Hers always then the mutable and immutable desert, the leagues and leagues of
slope and sage and rolling ridge, the great canyons and the giant cliffs, the
dark river with its mystic thunder of waters, the pine-fringed plateaus, the
endless stretch of horizon, with its lofty, isolated, noble monuments, and the
bold ramparts with their beckoning beyond! Hers always the desert seasons: the
shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the
gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms;
the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the
sky, with the black tempests hanging here and there over the peaks, dark veils
floating down and rainbows everywhere, and the lacy waterfalls upon the
glistening cliffs and the thunder of the red floods; and the glorious golden
autumn when it was always afternoon and time stood still! Hers always the
rides in the open, with the sun at her back and the wind in her face! And hers
surely, sooner or later, the nameless adventure which had its inception in the
strange yearning of her heart and presaged its fulfilment somewhere down that
trailless sage-slope she loved so well!

Bostil's house was a crude but picturesque structure of red stone and white
clay and bleached cottonwoods, and it stood at the outskirts of the cluster of
green-inclosed cabins which composed the hamlet. Bostil was wont to say that
in all the world there could hardly be a grander view than the outlook down
that gray sea of rolling sage, down to the black-fringed plateaus and the
wild, blue-rimmed and gold-spired horizon.

One morning in early spring, as was Bostil's custom, he ordered the racers to
be brought from the corrals and turned loose on the slope. He loved to sit
there and watch his horses graze, but ever he saw that the riders were close
at hand, and that the horses did not get out on the slope of sage. He sat back
and gloried in the sight. He owned bands of mustangs; near by was a field of