The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wildfire, by Zane Grey

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Title: Wildfire

Author: Zane Grey

Posting Date: November 19, 2008 [EBook #2066]
Release Date: February, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILDFIRE ***

Produced by Daniel Wentzell. HTML version by Al Haines.

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 ma