country of wonderful horses. He swore the great gray
could look back over his shoulder and run away from any broken horse
known to the riders.

Bostil himself was half horse, and the half of him that was human he
divided between love of his fleet racers and his daughter Lucy. He had
seen years of hard riding on that wild Utah border where, in those
days, a horse meant all the world to a man. A lucky strike of grassy
upland and good water south of the Rio Colorado made him rich in all
that he cared to own. The Indians, yet unspoiled by white men, were
friendly. Bostil built a boat at the Indian crossing of the Colorado
and the place became known as Bostil's Ford. From time to time his
personality and his reputation and his need brought horse-hunters,
riders, sheep-herders, and men of pioneer spirit, as well as wandering
desert travelers, to the Ford, and the lonely, isolated hamlet slowly
grew. North of the river it was more than two hundred miles to the
nearest little settlement, with only a few lonely ranches on the road;
to the west were several villages, equally distant, but cut off for two
months at a time by the raging Colorado, flooded by melting snow up in
the mountains. Eastward from the Ford stretched a ghastly, broken,
unknown desert of canyons. Southward rolled the beautiful uplands, with
valleys of sage and grass, and plateaus of pine and cedar, until this
rich rolling gray and green range broke sharply on a purple horizon
line of upflung rocky ramparts and walls and monuments, wild, dim, and
mysterious.

Bostil's cattle and horses were numberless, and many as were his
riders, he always could use more. But most riders did not abide long
with Bostil, first because some of them were of a wandering breed,
wild-horse hunters themselves; and secondly, Bostil had two great
faults: he seldom paid a rider in money, and he never permitted one to
own a fleet horse. He wanted to own all the fast horses himself. And in
those days every rider, especially a wild-horse hunter, loved his steed
as part of himself. If there was a difference between Bostil and any
rider of the sage, it was that, as he had more horses, so he had more
love.

Whenever Bostil could not get possession of a horse he coveted, either
by purchase or trade, he invariably acquired a grievance toward the
owner. This happened often, for riders were loath to part with their
favorites. And he had made more than one enemy by his persistent
nagging. It cou