CHAPTER XX

A darkness, like the streaming clouds overhead, seemed to blot out Slone’s sight, and then passed away, leaving it clearer.

Lucy was bending over him, binding a scarf round his shoulder and under his arm.  “Lin!  It’s nothing!” she was saying, earnestly.  “Never touched a bone!”

Slone sat up.  The smoke was clearing away.  Little curves of burning grass were working down along the rim.  He put out a hand to grasp Lucy, remembering in a flash.  He pointed to the ledge across the chasm.

“They’re—­gone!” cried Lucy, with a strange and deep note in her voice.  She shook violently.  But she did not look away from Slone.

“Wildfire!  The King!” he added, hoarsely.

“Both where they dropped.  Oh, I’m afraid to—­to look. . . .  And, Lin, I saw Sarch, Two Face, and Ben and Plume go down there.”

She had her back to the chasm where the trail led down, and she pointed without looking.

Slone got up, a little unsteady on his feet and conscious of a dull pain.

“Sarch will go straight home, and the others will follow him,” said Lucy.  “They got away here where Joel came up the trail.  The fire chased them out of the woods.  Sarch will go home.  And that’ll fetch the riders.”

“We won’t need them if only Wildfire and the King—­” Slone broke off and grimly, with a catch in his breath, turned to the horses.

How strange that Slone should run toward the King while Lucy ran to Wildfire!

Sage King was a beaten, broken horse, but he would live to run another race.

Lucy was kneeling beside Wildfire, sobbing and crying:  “Wildfire!  Wildfire!”

All of Wildfire was white except where he was red, and that red was not now his glossy, flaming skin.  A terrible muscular convulsion as of internal collapse grew slower and slower.  Yet choked, blinded, dying, killed on his feet, Wildfire heard Lucy’s voice.

“Oh, Lin!  Oh, Lin!” moaned Lucy.

While they knelt there the violent convulsions changed to slow heaves.

“He run the King down—­carryin’ weight—­with a long lead to overcome!” Slone muttered, and he put a shaking hand on the horse’s wet neck.

“Oh, he beat the King!” cried Lucy.  “But you mustn’t—­you can’t tell Dad!”

“What can we tell him?”

“Oh, I know.  Old Creech told me what to say!”

A change, both of body and spirit, seemed to pass over the great stallion.

“Wildfire!  Wildfire!”

Again the rider called to his horse, with a low and piercing cry.  But Wildfire did not hear.

The morning sun glanced brightly over the rippling sage which rolled away from the Ford like a gray sea.

Bostil sat on his porch, a stricken man.  He faced the blue haze of the north, where days before all that he had loved had vanished.  Every day, from sunrise till sunset, he had been there, waiting and watching.  His riders were grouped near him, silent, awed by his agony, awaiting orders that never came.