The wind was fragrant, sage-laden, no longer dry and hot, but cool in the shade.

Slone and Lucy never rode down so far as the stately monuments, though these held memories as hauntingly sweet as others were poignantly bitter.  Lucy never rode the King again.  But Slone rode him, learned to love him.  And Lucy did not race any more.  When Slone tried to stir in her the old spirit all the response he got was a wistful shake of head or a laugh that hid the truth or an excuse that the strain on her ankles from Joel Creech’s lasso had never mended.  The girl was unutterably happy, but it was possible that she would never race a horse again.

She rode Sarchedon, and she liked to trot or lope along beside Slone while they linked hands and watched the distance.  But her glance shunned the north, that distance which held the wild canyons and the broken battlements and the long, black, pine-fringed plateau.

“Won’t you ever ride with me, out to the old camp, where I used to wait for you?” asked Slone.

“Some day,” she said, softly.

“When?”

“When—­when we come back from Durango,” she replied, with averted eyes and scarlet cheek.  And Slone was silent, for that planned trip to Durango, with its wonderful gift to be, made his heart swell.

And so on this rainbow day, with storms all around them, and blue sky above, they rode only as far as the valley.  But from there, before they turned to go back, the monuments appeared close, and they loomed grandly with the background of purple bank and creamy cloud and shafts of golden lightning.  They seemed like sentinels—­guardians of a great and beautiful love born under their lofty heights, in the lonely silence of day, in the star-thrown shadow of night.  They were like that love.  And they held Lucy and Slone, calling every day, giving a nameless and tranquil content, binding them true to love, true to the sage and the open, true to that wild upland home.