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Updated: July 28, 2025
But they always seemed close together and near him. The air magnified everything. Slone lost track of time. The strange, solemn, lonely days and the silent, lonely nights, and the endless pursuit, and the wild, weird valley these completed the work of years on Slone and he became satisfied, unthinking, almost savage. The toil and privation had worn him down and he was like iron.
Both Sage King and Wildfire would beat the flame. Then, with the open just ahead, Slone felt a wave of hot wind rolling over him. He saw the lashing tongues of flame above him in the pines. The storm had caught him. It forged ahead. He was riding under a canopy of fire. Burning pine cones, like torches, dropped all around him.
He would have to be so, stopping just short of maiming or killing the horse, else he would never break him. But Wildfire was nimble. He got to his feet and this time he lunged out. Nagger, powerful as he was, could not sustain the tremendous shock, and went down. Slone saved himself with a rider's supple skill, falling clear of the horse, and he leaped again into the saddle as Nagger pounded up.
"At night then I could get round him," said Slone, thinking hard and narrowing his gaze to scan the circle of wall and slope. "Why not? ... No wind at night. That grass would burn slow till mornin' till the wind came up an' it's been west for days." Suddenly Slone began to pound the patient Nagger and to cry out to him in wild exultance.
Suddenly Slone's sensitive ear vibrated to a thrilling sound. He leaned down to place his ear to the sand. Rapid, rhythmic beat of hoofs made him leap to his feet, reaching for his lasso with right hand and a gun with his left. Nagger lifted his head, sniffed the air, and snorted. Slone peered into the black belt of gloom that lay below him.
But he heard nothing. The torrent of his changed blood, burning and terrible, filled his ears with hate and death. He guided the running stallion. In a few tremendous strides Wildfire struck Creech, and Slone had one glimpse of an awful face. The impact was terrific. Creech went hurtling through the air, limp and broken, to go down upon a rock, his skull cracking like a melon.
The dim blackness of the storm-clouds was split to the blinding zigzag of lightning, and the thunder rolled and boomed, like the Colorado in flood. The wind was fragrant, sage-laden, no longer dry and hot, but cool in the shade. Slone and Lucy never rode down so far as the stately monuments, though these held memories as hauntingly sweet as others were poignantly bitter.
This encouraged him, for where Indians could hunt so could he. Soon he was entering a forest where cedars and piñons and pines began to grow thickly. Presently he came upon a faintly defined trail, just a dim, dark line even to an experienced eye. But it was a trail, and Wildfire had taken it. Slone halted for the night. The air was cold.
The avalanche slipped with little jerks, as if treacherously loosing its hold for a long plunge. The line of fire below ate at the bleached grass and the long column of smoke curled away on the wind. Slone held the taut lasso with his left hand, and with the right he swung the other rope, catching the noose round Wildfire's nose.
When the dust cleared away Slone saw the stallion, sunk to his flanks in the sand, utterly helpless. With a wild whoop Slone leaped off Nagger, and, a lasso in each hand, he ran down the long bank. The fire was perhaps a quarter of a mile distant, and, since the grass was thinning out, it was not coming so fast as it had been.
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