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 smoke resembled those she had seen before.

“It’s a long way off,” she added.

So she kept on, now and then gazing at the smoke.  As she grew nearer to the first monument she was surprised, then amazed, at its height and surpassing size.  It was mountain-high—­a grand tower—­smooth, worn, glistening, yellow and red.  The trail she had followed petered out in a deep wash, and beyond that she crossed no more trails.  The sage had grown meager and the greasewoods stunted and dead; and cacti appeared on barren places.  The grass had not failed, but it was not rich grass such as the horses and cattle grazed upon miles back on the slope.  The air was hot down here.  The breeze