CONTENTS
FOREWORD
THE RAINBOW TRAIL
I. RED LAKE
II. THE SAGI
III. KAYENTA
IV. NEW FRIENDS
V. ON THE TRAIL
VI. IN THE HIDDEN VALLEY
VII. SAGO-LILIES
VIII. THE HOGAN OF NAS TA BEGA
IX. IN THE DESERT CRUCIBLE
X. STONEBRIDGE
XI. AFTER THE TRIAL
XII. THE REVELATION
XIII. THE STORY OF SURPRISE VALLEY
XIV. THE NAVAJO
XV. WILD JUSTICE
XVI. SURPRISE VALLEY
XVII. THE TRAIL TO NONNEZOSHE
XVIII. AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW
XIX. THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO
XX. WILLOW SPRINGS
EPILOGUE.
The spell of the desert comes back to me, as it always will come. I see the veils, like purple smoke, in the canyon, and I feel the silence. And it seems that again I must try to pierce both and to get at the strange wild life of the last American wilderness—wild still, almost, as it ever was.
While this romance is an independent story, yet readers of “Riders of the Purple Sage” will find in it an answer to a question often asked.
I wish to say also this story has appeared serially in a different form in one of the monthly magazines under the title of “The Desert Crucible.” ZANE GREY.
June, 1915.
Shefford halted his tired horse and gazed with slowly realizing eyes.
A league-long slope of sage rolled and billowed down to Red Lake, a dry red basin, denuded and glistening, a hollow in the desert, a lonely and desolate door to the vast, wild, and broken upland beyond.
All day Shefford had plodded onward with the clear horizon-line a thing unattainable; and for days before that he had ridden the wild bare flats and climbed the rocky desert benches. The great colored reaches and steps