“Ah!” said the rider, and then he watched the other lines creeping together.  How slowly fire moved, he thought.  The red stallion would have every chance to run between those lines, if he dared.  But a wild horse feared nothing like fire.  This one would not run the gantlet of flames.  Nevertheless, Slone felt more and more relieved as the lines closed.  The hours of the night dragged past until at length one long, continuous line of fire spread level across the valley, its bright, red line broken only where the monuments of stone were silhouetted against it.

The darkness of the valley changed.  The light of the moon changed.  The radiance of the stars changed.  Either the line of fire was finding denser fuel to consume or it was growing appreciably closer, for the flames began to grow, to leap, and to flare.

Slone strained his ears for the thud of hoofs on sand.

The time seemed endless in its futility of results, but fleeting after it had passed; and he could tell how the hours fled by the ever-recurring need to replenish the little fire he kept burning in the pass.

A broad belt of valley grew bright in the light, and behind it loomed the monuments, weird and dark, with columns of yellow and white smoke wreathing them.

Suddenly Slone’s sensitive ear vibrated to a thrilling sound.  He leaned down to place his ear to the sand.  Rapid, rhythmic beat of hoofs made him leap to his feet, reaching for his lasso with right hand and a gun with his left.

Nagger lifted his head, sniffed the air, and snorted.  Slone peered into the black belt of gloom that lay below him.  It would be hard to see a horse there, unless he got high enough to be silhouetted against that line of fire now flaring to the sky.  But he heard the beat of hoofs, swift, sharp, louder—­louder.  The night shadows were deceptive.  That wonderful light confused him, made the place unreal.  Was he dreaming?  Or had the long chase and his privations unhinged his mind?  He reached for Nagger.  No!  The big black was real, alive, quivering, pounding the sand.  He scented an enemy.

Once more Slone peered down into the void or what seemed a void.  But it, too, had changed, lightened.  The whole valley was brightening.  Great palls of curling smoke rose white and yellow, to turn back as the monuments met their crests, and then to roll upward, blotting out the stars.  It was such a light as he had never seen, except in dreams.  Pale moonlight and dimmed starlight and wan dawn all vague and strange and shadowy under the wild and vivid light of burning grass.

In the pale path before Slone, that fanlike slope of sand which opened down into the valley, appeared a swiftly moving black object, like a fleeting phantom.  It was a phantom horse.  Slone felt that his eyes, deceived by his mind, saw racing images.  Many a wild chase he had lived in dreams on some far desert.  But what was that beating in his ears—­sharp, swift, even, rhythmic?  Never had his ears played him false.  Never had he heard things in his dreams.  That running object was a horse and he was coming like the wind.  Slone felt something grip his heart.  All the time and endurance and pain and thirst and suspense and longing and hopelessness—­the agony of the whole endless chase—­ closed tight on his heart in that instant.