CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER I
What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley
Burch laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window.
It was a day typical of early April in New York, rather cold and gray,
with steely sunlight. Spring breathed in the air, but the women passing
along Fifty-seventh Street wore furs and wraps. She heard the distant
clatter of an L train and then the hum of a motor car. A hurdy-gurdy
jarred into the interval of quiet.
“Glenn has been gone over a year,” she mused, “three months over a
year—and of all his strange letters this seems the strangest yet.”
She lived again, for the thousandth time, the last moments she had
spent with him. It had been on New-Year’s Eve, 1918. They had called
upon friends who were staying at the McAlpin, in a suite on the
twenty-first floor overlooking Broadway. And when the last quarter hour
of that eventful and tragic year began slowly to pass with the low
swell of whistles and bells, Carley’s friends had discreetly left her
alone with her lover, at the open window, to watch and hear the old
year out, the new year in. Glenn Kilbourne had returned from France
early that fall, shell-shocked and gassed, and otherwise incapacitated
for service in the army—a wreck of his former sterling self and in many
unaccountable ways a stranger to her. Cold, silent, haunted by
something, he had made her miserable with his aloofness. But as the
bells began to ring out the year that had been his ruin Glenn had drawn
her close, tenderly, passionately, and yet strangely, too.
“Carley, look and listen!” he had whispered.
Under them stretched the great long white flare of Broadway, with its
snow-covered length glittering under a myriad of electric lights. Sixth
Avenue swerved away to the right, a less brilliant lane of blanched
snow. The L trains crept along like huge fire-eyed serpents. The hum of
the ceaseless moving line of motor cars drifted upward faintly, almost
drowned in the rising clamor of the street. Broadway’s gay and
thoughtless crowds surged to and fro, from that height merely a thick
stream of black figures, like contending columns of ants on the march.
And everywhere the monstrous electric signs flared up vivid in white
and red and green; and dimmed and paled, only to flash up again.
Ring out the Old! Ring in the New! Carley had poignantly felt the
sadness of the one, the promise of the other. As one by one the siren
factory whistles opened up with deep, hoarse bellow, the clamor of the
street and the ringing of the bells were lost in a volume of continuous
sound that swelled on high into a magnificent roar. It was the voice of
a city—of a nation. It was the voice of a people crying out the strife
and the agony of the year—pealing forth a prayer for the future.
Glenn had put his lips to her ear: “It’s like the voice in my soul!”
Never would she forget the shock of that. And how she had stood
spellbound, enveloped in the mighty volume of sound no longer
discordant, but full of great, pregnant melody, until the white ball
burst upon the tower of the Times Building, showing the bright figures
1919.
The new year had not been many minutes old when Glenn Kilbourne had
told her he was going West to try to recover his health.
Carley roused out of her memories to take up the letter that had so
perplexed her. It bore the postmark, Flagstaff, Arizona. She reread it
with slow pondering thoughtfulness.
WEST FORK,
_March_ 25.
DEAR CARLEY:
It does seem my neglect in writing you is unpardonable. I used to be a
pretty fair correspondent, but in that as in other things I have
changed.
One reason I have not answered sooner is because your letter was so
sweet and loving that it made me feel an ungrateful and unappreciative
wretch. Another is that this life I now lead does not induce writing. I
am outdoors all day, and when I get back to this cabin at night I am
too tired for anything but bed.
Your imperious questions I must answer—and that _must_, of course, is a
third reason why I have delayed my reply. First, you ask, “Don’t you
love me any more as you used to?”... Frankly, I do not. I am sure my
old love for you, before I went to France, was selfish, thoughtless,
sentimental, and boyish. I am a man now. And my love for you is
different. Let me assure you that it has been about all left to me of
what is noble and beautiful. Whatever the changes in me for the worse,
my love for you, at least, has grown better, finer, purer.
And now for your second question, “Are you coming home as soon as you
are well again?”... Carley, I _am_ well. I have delayed telling you
this because I knew you would expect me to rush back East with the
telling. But—the fact is, Carley, I am not coming—just yet. I wish it
were possible for me to make you understand. For a long time I seem to
have been frozen within. You know when I came back from France I
couldn’t talk. It’s almost as bad as that now. Yet all that I was then
seems to have changed again. It is only fair to you to tell you that,
as I feel now, I hate the city, I hate people, and particularly I hate
that dancing, drinking, lounging set you chase with. I don’t want to
come East until I am over that, you know... Suppose I never get over
it? Well, Carley, you can free yourself from me by one word that I
could never utter. I could never break our engagement. During the hell
I went through in the war my attachment to you saved me from moral
ruin, if it did not from perfect honor and fidelity. This is another
thing I despair of making you understand. And in the chaos I’ve
wandered through _since_ the war my love for you was my only anchor.
You never guessed, did you, that I lived on your letters until I got
well. And now the fact that I might get along without them is no
discredit to their charm or to you.
It is all so hard to put in words, Carley. To lie down with death and
get up with death was nothing. To face one’s degradation was nothing.
But to come home an incomprehensibly changed man—and to see my old life
as strange as if it were the new life of another planet—to try to slip
into the old groove—well, no words of mine can tell you how utterly
impossible it was.
My old job was not open to me, even if I had been able to work. The
government that I fought for left me to starve, or to die of my
maladies like a dog, for all it cared.
I could not live on your money, Carley. My people are poor, as you
know. So there was nothing for me to do but to borrow a little money
from my friends and to come West. I’m glad I had the courage to come.
What this West is I’ll never try to tell you, because, loving the
luxury and excitement and glitter of the city as you do, you’d think I
was crazy.
Getting on here, in my condition, was as hard as trench life. But now,
Carley—something has come to me out of the West. That, too, I am unable
to put into words. Maybe I can give you an inkling of it. I’m strong
enough to chop wood all day. No man or woman passes my cabin in a
month. But I am never lonely. I love these vast red canyon walls
towering above me. And the silence is so sweet. Think of the hellish
din that filled my ears. Even now—sometimes, the brook here changes its
babbling murmur to the roar of war. I never understood anything of the
meaning of nature until I lived under these looming stone walls and
whispering pines.
So, Carley, try to understand me, or at least be kind. You know they
came very near writing, “Gone west!” after my name, and considering
_that_, this “Out West” signifies for me a very fortunate difference. A
tremendous difference! For the present I’ll let well enough alone.
_Adios_. Write soon. Love from
GLENN.
Carley’s second reaction to the letter was a sudden upflashing desire
to see her lover—to go out West and find him. Impulses with her were
rather rare and inhibited, but this one made her tremble. If Glenn was
well again he must have vastly changed from the moody, stone-faced, and
haunted-eyed man who had so worried and distressed her. He had
embarrassed her, too, for sometimes, in her home, meeting young men
there who had not gone into the service, he had seemed to retreat into
himself, singularly aloof, as if his world was not theirs.
Again, with eager eyes and quivering lips, she read the letter. It
contained words that lifted her heart. Her starved love greedily
absorbed them. In them she had excuse for any resolve that might bring
Glenn closer to her. And she pondered over this longing to go to him.
Carley had the means to come and go and live as she liked. She did not
remember her father, who had died when she was a child. Her mother had
left her in the care of a sister, and before the war they had divided
their time between New York and Europe, the Adirondacks and Florida,
Carley had gone in for Red Cross and relief work with more of sincerity
than most of her set. But she was really not used to making any
decision as definite and important as that of going out West alone. She
had never been farther west than Jersey City; and her conception of the
West was a hazy one of vast plains and rough mountains, squalid towns,
cattle herds, and uncouth ill-clad men.
So she carried the letter to her aunt, a rather slight woman with a
kindly face and shrewd eyes, and who appeared somewhat given to
old-fashioned garments.
“Aunt Mary, here’s a letter from Glenn,” said Carley. “It’s more of a
stumper than usual. Please read it.”
“Dear me! You look upset,” replied the aunt, mildly, and, adjusting her
spectacles, she took the letter.
Carley waited impatiently for the perusal, conscious of inward forces
coming more and more to the aid of her impulse to go West. Her aunt
paused once to murmur how glad she was that Glenn had gotten well. Then
she read on to the close.
“Carley, that’s a fine letter,” she said, fervently. “Do you see
through it?”
“No, I don’t,” replied Carley. “That’s why I asked you to read it.”
“Do you still love Glenn as you used to before—”
“Why, Aunt Mary!” exclaimed Carley, in surprise.
“Excuse me, Carley, if I’m blunt. But the fact is young women of modern
times are very different from my kind when I was a girl. You haven’t
acted as though you pined for Glenn. You gad around almost the same as
ever.”
“What’s a girl to do?” protested Carley.
“You are twenty-six years old, Carley,” retorted Aunt Mary.
“Suppose I am. I’m as young—as I ever was.”
“Well, let’s not argue about modern girls and modern times. We never
get anywhere,” returned her aunt, kindly. “But I can tell you something
of what Glenn Kilbourne means in that letter—if you want to hear it.”
“I do—indeed.”
“The war did something horrible to Glenn aside from wrecking his
health. Shell-shock, they said! I don’t understand that. Out of his
mind, they said! But that never was true. Glenn was as sane as I am,
and, my dear, that’s pretty sane, I’ll have you remember. But he must
have suffered some terrible blight to his spirit—some blunting of his
soul. For months after he returned he walked as one in a trance. Then
came a change. He grew restless. Perhaps that change was for the
better. At least it showed he’d roused. Glenn saw you and your friends
and the life you lead, and all the present, with eyes from which the
scales had dropped. He saw what was _wrong_. He never said so to me,
but I knew it. It wasn’t only to get well that he went West. It was to
get away.... And, Carley Burch, if your happiness depends on him you
had better be up and doing—or you’ll _lose_ him!”
“Aunt Mary!” gasped Carley.
“I mean it. That letter shows how near he came to the Valley of the
Shadow—and how he has become a man.... If I were you I’d go out West.
Surely there must be a place where it would be all right for you to
stay.”
“Oh, yes,” replied Carley, eagerly. “Glenn wrote me there was a lodge
where people went in nice weather—right down in the canyon not far from
his place. Then, of course, the town—Flagstaff—isn’t far.... Aunt Mary,
I think I’ll go.”
“I would. You’re certainly wasting your time here.”
“But I could only go for a visit,” rejoined Carley, thoughtfully. “A
month, perhaps six weeks, if I could stand it.”
“Seems to me if you can stand New York you could stand that place,”
said Aunt Mary, dryly.
“The idea of staying away from New York any length of time—why, I
couldn’t do it I... But I can stay out there long enough to bring Glenn
back with me.”
“That may take you longer than you think,” replied her aunt, with a
gleam in her shrewd eyes. “If you want my advice you will surprise
Glenn. Don’t write him—don’t give him a chance to—well to suggest
courteously that you’d better not come just yet. I don’t like his words
‘just yet.’”
“Auntie, you’re—rather—more than blunt,” said Carley, divided between
resentment and amaze. “Glenn would be simply wild to have me come.”
“Maybe he would. Has he ever asked you?”
“No-o—come to think of it, he hasn’t,” replied Carley, reluctantly.
“Aunt Mary, you hurt my feelings.”
“Well, child, I’m glad to learn your feelings are hurt,” returned the
aunt. “I’m sure, Carley, that underneath all this—this blasé ultra
something you’ve acquired, there’s a real heart. Only you must hurry
and listen to it—or—”
“Or what?” queried Carley.
Aunt Mary shook her gray head sagely. “Never mind what. Carley, I’d
like your idea of the most significant thing in Glenn’s letter.”
“Why, his love for me, of course!” replied Carley.
“Naturally you think that. But I don’t. What struck me most were his
words, ‘out of the West.’ Carley, you’d do well to ponder over them.”
“I will,” rejoined Carley, positively. “I’ll do more. I’ll go out to
his wonderful West and see what he meant by them.”
Carley Burch possessed in full degree the prevailing modern craze for
speed. She loved a motor-car ride at sixty miles an hour along a
smooth, straight road, or, better, on the level seashore of Ormond,
where on moonlight nights the white blanched sand seemed to flash
toward her. Therefore quite to her taste was the Twentieth Century
Limited which was hurtling her on the way to Chicago. The unceasingly
smooth and even rush of the train satisfied something in her. An old
lady sitting in an adjoining seat with a companion amused Carley by the
remark: “I wish we didn’t go so fast. People nowadays haven’t time to
draw a comfortable breath. Suppose we should run off the track!”
Carley had no fear of express trains, or motor cars, or transatlantic
liners; in fact, she prided herself in not being afraid of anything.
But she wondered if this was not the false courage of association with
a crowd. Before this enterprise at hand she could not remember anything
she had undertaken alone. Her thrills seemed to be in abeyance to the
end of her journey. That night her sleep was permeated with the steady
low whirring of the wheels. Once, roused by a jerk, she lay awake in
the darkness while the thought came to her that she and all her fellow
passengers were really at the mercy of the engineer. Who was he, and
did he stand at his throttle keen and vigilant, thinking of the lives
intrusted to him? Such thoughts vaguely annoyed Carley, and she
dismissed them.
A long half-day wait in Chicago was a tedious preliminary to the second
part of her journey. But at last she found herself aboard the
California Limited, and went to bed with a relief quite a stranger to
her. The glare of the sun under the curtain awakened her. Propped up on
her pillows, she looked out at apparently endless green fields or
pastures, dotted now and then with little farmhouses and tree-skirted
villages. This country, she thought, must be the prairie land she
remembered lay west of the Mississippi.
Later, in the dining car, the steward smilingly answered her question:
“This is Kansas, and those green fields out there are the wheat that
feeds the nation.”
Carley was not impressed. The color of the short wheat appeared soft
and rich, and the boundless fields stretched away monotonously. She had
not known there was so much flat land in the world, and she imagined it
might be a fine country for automobile roads. When she got back to her
seat she drew the blinds down and read her magazines. Then tiring of
that, she went back to the observation car. Carley was accustomed to
attracting attention, and did not resent it, unless she was annoyed.
The train evidently had a full complement of passengers, who, as far as
Carley could see, were people not of her station in life. The glare
from the many windows, and the rather crass interest of several men,
drove her back to her own section. There she discovered that some one
had drawn up her window shades. Carley promptly pulled them down and
settled herself comfortably. Then she heard a woman speak, not
particularly low: “I thought people traveled west to see the country.”
And a man replied, rather dryly. “Wal, not always.” His companion went
on: “If that girl was mine I’d let down her skirt.” The man laughed and
replied: “Martha, you’re shore behind the times. Look at the pictures
in the magazines.”
Such remarks amused Carley, and later she took advantage of an
opportunity to notice her neighbors. They appeared a rather quaint old
couple, reminding her of the natives of country towns in the
Adirondacks. She was not amused, however, when another of her woman
neighbors, speaking low, referred to her as a “lunger.” Carley
appreciated the fact that she was pale, but she assured herself that
there ended any possible resemblance she might have to a consumptive.
And she was somewhat pleased to hear this woman’s male companion
forcibly voice her own convictions. In fact, he was nothing if not
admiring.
Kansas was interminably long to Carley, and she went to sleep before
riding out of it. Next morning she found herself looking out at the
rough gray and black land of New Mexico. She searched the horizon for
mountains, but there did not appear to be any. She received a vague,
slow-dawning impression that was hard to define. She did not like the
country, though that was not the impression which eluded her. Bare gray
flats, low scrub-fringed hills, bleak cliffs, jumble after jumble of
rocks, and occasionally a long vista down a valley, somehow
compelling—these passed before her gaze until she tired of them. Where
was the West Glenn had written about? One thing seemed sure, and it was
that every mile of this crude country brought her nearer to him. This
recurring thought gave Carley all the pleasure she had felt so far in
this endless ride. It struck her that England or France could be
dropped down into New Mexico and scarcely noticed.
By and by the sun grew hot, the train wound slowly and creakingly
upgrade, the car became full of dust, all of which was disagreeable to
Carley. She dozed on her pillow for hours, until she was stirred by a
passenger crying out, delightedly: “Look! Indians!”
Carley looked, not without interest. As a child she had read about
Indians, and memory returned images both colorful and romantic. From
the car window she espied dusty flat barrens, low squat mud houses, and
queer-looking little people, children naked or extremely ragged and
dirty, women in loose garments with flares of red, and men in white
man’s garb, slovenly and motley. All these strange individuals stared
apathetically as the train slowly passed.
“Indians,” muttered Carley, incredulously. “Well, if they are the noble
red people, my illusions are dispelled.” She did not look out of the
window again, not even when the brakeman called out the remarkable name
of Albuquerque.
Next day Carley’s languid attention quickened to the name of Arizona,
and to the frowning red walls of rock, and to the vast rolling
stretches of cedar-dotted land. Nevertheless, it affronted her. This
was no country for people to live in, and so far as she could see it
was indeed uninhabited. Her sensations were not, however, limited to
sight. She became aware of unfamiliar disturbing little shocks or
vibrations in her ear drums, and after that a disagreeable bleeding of
the nose. The porter told her this was owing to the altitude. Thus, one
thing and another kept Carley most of the time away from the window, so
that she really saw very little of the country. From what she had seen
she drew the conviction that she had not missed much. At sunset she
deliberately gazed out to discover what an Arizona sunset was like just
a pale yellow flare! She had seen better than that above the Palisades.
Not until reaching Winslow did she realize how near she was to her
journey’s end and that she would arrive at Flagstaff after dark. She
grew conscious of nervousness. Suppose Flagstaff were like these other
queer little towns!
Not only once, but several times before the train slowed down for her
destination did Carley wish she had sent Glenn word to meet her. And
when, presently, she found herself standing out in the dark, cold,
windy night before a dim-lit railroad station she more than regretted
her decision to surprise Glenn. But that was too late and she must make
the best of her poor judgment.
Men were passing to and fro on the platform, some of whom appeared to
be very dark of skin and eye, and were probably Mexicans. At length an
expressman approached Carley, soliciting patronage. He took her bags
and, depositing them in a wagon, he pointed up the wide street: “One
block up an’ turn. Hotel Wetherford.” Then he drove off. Carley
followed, carrying her small satchel. A cold wind, driving the dust,
stung her face as she crossed the street to a high sidewalk that
extended along the block. There were lights in the stores and on the
corners, yet she seemed impressed by a dark, cold, windy bigness. Many
people, mostly men, were passing up and down, and there were motor cars
everywhere. No one paid any attention to her. Gaining the corner of the
block, she turned, and was relieved to see the hotel sign. As she
entered the lobby a clicking of pool balls and the discordant rasp of a
phonograph assailed her ears. The expressman set down her bags and left
Carley standing there. The clerk or proprietor was talking from behind
his desk to several men, and there were loungers in the lobby. The air
was thick with tobacco smoke. No one paid any attention to Carley until
at length she stepped up to the desk and interrupted the conversation
there.
“Is this a hotel?” she queried, brusquely.
The shirt-sleeved individual leisurely turned and replied, “Yes,
ma’am.”
And Carley said: “No one would recognize it by the courtesy shown. I
have been standing here waiting to register.”
With the same leisurely case and a cool, laconic stare the clerk turned
the book toward her. “Reckon people round here ask for what they want.”
Carley made no further comment. She assuredly recognized that what she
had been accustomed to could not be expected out here. What she most
wished to do at the moment was to get close to the big open grate where
a cheery red-and-gold fire cracked. It was necessary, however, to
follow the clerk. He assigned her to a small drab room which contained
a bed, a bureau, and a stationary washstand with one spigot. There was
also a chair. While Carley removed her coat and hat the clerk went
downstairs for the rest of her luggage. Upon his return Carley learned
that a stage left the hotel for Oak Creek Canyon at nine o’clock next
morning. And this cheered her so much that she faced the strange sense
of loneliness and discomfort with something of fortitude. There was no
heat in the room, and no hot water. When Carley squeezed the spigot
handle there burst forth a torrent of water that spouted up out of the
washbasin to deluge her. It was colder than any ice water she had ever
felt. It was piercingly cold. Hard upon the surprise and shock Carley
suffered a flash of temper. But then the humor of it struck her and she
had to laugh.
“Serves you right—you spoiled doll of luxury!” she mocked. “This is out
West. Shiver and wait on yourself!”
Never before had she undressed so swiftly nor felt grateful for thick
woollen blankets on a hard bed. Gradually she grew warm. The blackness,
too, seemed rather comforting.
“I’m only twenty miles from Glenn,” she whispered. “How strange! I
wonder will he be glad.” She felt a sweet, glowing assurance of that.
Sleep did not come readily. Excitement had laid hold of her nerves, and
for a long time she lay awake. After a while the chug of motor cars,
the click of pool balls, the murmur of low voices all ceased. Then she
heard a sound of wind outside, an intermittent, low moaning, new to her
ears, and somehow pleasant. Another sound greeted her—the musical
clanging of a clock that struck the quarters of the hour. Some time
late sleep claimed her.
Upon awakening she found she had overslept, necessitating haste upon
her part. As to that, the temperature of the room did not admit of
leisurely dressing. She had no adequate name for the feeling of the
water. And her fingers grew so numb that she made what she considered a
disgraceful matter of her attire.
Downstairs in the lobby another cheerful red fire burned in the grate.
How perfectly satisfying was an open fireplace! She thrust her numb
hands almost into the blaze, and simply shook with the tingling pain
that slowly warmed out of them. The lobby was deserted. A sign directed
her to a dining room in the basement, where of the ham and eggs and
strong coffee she managed to partake a little. Then she went upstairs
into the lobby and out into the street.
A cold, piercing air seemed to blow right through her. Walking to the
near corner, she paused to look around. Down the main street flowed a
leisurely stream of pedestrians, horses, cars, extending between two
blocks of low buildings. Across from where she stood lay a vacant lot,
beyond which began a line of neat, oddly constructed houses, evidently
residences of the town. And then lifting her gaze, instinctively drawn
by something obstructing the sky line, she was suddenly struck with
surprise and delight.
“Oh! how perfectly splendid!” she burst out.
Two magnificent mountains loomed right over her, sloping up with
majestic sweep of green and black timber, to a ragged tree-fringed snow
area that swept up cleaner and whiter, at last to lift pure glistening
peaks, noble and sharp, and sunrise-flushed against the blue.
Carley had climbed Mont Blanc and she had seen the Matterhorn, but they
had never struck such amaze and admiration from her as these twin peaks
of her native land.
“What mountains are those?” she asked a passer-by.
“San Francisco Peaks, ma’am,” replied the man.
“Why, they can’t be over a mile away!” she said.
“Eighteen miles, ma’am,” he returned, with a grin. “Shore this Arizonie
air is deceivin’.”
“How strange,” murmured Carley. “It’s not that way in the Adirondacks.”
She was still gazing upward when a man approached her and said the
stage for Oak Creek Canyon would soon be ready to start, and he wanted
to know if her baggage was ready. Carley hurried back to her room to
pack.
She had expected the stage would be a motor bus, or at least a large
touring car, but it turned out to be a two-seated vehicle drawn by a
team of ragged horses. The driver was a little wizen-faced man of
doubtful years, and he did not appear obviously susceptible to the
importance of his passenger. There was considerable freight to be
hauled, besides Carley’s luggage, but evidently she was the only
passenger.
“Reckon it’s goin’ to be a bad day,” said the driver. “These April days
high up on the desert are windy an’ cold. Mebbe it’ll snow, too. Them
clouds hangin’ around the peaks ain’t very promisin’. Now, miss,
haven’t you a heavier coat or somethin’?”
“No, I have not,” replied Carley. “I’ll have to stand it. Did you say
this was desert?”
“I shore did. Wal, there’s a hoss blanket under the seat, an’ you can
have that,” he replied, and, climbing to the seat in front of Carley,
he took up the reins and started the horses off at a trot.
At the first turning Carley became specifically acquainted with the
driver’s meaning of a bad day. A gust of wind, raw and penetrating,
laden with dust and stinging sand, swept full in her face. It came so
suddenly that she was scarcely quick enough to close her eyes. It took
considerable clumsy effort on her part with a handkerchief, aided by
relieving tears, to clear her sight again. Thus uncomfortably Carley
found herself launched on the last lap of her journey.
All before her and alongside lay the squalid environs of the town.
Looked back at, with the peaks rising behind, it was not unpicturesque.
But the hard road with its sheets of flying dust, the bleak railroad
yards, the round pens she took for cattle corrals, and the sordid
debris littering the approach to a huge sawmill,—these were offensive
in Carley’s sight. From a tall dome-like stack rose a yellowish smoke
that spread overhead, adding to the lowering aspect of the sky. Beyond
the sawmill extended the open country sloping somewhat roughly, and
evidently once a forest, but now a hideous bare slash, with ghastly
burned stems of trees still standing, and myriads of stumps attesting
to denudation.
The bleak road wound away to the southwest, and from this direction
came the gusty wind. It did not blow regularly so that Carley could be
on her guard. It lulled now and then, permitting her to look about, and
then suddenly again whipping dust into her face. The smell of the dust
was as unpleasant as the sting. It made her nostrils smart. It was
penetrating, and a little more of it would have been suffocating. And
as a leaden gray bank of broken clouds rolled up the wind grew stronger
and the air colder. Chilled before, Carley now became thoroughly cold.
There appeared to be no end to the devastated forest land, and the
farther she rode the more barren and sordid grew the landscape. Carley
forgot about the impressive mountains behind her. And as the ride wore
into hours, such was her discomfort and disillusion that she forgot
about Glenn Kilbourne. She did not reach the point of regretting her
adventure, but she grew mightily unhappy. Now and then she espied
dilapidated log cabins and surroundings even more squalid than the
ruined forest. What wretched abodes! Could it be possible that people
had lived in them? She imagined men had but hardly women and children.
Somewhere she had forgotten an idea that women and children were
extremely scarce in the West.
Straggling bits of forest—yellow pines, the driver called the
trees—began to encroach upon the burned-over and arid barren land. To
Carley these groves, by reason of contrast and proof of what once was,
only rendered the landscape more forlorn and dreary. Why had these
miles and miles of forest been cut? By money grubbers, she supposed,
the same as were devastating the Adirondacks. Presently, when the
driver had to halt to repair or adjust something wrong with the
harness, Carley was grateful for a respite from cold inaction. She got
out and walked. Sleet began to fall, and when she resumed her seat in
the vehicle she asked the driver for the blanket to cover her. The
smell of this horse blanket was less endurable than the cold. Carley
huddled down into a state of apathetic misery. Already she had enough
of the West.
But the sleet storm passed, the clouds broke, the sun shone through,
greatly mitigating her discomfort. By and by the road led into a
section of real forest, unspoiled in any degree. Carley saw large gray
squirrels with tufted ears and white bushy tails. Presently the driver
pointed out a flock of huge birds, which Carley, on second glance,
recognized as turkeys, only these were sleek and glossy, with flecks of
bronze and black and white, quite different from turkeys back East.
“There must be a farm near,” said Carley, gazing about.
“No, ma’am. Them’s wild turkeys,” replied the driver, “an’ shore the
best eatin’ you ever had in your life.”
A little while afterwards, as they were emerging from the woodland into
more denuded country, he pointed out to Carley a herd of gray
white-rumped animals that she took to be sheep.
“An’ them’s antelope,” he said. “Once this desert was overrun by
antelope. Then they nearly disappeared. An’ now they’re increasin’
again.”
More barren country, more bad weather, and especially an exceedingly
rough road reduced Carley to her former state of dejection. The jolting
over roots and rocks and ruts was worse than uncomfortable. She had to
hold on to the seat to keep from being thrown out. The horses did not
appreciably change their gait for rough sections of the road. Then a
more severe jolt brought Carley’s knee in violent contact with an iron
bolt on the forward seat, and it hurt her so acutely that she had to
bite her lips to keep from screaming. A smoother stretch of road did
not come any too soon for her.
It led into forest again. And Carley soon became aware that they had at
last left the cut and burned-over district of timberland behind. A cold
wind moaned through the treetops and set the drops of water pattering
down upon her. It lashed her wet face. Carley closed her eyes and
sagged in her seat, mostly oblivious to the passing scenery. “The girls
will never believe this of me,” she soliloquized. And indeed she was
amazed at herself. Then thought of Glenn strengthened her. It did not
really matter what she suffered on the way to him. Only she was
disgusted at her lack of stamina, and her appalling sensitiveness to
discomfort.
“Wal, hyar’s Oak Creek Canyon,” called the driver.
Carley, rousing out of her weary preoccupation, opened her eyes to see
that the driver had halted at a turn of the road, where apparently it
descended a fearful declivity.
The very forest-fringed earth seemed to have opened into a deep abyss,
ribbed by red rock walls and choked by steep mats of green timber. The
chasm was a V-shaped split and so deep that looking downward sent at
once a chill and a shudder over Carley. At that point it appeared
narrow and ended in a box. In the other direction, it widened and
deepened, and stretched farther on between tremendous walls of red, and
split its winding floor of green with glimpses of a gleaming creek,
bowlder-strewn and ridged by white rapids. A low mellow roar of rushing
waters floated up to Carley’s ears. What a wild, lonely, terrible
place! Could Glenn possibly live down there in that ragged rent in the
earth? It frightened her—the sheer sudden plunge of it from the
heights. Far down the gorge a purple light shone on the forested floor.
And on the moment the sun burst through the clouds and sent a golden
blaze down into the depths, transforming them incalculably. The great
cliffs turned gold, the creek changed to glancing silver, the green of
trees vividly freshened, and in the clefts rays of sunlight burned into
the blue shadows. Carley had never gazed upon a scene like this.
Hostile and prejudiced, she yet felt wrung from her an acknowledgment
of beauty and grandeur. But wild, violent, savage! Not livable! This
insulated rift in the crust of the earth was a gigantic burrow for
beasts, perhaps for outlawed men—not for a civilized person—not for
Glenn Kilbourne.
“Don’t be scart, ma’am,” spoke up the driver. “It’s safe if you’re
careful. An’ I’ve druv this manys the time.”
Carley’s heartbeats thumped at her side, rather denying her taunted
assurance of fearlessness. Then the rickety vehicle started down at an
angle that forced her to cling to her seat.