Besides, perhaps they felt a little humiliation at abandoning a chase which he chose to keep up.

Anyway, they were gone, apparently without breakfast.
The morning was clear, cool, with the air dark like that before a storm, and in the east, over the steely wall of stone, shone a redness growing brighter.
Slone looked away to the west, down the trail taken by his comrades, but he saw nothing moving against that cedar-dotted waste.
"Good-by," he said, and he spoke as if he was saying good-by to more than comrades.
"I reckon I won't see Sevier Village soon again--an' maybe never," he soliloquized.
There was no one to regret him, unless it was old Mother Hall, who had been kind to him on those rare occasions when he got out of the wilderness.

Still, it was with regret that he gazed away across the red valley to the west.

Slone had no home.

His father and mother had been lost in the massacre of a wagon-train by Indians, and he had been one of the few saved and brought to Salt Lake.