search for the horses.

The forest was open and park-like. There were no fallen trees or
evidences of fire. Presently he came to a wide glade in the midst of
which Nagger and the pack-mustang were grazing with a herd of deer. The
size of the latter amazed Slone. The deer he had hunted back on the
Sevier range were much smaller than these. Evidently these were mule
deer, closely allied to the elk. They were so tame they stood facing
him curiously, with long ears erect. It was sheer murder to kill a deer
standing and watching like that, but Slone was out of meat and hungry
and facing a long, hard trip. He shot a buck, which leaped
spasmodically away, trying to follow the herd, and fell at the edge of
the glade. Slone cut out a haunch, and then, catching the horses, he
returned to camp, where he packed and saddled, and at once rode out on
the dim trail.

The wildness of the country he was entering was evident in the fact
that as he passed the glade where he had shot the deer a few minutes
before, there were coyotes quarreling over the carcass.

Stone could see ahead and on each side several hundred yards, and
presently he ascertained that the forest floor was not so level as he
had supposed. He had entered a valley or was traversing a wide, gently
sloping pass. He went through thickets of juniper, and had to go around
clumps of quaking aspen. The pines grew larger and farther apart.
Cedars and pinyons had been left behind, and he had met with no silver
spruces after leaving camp. Probably that point was the height of a
divide. There were banks of snow in some of the hollows on the north
side. Evidently the snow had very recently melted, and it was evident
also that the depth of snow through here had been fully ten feet,
judging from the mutilation of the juniper-trees where the deer,
standing on the hard, frozen crust, had browsed upon the branches.

The quiet of the forest thrilled Slone. And the only movement was the
occasional gray flash of a deer or coyote across a glade. No birds of
any species crossed Stone's sight. He came, presently, upon a lion
track in the trail, made probably a day before. Slone grew curious
about it, seeing how it held, as he was holding, to Wildfire's tracks.
After a mile or so he made sure the lion had been trailing the
stallion, and for a second he felt a cold contraction of his heart.
Already he loved Wildfire, and by virtue of all this toil of travel
considered the wild horse his pro