I
One afternoon that spring Claude was sitting on the long flight
of granite steps that leads up to the State House in Denver. He
had been looking at the collection of Cliff Dweller remains in
the Capitol, and when he came out into the sunlight the faint
smell of fresh-cut grass struck his nostrils and persuaded him to
linger. The gardeners were giving the grounds their first light
mowing. All the lawns on the hill were bright with daffodils and
hyacinths. A sweet, warm wind blew over the grass, drying the
waterdrops. There had been showers in the afternoon, and the sky
was still a tender, rainy blue, where it showed through the
masses of swiftly moving clouds.
Claude had been away from home for nearly a month. His father had
sent him out to see Ralph and the new ranch, and from there he
went on to Colorado Springs and Trinidad. He had enjoyed
travelling, but now that he was back in Denver he had that
feeling of loneliness which often overtakes country boys in a
city; the feeling of being unrelated to anything, of not
mattering to anybody. He had wandered about Colorado Springs
wishing he knew some of the people who were going in and out of
the houses; wishing that he could talk to some of those pretty
girls he saw driving their own cars about the streets, if only to
say a few words. One morning when he was walking out in the hills
a girl passed him, then slowed her car to ask if she could give
him a lift. Claude would have said that she was just the sort who
would never stop to pick him up, yet she did, and she talked to
him pleasantly all the way back to town. It was only twenty
minutes or so, but it was worth everything else that happened on
his trip. When she asked him where she should put him down, he
said at the Antlers, and blushed so furiously that she must have
known at once he wasn't staying there.
He wondered this afternoon how many discouraged young men had sat
here on the State House steps and watched the sun go down behind
the mountains. Every one was always saying it was a fine thing to
be young; but it was a painful thing, too. He didn't believe
older people were ever so wretched. Over there, in the golden
light, the mass of mountains was splitting up into four distinct
ranges, and as the sun dropped lower the peaks emerged in
perspective, one behind the other. It was a lonely splendour that
only made the ache in his breast the stronger. What was the
matter with him, he asked himself entreatingly. He must answer
that question before he went home again.
The statue of Kit Carson on horseback, down in the Square,
pointed Westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more.
There was still South America; perhaps he could find something
below the Isthmus. Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the
world; his mother could see saints and martyrs behind it.
Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed. Even his
father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a
new country. It was a storm that died down at last,--but what a
pity not to do anything with it! A waste of power--for it was a
kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against
the ruddy light, so deep in his struggling thoughts that he did
not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped
to look at him.
The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest. He saw a young man
standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists
clenched in an attitude of arrested action,--his sandy hair, his
tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique
rays. Claude would have been astonished if he could have known
how he seemed to this stranger.