第95章

In the morning the bright, broad day, with its dispelling reality, made Slone regard himself differently.Things that oppressed him in the dark of night vanished in the light of the sun.Still, he was curious about the Creeches, and after he had done his morning's work he strolled out to take up their trail.It was not hard to follow in the lane, for no other horses had gone in that direction since the Creeches had left.

Once up on the wide, windy slope the reach and color and fragrance seemed to call to Slone irresistibly, and he fell to trailing these tracks just for the love of a skill long unused.Half a mile out the road turned toward Durango.

But the Creeches did not continue on that road.They entered the sage.

Instantly Slone became curious.

He followed the tracks to a pile of rocks where the Creeches had made a greasewood fire and had cooked a meal.This was strange--within a mile of the Ford, where Brackton and others would have housed them.What was stranger was the fact that the trail started south from there and swung round toward the village.

Slone's heart began to thump.But he forced himself to think only of these tracks and not any significance they might have.He trailed the men down to a bench on the slope, a few hundred yards from Bostil's grove, and here a trampled space marked where a halt had been made and a wait.

And here Slone could no longer restrain conjecture and dread.He searched and searched.He got on his knees.He crawled through the sage all around the trampled space.Suddenly his heart seemed to receive a stab.He had found prints of Lucy's boots in the soft earth! And he leaped up, wild and fierce, needing to know no more.

He ran back to his cabin.He never thought of Bostil, of Holley, of anything except the story revealed in those little boot-tracks.He packed a saddle-bag with meat and biscuits, filled a canvas water-bottle, and, taking them and his rifle, he hurried out to the corral.First he took Nagger down to Brackton's pasture and let him in.Then returning, he went at the fiery stallion as he had not gone in many a day, roped him, saddled him, mounted him, and rode off with a hard, grim certainty that in Wildfire was Lucy's salvation.

Four hours later Slone halted on the crest of a ridge, in the cover of sparse cedars, and surveyed a vast, gray, barren basin yawning and reaching out to a rugged, broken plateau.

He expected to find Joel Creech returning on the back-trail, and he had taken the precaution to ride on one side of the tracks he was following.He did not want Joel to cross his trail.Slone had long ago solved the meaning of the Creeches' flight.They would use Lucy to ransom Bostil's horses, and more than likely they would not let her go back.That they had her was enough for Slone.

He was grim and implacable.

The eyes of the wild-horse hunter had not searched that basin long before they picked out a dot which was not a rock or a cedar, but a horse.Slone watched it grow, and, hidden himself, he held his post until he knew the rider was Joel Creech.Slone drew his own horse back and tied him to a sage-bush amidst some scant grass.Then he returned to watch.It appeared Creech was climbing the ridge below Slone, and some distance away.It was a desperate chance Joel ran then, for Slone had set out to kill him.It was certain that if Joel had happened to ride near instead of far, Slone could not have helped but kill him.As it was, he desisted because he realized that Joel would acquaint Bostil with the abducting of Lucy, and it might be that this would be well.

Slone was shaking when young Creech passed up and out of sight over the ridge--shaking with the deadly grip of passion such as he had never known.He waited, slowly gaining control, and at length went back for Wildfire.

Then he rode boldly forth on the trail.He calculated that old Creech would take Lucy to some wild retreat in the canyons and there wait for Joel and the horses.Creech had almost certainly gone on and would be unaware of a pursuer so closely on his trail.Slone took the direction of the trail, and he saw a low, dark notch in the rocky wall in the distance.After that he paid no more attention to choosing good ground for Wildfire than he did to the trail.The stallion was more tractable than Slone had ever found him.He loved the open.

He smelled the sage and the wild.He settled down into his long, easy, swinging lope which seemed to eat up the miles.Slone was obsessed with thoughts centering round Lucy, and time and distance were scarcely significant.

The sun had dipped full red in a golden west when Slone reached the wall of rocks and the cleft where Creech's tracks and Lucy's, too, marked the camp.

Slone did not even dismount.Riding on into the cleft, he wound at length into a canyon and out of that into a larger one, where he found that Lucy had remembered to leave a trail, and down this to a break in a high wall, and through it to another winding, canyon.The sun set, but Slone kept on as long as he could see the trail, and after that, until an intersecting canyon made it wise for him to halt.