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.

The shades of night fell swiftly, and it was dark by the time the hunters
finished the meal. Then the campfire had burned low. One of the three dragged
branches of dead cedars and replenished the fire. Quickly it flared up, with
the white flame and crackle characteristic of dry cedar. The night wind had
risen, moaning through the gnarled, stunted cedars near by, and it blew the
fragrant wood-smoke into the faces of the two hunters, who seemed too tired to
move.