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Wildfire was the most cunning of all animals a wild stallion; his speed and endurance were incomparable; his scent as keen as those animals that relied wholly upon scent to warn them of danger; and as for sight, it was Slone's belief that no hoofed creature, except the mountain sheep used to high altitudes, could see as far as a wild horse.
His heart seemed too large for his breast. "I tracked you!" he cried, savagely. "I stayed with you! An' I got a rope on you! An' I'll ride you you red devil!" The passion of the man was intense. That endless, racking pursuit had brought out all the hardness the desert had engendered in him. Almost hate, instead of love, spoke in Slone's words.
He was not running near his limit but, after the nature of such a horse, left to choose his gait, running slowly, but rising toward his swiftest and fiercest. Slone's rider's blood never thrilled to that race, for his blood had curdled. The sickness within rose to his mind. And that flashed up whenever he dared to look forward at Lucy's white form.
The price he asked was ridiculously low if the property was worth anything. An idea flashed across Slone's mind. He went up to Vorhees's place and was much pleased with everything, especially the corral, which had been built by a man who feared horse-thieves as much as Bostil. The view from the door of the little cabin was magnificent beyond compare. Slone remembered Lucy's last words.
"Four mustangs an' two men last night," said Holley, rapidly. "Here's where Lucy was set down on her feet. Here's where she mounted.... An' here's the tracks of a third man tracks made this mornin'." Bostil straightened up and faced Holley as if ready to take a death-blow. "I'm reckonin' them last is Slone's tracks." "Yes, I know them," replied Holley. "An' them other tracks? Who made them?"
He followed the tracks to a pile of rocks where the Creeches had made a greasewood fire and had cooked a meal. This was strange within a mile of the Ford, where Brackton and others would have housed them. What was stranger was the fact that the trail started south from there and swung round toward the village. Slone's heart began to thump.
Above him ran a low, red wall, around which evidently the trail led. At the curve, which was a promontory, scarcely a hundred feet in an air line above him, he saw something red moving, bobbing, coming out into view. It was a horse. Wildfire no farther away than the length of three lassos! There he stood looking down. He fulfilled all of Slone's dreams. Only he was bigger.
A later incident earned more of Slone's attention. He had observed a man in Brackton's store, and it chanced that this man heard Slone's reply to Brackton's offer, and he said: "You'll sure need to corral thet red stallion. Grandest hoss I ever seen!" That praise won Slone, and he engaged in conversation with the man, who said his name was Vorhees.
This, then, was the great canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle, and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and the grandeur and the vague sadness of the scene.
He saw beside the big track a faint imprint of Lucy's small foot. That was the last sign of her progress and it told a story. "Bostil, thet ain't Slone's track," said Holley, ringingly. "Sure it ain't. Thet's the track of a big man," replied Bostil. The other riders, circling round with bent heads, all said one way or another that Slone could not have made the trail.
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