All of a sudden Lin Slone stood out clearer in her mental vision—­the finest type of a rider she had ever known—­a strong, lithe, magnificent horseman, whose gentleness showed his love for horses, whose roughness showed his power—­a strange, intense, lonely man in whom she had brought out pride, gratitude, kindness, passion, and despair.  She felt her heart swell at the realization that she had changed him, made him kinder, made him divide his love as did her father, made him human, hopeful, longing for a future unfettered by the toils of desert allurement.  She could not control her pride.  She must like him very much.  She confessed that, honestly, without a qualm.  It was only bewildering moments of strange agitation and uncertainty that bothered her.  She had refused to be concerned by them until they had finally impinged upon her peace of mind.  Then they accused her; now she accused herself.  She ought not go to meet Lin Slone any more.

“But then—­the race!” she murmured.  “I couldn’t give that up. . . .  And oh!  I’m afraid the harm is done!  What can I do?”

After the race—­what then?  To be sure, all of Bostil’s Ford would know she had been meeting Slone out in the sage, training his horse.  What would people say?

“Dad will simply be radiant, if he can buy Wildfire—­and a fiend if he can’t,” she muttered.

Lucy saw that her own impulsiveness had amounted to daring.  She had gone too far.  She excused that—­for she had a rider’s blood—­she was Bostil’s girl.  But she had, in her wildness and joy and spirit, spent many hours alone with a rider, to his undoing.  She could not excuse that.  She was ashamed.  What would he say when she told him she could see him no more?  The thought made her weak.  He would accept and go his way—­back to that lonely desert, with only a horse.

“Wildfire doesn’t love him!” she said.

And the scarlet fired her neck and cheek and temple.  That leap of blood seemed to release a riot of emotions.  What had been a torment became a torture.  She turned Sarchedon homeward, but scarcely had faced that way when she wheeled him again.  She rode slowly and she rode swiftly.  The former was hateful because it held her back—­from what she no longer dared think; the latter was fearful because it hurried her on swiftly, irresistibly to her fate.

Lin Slone had changed his camp and had chosen a pass high up where the great walls had began to break into sections.  Here there was intimacy with the sheer cliffs of red and yellow.  Wide avenues between the walls opened on all points of the compass, and that one to the north appeared to be a gateway down into the valley of monuments.  The monuments trooped down into the valley to spread out and grow isolated in the distance.  Slone’s camp was in a clump of cedars surrounding a spring.  There was grass and white sage where rabbits darted in and out.

Lucy did not approach this camp from that roundabout trail which she had made upon the first occasion of her visiting Slone.  He had found an opening in the wall, and by riding this way into the pass Lucy cut off miles.  In fact, the camp was not over fifteen miles from Bostil’s Ford.  It was so close that Lucy was worried lest some horse-tracker should stumble on the trail and follow her up into the pass.