemed indigenous to the Valley, without other memories. Their name was Whitmore, and they had lived all their lives in a poor cove up beyond the Valley's head where the barren rocklands came down out of the skies. There had been, besides themselves, only the father and mother, worn-out workers, who had died at last, leaving the brother and sister to live as best they might in the solitudes. Here Courtrey had found them, both in their teens, and he had promptly taken them both along with their scant affairs. It was about the only thing to his credit that he had married Ellen, hard and fast enough, with the offices of a bona fide justice, a matter which he had regretted often enough in the years that followed. It was this knowledge which set the light burning in Cleve's eyes. He knew how Ellen loved Courtrey. He knew also that Lola of the Golden Cloud had made the cattle king step lively for over a year. He saw the daily growing impatience with which Courtrey regarded his marriage.