own way, but he had no especial
liking for their tricks. Perhaps a few remarkable captures of
remarkable horses had spoiled Slone. He was always trying what the
brothers claimed to be impossible. He was a fearless rider, but he had
the fault of saving his mount, and to kill a wild horse was a tragedy
for him. He would much rather have hunted alone, and he had been alone
on the trail of the stallion Wildfire when the Stewarts had joined him.

Lin Slone awoke next morning and rolled out of his blanket at his usual
early hour. But he was not early enough to say good-by to the Stewarts.
They were gone.

The fact surprised him and somehow relieved him. They had left him more
than his share of the outfit, and perhaps that was why they had slipped
off before dawn. They knew him well enough to know that he would not
have accepted it. Besides, perhaps they felt a little humiliation at
abandoning a chase which he chose to keep up. Anyway, they were gone,
apparently without breakfast.

The morning was clear, cool, with the air dark like that before a
storm, and in the east, over the steely wall of stone, shone a redness
growing brighter.

Slone looked away to the west, down the trail taken by his comrades,
but he saw nothing moving against that cedar-dotted waste.

"Good-by," he said, and he spoke as if he was saying good-by to more
than comrades.

"I reckon I won't see Sevier Village soon again--an' maybe never," he
soliloquized.

There was no one to regret him, unless it was old Mother Hall, who had
been kind to him on those rare occasions when he got out of the
wilderness. Still, it was with regret that he gazed away across the red
valley to the west. Slone had no home. His father and mother had been
lost in the massacre of a wagon-train by Indians, and he had been one
of the few saved and brought to Salt Lake. That had happened when he
was ten years old. His life thereafter had been hard, and but for his
sturdy Texas training he might not have survived. The last five years
he had been a horse-hunter in the wild uplands of Nevada and Utah.

Slone turned his attention to the pack of supplies. The Stewarts had
divided the flour and the parched corn equally, and unless he was
greatly mistaken they had left him most of the coffee and all of the
salt.

"Now I hold that decent of Bill an' Abe," said Slone, regretfully. "But
I could have got along without it better 'n they could."

Then he swiftly set about kindling a fi