“Let me go!” cried Lucy, standing perfectly motionless.  The hard clutch of his fingers roused a fierce, hot anger.

Joel did not heed her command.  He was forcing her back.  He talked incoherently.  One glimpse of his face added terror to Lucy’s fury.

“Joel, you’re out of your head!” she cried, and she began to wrench and writhe out of his grasp.  Then ensued a short, sharp struggle.  Joel could not hold Lucy, but he tore her blouse into shreds.  It seemed to Lucy that he did that savagely.  She broke free from him, and he lunged at her again.  With all her strength she lashed his face with the heavy leather quirt.  That staggered him.  He almost fell.

Lucy bounded to Sarchedon.  In a rush she was up in the saddle.  Joel was running toward her.  Blood on his face!  Blood on his hands!  He was not the Joel Creech she knew.

“Stop!” cried Lucy, fiercely.  “I’ll run you down!”

The big black plunged at a touch of spur and came down quivering, ready to bolt.

Creech swerved to one side.  His face was lividly white except where the bloody welts crossed it.  His jaw seemed to hang loosely, making speech difficult.

“Jest fer—­thet—­” he panted, hoarsely, “I’ll lay fer you—­an’ I’ll strip you—–­an’ I’ll tie you on a hoss—­an’ I’ll drive you naked through Bostil’s Ford!”

Lucy saw the utter futility of all her good intentions.  Something had snapped in Joel Creech’s mind.  And in hers kindness had given precedence to a fury she did not know was in her.  For the second time she touched a spur to Sarchedon.  He leaped out, flashed past Creech, and thundered up the road.  It was all Lucy could do to break his gait at the first steep rise.

CHAPTER IV

Three wild-horse hunters made camp one night beside a little stream in the Sevier Valley, five hundred miles, as a crow flies, from Bostil’s Ford.

These hunters had a poor outfit, excepting, of course, their horses.  They were young men, rangy in build, lean and hard from life in the saddle, bronzed like Indians, still-faced, and keen-eyed.  Two of them appeared to be tired out, and lagged at the camp-fire duties.  When the meager meal was prepared they sat, cross-legged, before a ragged tarpaulin, eating and drinking in silence.

The sky in the west was rosy, slowly darkening.  The valley floor billowed away, ridged and cut, growing gray and purple and dark.  Walls of stone, pink with the last rays of the setting sun, inclosed the valley, stretching away toward a long, low, black mountain range.

The place was wild, beautiful, open, with something nameless that made the desert different from any other country.  It was, perhaps, a loneliness of vast stretches of valley and stone, clear to the eye, even after sunset.  That black mountain range, which looked close enough to ride to before dark, was a hundred miles distant.