CHAPTER I

For some reason the desert scene before Lucy Bostil awoke varying emotions—­a sweet gratitude for the fullness of her life there at the Ford, yet a haunting remorse that she could not be wholly content—­a vague loneliness of soul—­a thrill and a fear for the strangely calling future, glorious, unknown.

She longed for something to happen.  It might be terrible, so long as it was wonderful.  This day, when Lucy had stolen away on a forbidden horse, she was eighteen years old.  The thought of her mother, who had died long ago on their way into this wilderness, was the one drop of sadness in her joy.  Lucy loved everybody at Bostil’s Ford and everybody loved her.  She loved all the horses except her father’s favorite racer, that perverse devil of a horse, the great Sage King.

Lucy was glowing and rapt with love for all she beheld from her lofty perch:  the green-and-pink blossoming hamlet beneath her, set between the beauty of the gray sage expanse and the ghastliness of the barren heights; the swift Colorado sullenly thundering below in the abyss; the Indians in their bright colors, riding up the river trail; the eagle poised like a feather on the air, and a beneath him the grazing cattle making black dots on the sage; the deep velvet azure of the sky; the golden lights on the bare peaks and the lilac veils in the far ravines; the silky rustle of a canyon swallow as he shot downward in the sweep of the wind; the fragrance of cedar, the flowers of the spear-pointed mescal; the brooding silence, the beckoning range, the purple distance.

Whatever it was Lucy longed for, whatever was whispered by the wind and written in the mystery of the waste of sage and stone, she wanted it to happen there at Bostil’s Ford.  She had no desire for civilization, she flouted the idea of marrying the rich rancher of Durango.  Bostil’s sister, that stern but lovable woman who had brought her up and taught her, would never persuade her to marry against her will.  Lucy imagined herself like a wild horse—­free, proud, untamed, meant for the desert; and here she would live her life.  The desert and her life seemed as one, yet in what did they resemble each other—­in what of this scene could she read the nature of her future?

Shudderingly she rejected the red, sullen, thundering river, with its swift, changeful, endless, contending strife—­for that was tragic.  And she rejected the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split and canyoned, so grim and aloof—­for that was barren.  But she accepted the vast sloping valley of sage, rolling gray and soft and beautiful, down to the dim mountains and purple ramparts of the horizon.  Lucy did not know what she yearned for, she did not know why the desert called to her, she did not know in what it resembled her spirit, but she did know that these three feelings were as one, deep in her heart.  For ten years, every day of