dges, bare of all but bleached white grass and meager
greasewood, always descending in the face of that painted desert of bold
and ragged steppes. Slone made fifty miles that day, and gained the
valley bed, where a slender stream ran thin and spread over a wide sandy
bottom. It was salty water, but it was welcome to both man and beast.

The following day he crossed, and the tracks of Wildfire were still wet
on the sand bars. The stallion was slowing down. Slone saw him, limping
along, not far in advance. There was a ten-mile stretch of level ground,
blown hard as rock, from which the sustenance had been bleached, for not
a spear of grass grew there. And following that was a tortuous passage
through a weird region of clay dunes, blue and violet and heliotrope and
lavender, all worn smooth by rain and wind. Wildfire favored the soft
ground now. He had deviated from his straight course. And he was partial
to washes and dips in the earth where water might have lodged. And he
was not now scornful of a green-scummed water hole with its white margin
of alkali. That night Slone made camp with Wildfire in plain sight. The
stallion stopped when his pursuers stopped. And he began to graze on the
same stretch with Nagger. How strange this seemed to Slone!

Here at this camp was evidence of Indians. Wildfire had swung round to
the north in his course. Like any pursued wild animal, he had begun to
circle. And he had pointed his nose toward the Utah he had left.

Next morning Wildfire was not in sight, but he had left his tracks in
the sand. Slone trailed him with Nagger at a trot. Toward the head of
this sandy flat Slone came upon old cornfields, and a broken dam where
the water had been stored, and well-defined trails leading away to the
right. Somewhere over there in the desert lived Indians. At this point
Wildfire abandoned the trail he had followed for many days and cut out
more to the north. It took all the morning hours to climb three great
steppes and benches that led up to the summit of a mesa, vast in extent.
It turned out to be a sandy waste. The wind rose and everywhere were
moving sheets of sand, and in the distance circular yellow dust devils,
rising high like water spouts, and back down in the sun-scorched valley
a sandstorm moved along majestically, burying the desert in its yellow
pall.

Then two more days of sand and another day of a slowly rising ground
growing from bare to gray and gray to green, and then to the