The rider smiled faintly again.  How he stared with his strained, dark eyes!  His face showed ghastly through the thin, soft beard and the tan.  Lucy found his right arm badly bruised, but not broken.  She made sure his collar-bones and shoulder-blades were intact.  Broken ribs were harder to locate; still, as he did not feel pain from pressure, she concluded there were no fractures there.  With her assistance he moved his legs, proving no broken bones there.

“I’m afraid it’s my—­spine,” he said.

“But you raised your head once,” she replied.  “If your back was—­was broken or injured you couldn’t raise your head.”

“So I couldn’t.  I guess I’m just knocked out.  I was—­pretty weak before Wildfire knocked me—­off Nagger.”

“Wildfire?”

“That’s the red stallion’s name.”

“Oh, he’s named already?”

“I named him—­long ago.  He’s known on many a range.”

“Where?”

“I think far north of here.  I—­trailed him—­days—­weeks—­months.  We crossed the great canyon—­”

“The Grand Canyon?”

“It must be that.”

“The Grand Canyon is down there,” said Lucy, pointing.  “I live on it. . . .  You’ve come a long way.”

“Hundreds of miles! . . .  Oh, the ground I covered that awful canyon country! . . .  But I stayed with Wildfire.  An’ I put a rope on him.  An’ he got away. . . .  An’ it was a boy—­no—­a girl who—­saved him for me—­an’ maybe saved my life, too!”

Lucy looked away from the dark, staring eyes.  A light in them confused her.

“Never mind me.  You say you were weak?  Have you been ill?”

“No, miss, just starved. . . .  I starved on Wildfire’s trail.”

Lucy ran to her saddle and got the biscuits out of the pockets of her coat, and she ran back to the rider.

“Here.  I never thought.  Oh, you’ve had a hard time of it!  I understand.  That wonderful flame of a horse!  I’d have stayed, too.  My father was a rider once.  Bostil.  Did you ever hear of him?”

“Bostil.  The name—­I’ve heard.”  Then the rider lay thinking, as he munched a biscuit.  “Yes, I remember, but it was long ago.  I spent a night with a wagon-train, a camp of many men and women, religious people, working into Utah.  Bostil had a boat at the crossing of the Fathers.”

“Yes, they called the Ferry that.”

“I remember well now.  They said Bostil couldn’t count his horses—­that he was a rich man, hard on riders—­an’ he’d used a gun more than once.”

Lucy bowed her head.  “Yes, that’s my dad.”

The rider did not seem to see how he had hurt her.

“Here we are talking—­wasting time,” she said.  “I must start home.  You can’t be moved.  What shall I do?”

“That’s for you to say, Bostil’s daughter.”

“My name’s Lucy,” replied the girl, blushing painfully, “I mean I’ll be glad to do anything you think best.”