was heavy and smelled of fire, and the sand was blowing here and there.  She had a sense of the bigness, the openness of this valley, and then she realized its wildness and strangeness.  These lonely, isolated monuments made the place different from any she had visited.  They did not seem mere standing rocks.  They seemed to retreat all the time as she approached, and they watched her.  They interested her, made her curious.  What had formed all these strange monuments?  Here the ground was level for miles and miles, to slope gently up to the bases of these huge rocks.  In an old book she had seen pictures of the Egyptian pyramids, but these appeared vaster, higher, and stranger, and they were sheerly perpendicular.

Suddenly Sage King halted sharply, shot up his ears, and whistled.  Lucy was startled.  That from the King meant something.  Hastily, with keen glance she swept the foreground.  A mile on, near the monument, was a small black spot.  It seemed motionless.  But the King’s whistle had proved it to be a horse.  When Lucy had covered a quarter of the intervening distance she could distinguish the horse and that there appeared some thing strange about his position.  Lucy urged Sage King into a lope and soon drew nearer.  The black horse had his head down, yet he did not appear to be grazing.  He was as still as a statue.  He stood just outside a clump of greasewood and cactus.

Suddenly a sound pierced the stillness.  The King jumped and snorted in fright.  For an instant Lucy’s blood ran cold, for it was a horrible cry.  Then she recognized it as the neigh of a horse in agony.  She had heard crippled and dying horses utter that long-drawn and blood-curdling neigh.  The black horse had not moved, so the sound could not have come from him.  Lucy thought Sage King acted more excited than the occasion called for.  Then remembering her father’s warning, she reined in on top of a little knoll, perhaps a hundred yards from where the black horse stood, and she bent her keen gaze forward.

It was a huge, gaunt, shaggy black horse she saw, with the saddle farther up on his shoulders than it should have been.  He stood motionless, as if utterly exhausted.  His forelegs were braced, so that he leaned slightly back.  Then Lucy saw a rope.  It was fast to the saddle and stretched down into the cactus.  There was no other horse in sight, nor any living thing.  The immense monument dominated the scene.  It seemed stupendous to Lucy, sublime, almost frightful.

She hesitated.  She knew there was another horse, very likely at the other end of that lasso.  Probably a rider had been thrown, perhaps killed.  Certainly a horse had been hurt.  Then on the moment rang out the same neigh of agony, only weaker and shorter.  Lucy no longer feared an ambush.  That was a cry which could not be imitated by a man or forced from a horse.  There was probably death, certainly suffering, near at hand.  She spurred the King on.