asleep. The wind whipped the sand and ashes and
smoke over the sleepers. Coyotes barked from near in darkness, and from
the valley ridge came the faint mourn of a hunting wolf. The desert
night grew darker and colder.

The Stewart brothers were wild-horse hunters for the sake of trades and
occasional sales. But Lin Slone never traded nor sold a horse he had
captured. The excitement of the game, and the lure of the desert, and
the love of a horse were what kept him at the profitless work. His type
was rare in the uplands.

These were the early days of the settlement of Utah, and only a few of
the hardiest and most adventurous pioneers had penetrated the desert in
the southern part of that vast upland. And with them came some of that
wild breed of riders to which Slone and the Stewarts belonged. Horses
were really more important and necessary than men; and this singular
fact gave these lonely riders a calling.

Before the Spaniards came there were no horses in the West. Those
explorers left or lost horses all over the southwest. Many of them were
Arabian horses of purest blood. American explorers and travelers, at
the outset of the nineteenth century, encountered countless droves of
wild horses all over the plains. Across the Grand Canyon, however, wild
horses were comparatively few in number in the early days; and these
had probably come in by way of California.

The Stewarts and Slone had no established mode of catching wild horses.
The game had not developed fast enough for that. Every chase of horse
or drove was different; and once in many attempts they met with success.

A favorite method originated by the Stewarts was to find a water-hole
frequented by the band of horses or the stallion wanted, and to build
round this hole a corral with an opening for the horses to get in. Then
the hunters would watch the trap at night, and if the horses went in to
drink, a gate was closed across the opening. Another method of the
Stewarts was to trail a coveted horse up on a mesa or highland, places
which seldom had more than one trail of ascent and descent, and there
block the escape, and cut lines of cedars, into which the quarry was
ran till captured. Still another method, discovered by accident, was to
shoot a horse lightly in the neck and sting him. This last, called
creasing, was seldom successful, and for that matter in any method ten
times as many horses were killed as captured.

Lin Slone helped the Stewarts in their