Slone’s heart began to thump.  But he forced himself to think only of these tracks and not any significance they might have.  He trailed the men down to a bench on the slope, a few hundred yards from Bostil’s grove, and here a trampled space marked where a halt had been made and a wait.

And here Slone could no longer restrain conjecture and dread.  He searched and searched.  He got on his knees.  He crawled through the sage all around the trampled space.  Suddenly his heart seemed to receive a stab.  He had found prints of Lucy’s boots in the soft earth!  And he leaped up, wild and fierce, needing to know no more.

He ran back to his cabin.  He never thought of Bostil, of Holley, of anything except the story revealed in those little boot-tracks.  He packed a saddle-bag with meat and biscuits, filled a canvas water-bottle, and, taking them and his rifle, he hurried out to the corral.  First he took Nagger down to Brackton’s pasture and let him in.  Then returning, he went at the fiery stallion as he had not gone in many a day, roped him, saddled him, mounted him, and rode off with a hard, grim certainty that in Wildfire was Lucy’s salvation.

Four hours later Slone halted on the crest of a ridge, in the cover of sparse cedars, and surveyed a vast, gray, barren basin yawning and reaching out to a rugged, broken plateau.

He expected to find Joel Creech returning on the back-trail, and he had taken the precaution to ride on one side of the tracks he was following.  He did not want Joel to cross his trail.  Slone had long ago solved the meaning of the Creeches’ flight.  They would use Lucy to ransom Bostil’s horses, and more than likely they would not let her go back.  That they had her was enough for Slone.  He was grim and implacable.

The eyes of the wild-horse hunter had not searched that basin long before they picked out a dot which was not a rock or a cedar, but a horse.  Slone watched it grow, and, hidden himself, he held his post until he knew the rider was Joel Creech.  Slone drew his own horse back and tied him to a sage-bush amidst some scant grass.  Then he returned to watch.  It appeared Creech was climbing the ridge below Slone, and some distance away.  It was a desperate chance Joel ran then, for Slone had set out to kill him.  It was certain that if Joel had happened to ride near instead of far, Slone could not have helped but kill him.  As it was, he desisted because he realized that Joel would acquaint Bostil with the abducting of Lucy, and it might be that this would be well.

Slone was shaking when young Creech passed up and out of sight over the ridge—­shaking with the deadly grip of passion such as he had never known.  He waited, slowly gaining control, and at length went back for Wildfire.