第30章

From time to time his horse went through grass, and its dry, crackling rustle, showing how it would burn, was music to Slone.Gradually the monuments began to loom up, bold and black against the blue sky, with stars seemingly hanging close over them.Slone had calculated that the basin was smaller than it really was, in both length and breadth.This worried him.Wildfire might see or hear or scent him, and make a break back to the pass and thus escape.Slone was glad when the huge, dark monuments were indistinguishable from the black, frowning wall.He had to go slower here, because of the darkness.But at last he reached the slow rise of jumbled rock that evidently marked the extent of weathering on that side.Here he turned to the right and rode out into the valley.The floor was level and thickly overgrown with long, dead grass and dead greasewood, as dry as tinder.It was easy to account for the dryness;neither snow nor rain had visited that valley for many months.Slone whipped one of the sticks in the wind and soon had the smoldering end red and showering sparks.Then he dropped the stick in the grass, with curious intent and a strange feeling of regret.

Instantly the grass blazed with a little sputtering roar.Nagger snorted.

"Wildfire!" exclaimed Slone.That word was a favorite one with riders, and now Slone used it both to call out his menace to the stallion and to express his feeling for that blaze, already running wild.

Without looking back Slone rode across the valley, dropping a glowing stick every quarter of a mile.When he reached the other side there were a dozen fires behind him, burning slowly, with white smoke rising lazily.Then he loped Nagger along the side back to the sandy ascent, and on up to the mouth of the pass.There he searched for tracks.Wildfire had not gone out, and Slone experienced relief and exultation.He took up a position in the middle of the narrowest part of the pass, and there, with Nagger ready for anything, he once more composed himself to watch and wait.

Far across the darkness of the valley, low down, twelve lines of fire, widely separated, crept toward one another.They appeared thin and slow, with only an occasional leaping flame.And some of the black spaces must have been monuments, blotting out the creeping snail-lines of red.Slone watched, strangely fascinated.

"What do you think of that?" he said, aloud, and he meant his query for Wildfire.

As he watched the lines perceptibly lengthened and brightened and pale shadows of smoke began to appear.Over at the left of the valley the two brightest fires, the first he had started, crept closer and closer together.They seemed long in covering distance.But not a breath of wind stirred, and besides they really might move swiftly, without looking so to Slone.When the two lines met a sudden and larger blaze rose.

"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.