round, so she mounted from a rock. She
took to the road, and then the first trail into the sage, intending to
trot him ten or fifteen miles down into the valley, and give him some
fast, warm work on the return.

The day was early in May and promised to grow hot. There was not a
cloud in the blue sky. The wind, laden with the breath of sage, blew
briskly from the west. All before Lucy lay the vast valley, gray and
dusky gray, then blue, then purple where the monuments stood, and,
farther still, dark ramparts of rock. Lucy had a habit of dreaming
while on horseback, a habit all the riders had tried to break, but she
did not give it rein while she rode Sarchedon, and assuredly now, up on
the King, she never forgot him for an instant. He shied at mockingbirds
and pack-rats and blowing blossoms and even at butterflies; and he did
it, Lucy thought, just because he was full of mischief. Sage King had
been known to go steady when there had been reason to shy. He did not
like Lucy and he chose to torment her. Finally he earned a good dig
from a spur, and then, with swift pounding of hoofs, he plunged and
veered and danced in the sage. Lucy kept her temper, which was what
most riders did not do, and by patience and firmness pulled Sage King
out of his prancing back into the trail. He was not the least
cross-grained, and, having had his little spurt, he settled down into
easy going.

In an hour Lucy was ten miles or more from home, and farther down in
the valley than she had ever been. In fact, she had never before been
down the long slope to the valley floor. How changed the horizon
became! The monuments loomed up now, dark, sentinel-like, and strange.
The first one, a great red rock, seemed to her some five miles away. It
was lofty, straight-sided, with a green slope at its base. And beyond
that the other monuments stretched out down the valley. Lucy decided to
ride as far as the first one before turning back. Always these
monuments had fascinated her, and this was her opportunity to ride near
one. How lofty they were, how wonderfully colored, and how comely!

Presently, over the left, where the monuments were thicker, and
gradually merged their slopes and lines and bulk into the yellow walls,
she saw low, drifting clouds of smoke.

"Well, what's that, I wonder?" she mused. To see smoke on the horizon
in that direction was unusual, though out toward Durango the grassy
benches would often burn over. And these low clouds of sm