ade him divide his love as did her father, made him human,
hopeful, longing for a future unfettered by the toils of desert
allurement. She could not control her pride. She must like him very
much. She confessed that, honestly, without a qualm. It was only
bewildering moments of strange agitation and uncertainty that bothered
her. She had refused to be concerned by them until they had finally
impinged upon her peace of mind. Then they accused her; now she accused
herself. She ought not go to meet Lin Slone any more.

"But then--the race!" she murmured. "I couldn't give that up.... And
oh! I'm afraid the harm is done! What can I do?"

After the race--what then? To be sure, all of Bostil's Ford would know
she had been meeting Slone out in the sage, training his horse. What
would people say?

"Dad will simply be radiant, IF he can buy Wildfire--and a fiend if he
can't," she muttered.

Lucy saw that her own impulsiveness had amounted to daring. She had
gone too far. She excused that--for she had a rider's blood--she was
Bostil's girl. But she had, in her wildness and joy and spirit, spent
many hours alone with a rider, to his undoing. She could not excuse
that. She was ashamed. What would he say when she told him she could
see him no more? The thought made her weak. He would accept and go his
way--back to that lonely desert, with only a horse.

"Wildfire doesn't love him!" she said.

And the scarlet fired her neck and cheek and temple. That leap of blood
seemed to release a riot of emotions. What had been a torment became a
torture. She turned Sarchedon homeward, but scarcely had faced that way
when she wheeled him again. She rode slowly and she rode swiftly. The
former was hateful because it held her back--from what she no longer
dared think; the latter was fearful because it hurried her on swiftly,
irresistibly to her fate.

Lin Slone had changed his camp and had chosen a pass high up where the
great walls had began to break into sections. Here there was intimacy
with the sheer cliffs of red and yellow. Wide avenues between the walls
opened on all points of the compass, and that one to the north appeared
to be a gateway down into the valley of monuments. The monuments
trooped down into the valley to spread out and grow isolated in the
distance. Slone's camp was in a clump of cedars surrounding a spring.
There was grass and white sage where rabbits darted in and out.

Lucy did not approach this camp from that round