第31章

A broad belt of valley grew bright in the light, and behind it loomed the monuments, weird and dark, with columns of yellow and white smoke wreathing them.

Suddenly Slone's sensitive ear vibrated to a thrilling sound.He leaned down to place his ear to the sand.Rapid, rhythmic beat of hoofs made him leap to his feet, reaching for his lasso with right hand and a gun with his left.

Nagger lifted his head, sniffed the air, and snorted.Slone peered into the black belt of gloom that lay below him.It would be hard to see a horse there, unless he got high enough to be silhouetted against that line of fire now flaring to the sky.But he heard the beat of hoofs, swift, sharp, louder--louder.The night shadows were deceptive.That wonderful light confused him, made the place unreal.Was he dreaming? Or had the long chase and his privations unhinged his mind? He reached for Nagger.No! The big black was real, alive, quivering, pounding the sand.He scented an enemy.

Once more Slone peered down into the void or what seemed a void.But it, too, had changed, lightened.The whole valley was brightening.Great palls of curling smoke rose white and yellow, to turn back as the monuments met their crests, and then to roll upward, blotting out the stars.It was such a light as he had never seen, except in dreams.Pale moonlight and dimmed starlight and wan dawn all vague and strange and shadowy under the wild and vivid light of burning grass.

In the pale path before Slone, that fanlike slope of sand which opened down into the valley, appeared a swiftly moving black object, like a fleeting phantom.It was a phantom horse.Slone felt that his eyes, deceived by his mind, saw racing images.Many a wild chase he had lived in dreams on some far desert.But what was that beating in his ears--sharp, swift, even, rhythmic?

Never had his ears played him false.Never had he heard things in his dreams.

That running object was a horse and he was coming like the wind.Slone felt something grip his heart.All the time and endurance and pain and thirst and suspense and longing and hopelessness--the agony of the whole endless chase--closed tight on his heart in that instant.

The running horse halted just in the belt of light cast by the burning grass.

There he stood sharply defined, clear as a cameo, not a hundred paces from Slone.It was Wildfire.

Slone uttered an involuntary cry.Thrill on thrill shot through him.Delight and hope and fear and despair claimed him in swift, successive flashes.And then again the ruling passion of a rider held him--the sheer glory of a grand and unattainable horse.For Slone gave up Wildfire in that splendid moment.

How had he ever dared to believe he could capture that wild stallion? Slone looked and looked, filling his mind, regretting nothing, sure that the moment was reward for all he had endured.

The weird lights magnified Wildfire and showed him clearly.He seemed gigantic.He shone black against the fire.His head was high, his mane flying.

Behind him the fire flared and the valley-wide column of smoke rolled majestically upward, and the great monuments seemed to retreat darkly and mysteriously as the flames advanced beyond them.It was a beautiful, unearthly spectacle, with its silence the strangest feature.

But suddenly Wildfire broke that silence with a whistle which to Slone's overstrained faculties seemed a blast as piercing as the splitting sound of lightning.And with the whistle Wildfire plunged up toward the pass.Slone yelled at the top of his lungs and fired his gun before he could terrorize the stallion and drive him back down the slope.Soon Wildfire became again a running black object, and then he disappeared.

The great line of fire had gotten beyond the monuments and now stretched unbroken across the valley from wall to slope.Wildfire could never pierce that line of flames.And now Slone saw, in the paling sky to the east, that dawn was at hand.