“Been bored, eh?  Wal, it ain’t low, an’ thet’s good.  Who shot you?”

“Cordts.”

“Cordts!” Bostil leaned forward in sudden, fierce eagerness.

“Yes, Cordts. . . .  His outfit run across Creech’s trail an’ we bunched.  I can’t tell now. . . .  But we had—­hell!  An’ Cordts is dead—­so’s Hutch—­an’ that other pard of his. . . .  Bostil, they’ll never haunt your sleep again!”

Slone finished with a strange sternness that seemed almost bitter.

Bostil raised both his huge fists.  The blood was bulging his thick neck.  It was another kind of passion that obsessed him.  Only some violent check to his emotion prevented him from embracing Slone.  The huge fists unclenched and the big fingers worked.

“You mean to tell me you did fer Cordts an’ Hutch what you did fer Sears?” he boomed out.

“They’re dead—­gone, Bostil—­honest to God!” replied Slone.

Holley thrust a quivering, brown hand into Bostil’s face.  “What did I tell you?” he shouted.  “Didn’t I say wait?”

Bostil threw away all that deep fury of passion, and there seemed only a resistless and speechless admiration left.  Then ensued a moment of silence.  The riders watched Slone’s weary face as it drooped, and Bostil, as he loomed over him.

“Where’s the red stallion?” queried Bostil.  That was the question hard to get out.

Slone raised eyes dark with pain, yet they flashed as he looked straight up into Bostil’s face.  “Wildfire’s dead!”

“Dead!” ejaculated Bostil.

Another moment of strained exciting suspense.

“Shot?” he went on.

“No.”

“What killed him?”

“The King, sir! . . .  Killed him on his feet!”

Bostil’s heavy jaw bulged and quivered.  His hand shook as he laid it on Sage King’s mane—­the first touch since the return of his favorite.

“Slone—­what—­is it?” he said, brokenly, with voice strangely softened.  His face became transfigured.

“Sage King killed Wildfire on his feet. . . .  A grand race, Bostil! . . .  But Wildfire’s dead—­an’ here’s the King!  Ask me no more.  I want to forget.”

Bostil put his arm around the young man’s shoulder.  “Slone, if I don’t know what you feel fer the loss of thet grand hoss, no rider on earth knows! . . .  Go in the house.  Boys, take him in—­all of you—­an’ look after him.”

Bostil wanted to be alone, to welcome the King, to lead him back to the home corral, perhaps to hide from all eyes the change and the uplift that would forever keep him from wronging another man.

The late rains came and like magic, in a few days, the sage grew green and lustrous and fresh, the gray turning to purple.

Every morning the sun rose white and hot in a blue and cloudless sky.  And then soon the horizon line showed creamy clouds that rose and spread and darkened.  Every afternoon storms hung along the ramparts and rainbows curved down beautiful and ethereal.  The dim blackness of the storm-clouds was split to the blinding zigzag of lightning, and the thunder rolled and boomed, like the Colorado in flood.