CHAPTER I

For some reason the desert scene before Lucy Bostil awoke varying
emotions--a sweet gratitude for the fullness of her life there at the
Ford, yet a haunting remorse that she could not be wholly content--a
vague loneliness of soul--a thrill and a fear for the strangely calling
future, glorious, unknown.

She longed for something to happen. It might be terrible, so long as it
was wonderful. This day, when Lucy had stolen away on a forbidden
horse, she was eighteen years old. The thought of her mother, who had
died long ago on their way into this wilderness, was the one drop of
sadness in her joy. Lucy loved everybody at Bostil's Ford and everybody
loved her. She loved all the horses except her father's favorite racer,
that perverse devil of a horse, the great Sage King.

Lucy was glowing and rapt with love for all she beheld from her lofty
perch: the green-and-pink blossoming hamlet beneath her, set between
the beauty of the gray sage expanse and the ghastliness of the barren
heights; the swift Colorado sullenly thundering below in the abyss; the
Indians in their bright colors, riding up the river trail; the eagle
poised like a feather on the air, and a beneath him the grazing cattle
making black dots on the sage; the deep velvet azure of the sky; the
golden lights on the bare peaks and the lilac veils in the far ravines;
the silky rustle of a canyon swallow as he shot downward in the sweep
of the wind; the fragrance of cedar, the flowers of the spear-pointed
mescal; the brooding silence, the beckoning range, the purple distance.

Whatever it was Lucy longed for, whatever was whispered by the wind and
written in the mystery of the waste of sage and stone, she wanted it to
happen there at Bostil's Ford. She had no desire for civilization, she
flouted the idea of marrying the rich rancher of Durango. Bostil's
sister, that stern but lovable woman who had brought her up and taught
her, would never persuade her to marry against her will. Lucy imagined
herself like a wild horse--free, proud, untamed, meant for the desert;
and here she would live her life. The desert and her life seemed as
one, yet in what did they resemble each other--in what of this scene
could she read the nature of her future?

Shudderingly she rejected the red, sullen, thundering river, with its
swift, changeful, endless, contending strife--for that was tragic. And
she rejected the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split
and canyoned, so grim and aloof--for that was barren. But she accepted
the vast sloping valley of sage, rolling gray and soft and beautiful,
down to the dim mountains and purple ramparts of the horizon. Lucy did
not know what she yearned for, she did not know why the desert called
to her, she did not know in what it resembled her spirit, but she did
know that these three feelings were as one, deep in her heart. For ten
years, every day of her life, she had watched this desert scene, and
never had there been an hour that it was not different, yet the same.
Ten years--and she grew up watching, feeling--till from the desert's
thousand moods she assimilated its nature, loved her bonds, and could
never have been happy away from the open, the color, the freedom, the
wildness. On this birthday, when those who loved her said she had
become her own mistress, she acknowledged the claim of the desert
forever. And she experienced a deep, rich, strange happiness.

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!