Wildfire | Page 3

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Etext scanned by Daniel Wentzell of Leesburg, Georgia.

WILDFIRE
by ZANE GREY
CHAPTER I
For some reason the desert scene before Lucy Bostil awoke varying
emotions--a sweet gratitude for the fullness of her life there at the Ford,
yet a haunting remorse that she could not be wholly content--a vague
loneliness of soul--a thrill and a fear for the strangely calling future,
glorious, unknown.
She longed for something to happen. It might be terrible, so long as it
was wonderful. This day, when Lucy had stolen away on a forbidden
horse, she was eighteen years old. The thought of her mother, who had
died long ago on their way into this wilderness, was the one drop of
sadness in her joy. Lucy loved everybody at Bostil's Ford and
everybody loved her. She loved all the horses except her father's
favorite racer, that perverse devil of a horse, the great Sage King.
Lucy was glowing and rapt with love for all she beheld from her lofty
perch: the green-and-pink blossoming hamlet beneath her, set between
the beauty of the gray sage expanse and the ghastliness of the barren
heights; the swift Colorado sullenly thundering below in the abyss; the
Indians in their bright colors, riding up the river trail; the eagle poised
like a feather on the air, and a beneath him the grazing cattle making
black dots on the sage; the deep velvet azure of the sky; the golden
lights on the bare peaks and the lilac veils in the far ravines; the silky
rustle of a canyon swallow as he shot downward in the sweep of the
wind; the fragrance of cedar, the flowers of the spear-pointed mescal;
the brooding silence, the beckoning range, the purple distance.

Whatever it was Lucy longed for, whatever was whispered by the wind
and written in the mystery of the waste of sage and stone, she wanted it
to happen there at Bostil's Ford. She had no desire for civilization, she
flouted the idea of marrying the rich rancher of Durango. Bostil's sister,
that stern but lovable woman who had brought her up and taught her,
would never persuade her to marry against her will. Lucy imagined
herself like a wild horse--free, proud, untamed, meant for the desert;
and here she would live her life. The desert and her life seemed as one,
yet in what did they resemble each other--in what of this scene could
she read the nature of her future?
Shudderingly she rejected the red, sullen, thundering river, with its
swift, changeful, endless, contending strife--for that was tragic. And
she rejected the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split
and canyoned, so grim and aloof--for that was barren. But she accepted
the vast sloping valley of sage, rolling gray and soft and beautiful,
down to the dim mountains and purple ramparts of the horizon. Lucy
did not know what she yearned for, she did not know why the