m good," replied Lucy.

That was the old rider's ruthless spirit speaking out of his daughter's
lips.

Slone went close to the King and, putting a hand on the pommel, he
looked up at Lucy. "Maybe--it is--a dream--an' you won't come back," he
said, with unsteady voice.

"Then I'll come in dreams," she flashed. "Be careful of yourself....
Good-by."

And at a touch the impatient King was off. From far up the slope near a
monument Lucy looked back. Slone was watching her. She waved a
gauntleted hand--and then looked back no more.

CHAPTER X

Two weeks slipped by on the wings of time and opportunity and
achievement, all colored so wonderfully for Lucy, all spelling that
adventure for which she had yearned.

Lucy was riding down into the sage toward the monuments with a whole
day before her. Bostil kept more and more to himself, a circumstance
that worried her, though she thought little about it. Van had taken up
the training of the King; and Lucy had deliberately quarreled with him
so that she would be free to ride where she listed. Farlane nagged her
occasionally about her rides into the sage, insisting that she must not
go so far and stay so long. And after Van's return to work he made her
ride Sarchedon.

Things had happened at the Ford which would have concerned Lucy greatly
had she not been over-excited about her own affairs. Some one had
ambushed Bostil in the cottonwoods near his house and had shot at him,
narrowly missing him. Bostil had sworn he recognized the shot as having
come from a rifle, and that he knew to whom it belonged. The riders did
not believe this, and said some boy, shooting at a rabbit or coyote,
had been afraid to confess he had nearly hit Bostil. The riders all
said Bostil was not wholly himself of late. The river was still low.
The boat had not been repaired. And Creech's horses were still on the
other side.

These things concerned Lucy, yet they only came and went swiftly
through her mind. She was obsessed by things intimately concerning
herself.

"Oh, I oughtn't to go," she said, aloud. But she did not even check
Sarchedon's long swing, his rocking-chair lope. She had said a hundred
times that she ought not go again out to the monuments. For Lin Slone
had fallen despairingly, terribly in love with her.

It was not this, she averred, but the monuments and the beautiful
Wildfire that had woven a spell round her she could not break. She had
ridden Wildfire all through that stra