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Bostil's house was a crude but picturesque structure of red stone and white clay and bleached cottonwoods, and it stood at the outskirts of the cluster of green-inclosed cabins which composed the hamlet.
Strange it was that not one of these was a mustang or a broken wild horse, for many of the riders' best mounts had been captured by them or the Indians. And it was Bostil's supreme ambition to own a great wild stallion.
Bostil struggled both to control himself and to speak. "Naw! I ain't goin' to see thet red hoss-killer jump the King again!" "Bah! you're afraid. You know there'd be no girl on his back. You know he can outrun the King an' that's why you want to buy him." Slone caught his breath then. He realized suddenly, at Bostil's paling face, that perhaps he had dared too much.
When she drove him in Creech was talking hard to Joel, who had mounted. "When you come back, work up this canyon till you git up. It heads on the pine plateau. I can't miss seein' you, or any one, long before you git up on top. An' you needn't come without Bostil's hosses. You know what to tell Bostil if he threatens you, or refuses to send his hosses, or turns his riders on my trail. Thet's all.
Bostil's house, at the head of the village, looked in the opposite direction, down the sage slope that widened like a colossal fan. There was one wide street bordered by cottonwoods and cabins, and a number of gardens and orchards, beginning to burst into green and pink and white. A brook ran out of a ravine in the huge bluff, and from this led irrigation ditches.
"Bostil, mebbe you 'ain't been told yet thet thet Creech rode in yesterday.... He lost all his racers! He had to shoot both Peg an' Roan!" Bostil's thought suffered a sudden, blank halt. Then, with realization, came the shock for which he had long been prepared. "A-huh! Is thet so? ... Wal, an' what did he say?" Holley laughed a grim, significant laugh that curdled Bostil's blood.
But he swore a grim oath that he would beat the flame. The intense and abnormal rider's passion in him, like Bostil's, dammed up, but never fully controlled, burst within him, and suddenly he awoke to a wild and terrible violence of heart and soul. He had accepted death; he had no fear. All that he wanted to do, the last thing he wanted to do, was to ride down the King and kill Lucy mercifully.
Cordts rode into this wild free-range country, where he had been heard to say that a horse-thief was meaner than a poisoned coyote. Nevertheless, he became a horse-thief. The passion he had conceived for the Sage King was the passion of a man for an unattainable woman. Cordts swore that he would never rest, that he would not die, till he owned the King. So there was reason for Bostil's great fear.
"Down in the canyons, where no one can track me," he said. "It'll be hard goin' fer you, child, an' hard fare.... But I'm strikin' at Bostil's heart as he has broken mine. I'll send him word. An' I'll tell him if he won't give his hosses thet I'll sell you to Cordts." "Oh, Creech but you wouldn't!" she whispered, and her hand went to his brawny arm.
Then, as Farlane well knew, a quick road to Bostil's good will was to praise one of his favorites. "Reckon you spoke sense for once, Farlane," replied Bostil, with relief. "I wasn't thinkin' so much of danger for Lucy.... But she lets thet half-witted Creech go with her." "No, boss, you're wrong," put in Holley, earnestly. "I know the girl. She has no use fer Joel. But he jest runs after her."
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