He resented with every ounce of the repressed spirit there was in him the girl's poor standing at the Stronghold. Black Bart and Wylackie Bob treated her with no more consideration than any of the Indian serving women. They swore and drank before her with an abandon that made the young man's nails cut deep in his palms at times, the blood mount high in his white cheeks. And Ellen drooped like a lily on a broken stem, brooded over her husband's absences, and hated the name of Lola, used openly to her as a cruel joke. The Stronghold was a huge place. The house was like the majority of the habitations of the region, built of adobe and able to stand siege against a regiment. It was shaded by cottonwoods and spruces, flanked by corrals and barns and sheds until the place resembled a small town. Cleve Whitmore rode for Courtrey but his heart was not in Courtrey's game. He was slim and sullen, dissatisfied, slow of speech, repressed. He worked early and late and thought a lot. Courtrey, who kept close count of the favours he did for others, considered Cleve deep in his debt and paid him a niggardly wage. So it was, that when the newly organized Vigilantes under Tharon Last came out in broad day and took back their own from Courtrey's herds, there was one at the Stronghold who laughed quietly to himself in sympathy with the defy. "Good enough," he told the wide sky and the silence as he rode herd under the beetling rocklands, "hope t' God some one gits him good an' plenty." But Courtrey was hard to get. His aides and lieutenants were picked men. He was like a king in his domain. But if strife and ferment seethed under the calm surface in Lost Valley, its surges died before they reached the rolling slopes where the forests came down to the eastern plains. Up among the pines and oaks, the ridges and the age-worn, tumbled rocks David Kenset had found his ideal spot, his glade where the pines stood guard and a talking stream ran down. High on the wooded slopes he had set his mark, begun that home of which he had told Tharon. From Corvan he had hired three men, a teamster by the name of Drake and his two sons, and together they had felled and dressed trees enough for a cabin, laid them up with clay brought five miles on mule-back, roofed the structure with shakes made on the spot with a froe, and the result was pleasing, indeed, to this man straight from the far eastern cities. The cabin faced southwest, set at an angle to command the circled glade, the dropping slopes, the distant range lands, the wooded line of the Broken Bend, and farther off the levels and slants of the gently undulating Valley, with the mighty Rockface of the Wall rising like a mystery beyond. Kenset cut all trees at the west and south of the glade, thus forming a splendid doorway into his retreat, through which all this shone in, like those wonderful etched landscapes one sometimes sees in tiny toys that fit the narrowed eye.