Wildfire | Page 4

desert
called to her, she did not know in what it resembled her spirit, but she
did know that these three feelings were as one, deep in her heart. For
ten years, every day of her life, she had watched this desert scene, and
never had there been an hour that it was not different, yet the same. Ten
years--and she grew up watching, feeling--till from the desert's
thousand moods she assimilated its nature, loved her bonds, 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