king, almost savage.

The toil and privation had worn him down and he was like iron. His
garments hung in tatters; his boots were ripped and soleless. Long
since his flour had been used up, and all his supplies except the salt.
He lived on the meat of rabbits, but they were scarce, and the time
came when there were none. Some days he did not eat. Hunger did not
make him suffer. He killed a desert bird now and then, and once a
wildcat crossing the valley. Eventually he felt his strength
diminishing, and then he took to digging out the pack-rats and cooking
them. But these, too, were scarce. At length starvation faced Slone.
But he knew he would not starve. Many times he had been within
rifle-shot of Wildfire. And the grim, forbidding thought grew upon him
that he must kill the stallion. The thought seemed involuntary, but his
mind rejected it. Nevertheless, he knew that if he could not catch the
stallion he would kill him. That had been the end of many a desperate
rider's pursuit of a coveted horse.

While Slone kept on his merciless pursuit, never letting Wildfire rest
by day, time went on just as relentlessly. Spring gave way to early
summer. The hot sun bleached the grass; water-holes failed out in the
valley, and water could be found only in the canyons; and the dry winds
began to blow the sand. It was a sandy valley, green and gray only at a
distance, and out toward the north there were no monuments, and the
slow heave of sand lifted toward the dim walls.

Wildfire worked away from this open valley, back to the south end,
where the great monuments loomed, and still farther back, where they
grew closer, till at length some of them were joined by weathered
ridges to the walls of the surrounding plateau. For all that Slone
could see, Wildfire was in perfect condition. But Nagger was not the
horse he had been. Slone realized that in one way or another the
pursuit was narrowing down to the end.

He found a water-hole at the head of a wash in a split in the walls,
and here he let Nagger rest and graze one whole day--the first day for
a long time that he had not kept the red stallion in sight. That day
was marked by the good fortune of killing a rabbit, and while eating it
his gloomy, fixed mind admitted that he was starving. He dreaded the
next sunrise. But he could not hold it back. There, behind the dark
monuments, standing sentinel-like, the sky lightened and reddened and
burst into gold and pink, till out of the g