Lucy gazed about her at the great looming red walls and out through the avenues to the gray desert beyond.  This adventure of hers would soon have an end, for the day of the races was not far distant, and after that it was obvious she would not have occasion to meet Slone.  To think of never coming to the pass again gave Lucy a pang.  Unconsciously she meant that she would never ride up here again, because Slone would not be here.  A wind always blew through the pass, and that was why the sand was so clean and hard.  To-day it was a pleasant wind, not hot, nor laden with dust, and somehow musical in the cedars.  The blue smoke from Slone’s fire curled away and floated out of sight.  It was lonely, with the haunting presence of the broken walls ever manifest.  But the loneliness seemed full of content.  She no longer wondered at Slone’s desert life.  That might be well for a young man, during those years when adventure and daring called him, but she doubted that it would be well for all of a man’s life.  And only a little of it ought to be known by a woman.  She saw how the wildness and loneliness and brooding of such a life would prevent a woman’s development.  Yet she loved it all and wanted to live near it, so that when the need pressed her she could ride out into the great open stretches and see the dark monuments grow nearer and nearer, till she was under them, in the silent and colored shadows.

Slone returned presently with Wildfire.  The stallion shone like a flame in the sunlight.  His fear and hatred of Slone showed in the way he obeyed.  Slone had mastered him, and must always keep the upper hand of him.  It had from the first been a fight between man and beast, and Lucy believed it would always be so.

But Wildfire was a different horse when he saw Lucy.  Day by day evidently Slone loved him more and tried harder to win a little of what Wildfire showed at sight of Lucy.  Still Slone was proud of Lucy’s control over the stallion.  He was just as much heart and soul bent on winning the great race as Lucy was.  She had ridden Wildfire bareback at first, and then they had broken him to the saddle.

It was serious business, that training of Wildfire, and Slone had peculiar ideas regarding it.  Lucy rode him up and down the pass until he was warm.  Then Slone got on Sarchedon.  Wildfire always snorted and showed fight at sight of Sage King or Nagger, and the stallion Sarchedon infuriated him because Sarchedon showed fight, too.  Slone started out ahead of Lucy, and then they raced down the long pass.  The course was hard-packed sand.  Fast as Sarchedon was, and matchless as a horseman as was Slone, the race was over almost as soon as it began.  Wildfire ran indeed like fire before the wind.  He wanted to run, and the other horse made him fierce.  Like a burr Lucy stuck low over his neck, a part of the horse, and so light he would not have known he was carrying her but for the repeated calls in his ears.  Lucy never spurred him.  She absolutely