ot
the Joel Creech she knew.

"Stop!" cried Lucy, fiercely. "I'll run you down!"

The big black plunged at a touch of spur and came down quivering, ready
to bolt.

Creech swerved to one side. His face was lividly white except where the
bloody welts crossed it. His jaw seemed to hang loosely, making speech
difficult.

"Jest fer--thet--" he panted, hoarsely, "I'll lay fer you--an' I'll
strip you---an' I'll tie you on a hoss--an' I'll drive you naked
through Bostil's Ford!"

Lucy saw the utter futility of all her good intentions. Something had
snapped in Joel Creech's mind. And in hers kindness had given
precedence to a fury she did not know was in her. For the second time
she touched a spur to Sarchedon. He leaped out, flashed past Creech,
and thundered up the road. It was all Lucy could do to break his gait
at the first steep rise.

CHAPTER IV

Three wild-horse hunters made camp one night beside a little stream in
the Sevier Valley, five hundred miles, as a crow flies, from Bostil's
Ford.

These hunters had a poor outfit, excepting, of course, their horses.
They were young men, rangy in build, lean and hard from life in the
saddle, bronzed like Indians, still-faced, and keen-eyed. Two of them
appeared to be tired out, and lagged at the camp-fire duties. When the
meager meal was prepared they sat, cross-legged, before a ragged
tarpaulin, eating and drinking in silence.

The sky in the west was rosy, slowly darkening. The valley floor
billowed away, ridged and cut, growing gray and purple and dark. Walls
of stone, pink with the last rays of the setting sun, inclosed the
valley, stretching away toward a long, low, black mountain range.

The place was wild, beautiful, open, with something nameless that made
the desert different from any other country. It was, perhaps, a
loneliness of vast stretches of valley and stone, clear to the eye,
even after sunset. That black mountain range, which looked close enough
to ride to before dark, was a hundred miles distant.

The shades of night fell swiftly, and it was dark by the time the
hunters finished the meal. Then the campfire had burned low. One of the
three dragged branches of dead cedars and replenished the fire. Quickly
it flared up, with the white flame and crackle characteristic of dry
cedar. The night wind had risen, moaning through the gnarled, stunted
cedars near by, and it blew the fragrant wood-smoke into the faces of
the two hunters, who seemed too ti