Wildfire | Page 4

and could never have been happy away from the open, the color, the freedom, the wildness. On this birthday, when those who loved her said she had become her own mistress, she acknowledged the claim of the desert forever. And she experienced a deep, rich, strange happiness.
Hers always then the mutable and immutable desert, the leagues and leagues of slope and sage and rolling ridge, the great canyons and the giant cliffs, the dark river with its mystic thunder of waters, the pine-fringed plateaus, the endless stretch of horizon, with its lofty, isolated, noble monuments, and the bold ramparts with their beckoning beyond! Hers always the desert seasons: the shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms; the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the sky, with the black tempests hanging here and there over the peaks, dark veils floating down and rainbows everywhere, and the lacy waterfalls upon the glistening cliffs and the thunder of the red floods; and the glorious golden autumn when it was always afternoon and time stood still! Hers always the rides in the open, with the sun at her back and the wind in her face! And hers surely, sooner or later, the nameless adventure which had its inception in the strange yearning of her heart and presaged its fulfilment somewhere down that trailless sage-slope she loved so well!
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. Bostil was wont to say that in all the world there could hardly be a grander view than the outlook down that gray sea of rolling sage, down to the black-fringed plateaus and the wild, blue-rimmed and gold-spired horizon.
One morning in early spring, as was Bostil's custom, he ordered the racers to be brought from the corrals and turned loose on the slope. He loved to sit there and watch his horses graze, but ever he saw that the riders were close at hand, and that the horses did not get out on the slope of sage. He sat back and gloried in the sight. He owned bands of mustangs; near by was a field of them, fine and mettlesome and racy; yet Bostil had eyes only for the blooded favorites. 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. There was Plume, a superb mare that got her name from the way her mane swept in the wind when she was on the ran; and there was Two Face, like a coquette, sleek and glossy and running and the huge, rangy bay, Dusty Ben; and the black stallion Sarchedon; and lastly Sage King, the color of the upland sage, a racer in build, a horse splendid and proud and beautiful.
"Where's Lucy?" presently asked Bostil.
As he divided his love, so he divided his anxiety.
Some rider had seen Lucy riding off, with her golden hair flying in the wind. This was an old story.
"She's up on Buckles?" Bostil queried, turning sharply the speaker.
"Reckon so," was the calm reply.
Bostil swore. He did not have a rider who could equal him in profanity.
"Farlane, you'd orders. Lucy's not to ride them hosses, least of all Buckles. He ain't safe even for a man."
"Wal, he's safe fer Lucy."
"But didn't I say no?"
"Boss, it's likely you did, fer you talk a lot," replied Farlane. "Lucy pulled my hat down over my eyes--told me to go to thunder-- an' then, zip! she an' Buckles were dustin' it fer the sage."
"She's got to keep out of the sage," growled Bostil. "It ain't safe for her out there. . . . Where's my glass? I want to take a look at the slope. Where's my glass?"
The glass could not be found.
"What's makin' them dust-clouds on the sage? Antelope? . . . Holley, you used to have eyes better 'n me. Use them, will you?"
A gray-haired, hawk-eyed rider, lean and worn, approached with clinking spurs.
"Down in there," said Bostil, pointing.
"Thet's a bunch of hosses," replied Holley.
"Wild hosses?"
"I take 'em so, seein' how they throw thet dust."
"Huh! I don't like it. Lucy oughtn't be ridin' round alone."
"Wal, boss, who could catch her up on Buckles? Lucy can ride. An' there's the King an' Sarch right under your nose--the only hosses on the sage thet could outrun Buckles."
Farlane knew how to mollify his master and long habit had made him proficient. Bostil's eyes flashed. He was proud