The third day's
travel consisted of forty miles or more through level pine forest, dry and
odorous, but lacking the freshness and beauty of the forest on the north side
of the canyon. On this south side a strange feature was that all the water,
when there was any, ran away from the rim. Slone camped this night at a muddy
pond in the woods, where Wildfire's tracks showed plainly.
On the following day Slone rode out of the forest into a country of scanty
cedars, bleached and stunted, and out of this to the edge of a plateau, from
which the shimmering desert flung its vast and desolate distances, forbidding
and menacing. This was not the desert upland country of Utah, but a naked and
bony world of colored rock and sand--a painted desert of heat and wind and
flying sand and waterless wastes and barren ranges. But it did not daunt
Slone. For far down on the bare, billowing ridges moved a red speck, at a
snail's pace, a slowly moving dot of color which was Wildfire.
On open ground like this, Nagger, carrying two hundred and fifty pounds,
showed his wonderful quality.
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