Carley burst in upon her aunt.
“Look at me, Aunt Mary!” she cried, radiant and exultant. “I’m going
back out West to marry Glenn and live his life!”
The keen old eyes of her aunt softened and dimmed. “Dear Carley, I’ve
known that for a long time. You’ve found yourself at last.”
Then Carley breathlessly babbled her hastily formed plans, every word
of which seemed to rush her onward.
“You’re going to surprise Glenn again?” queried Aunt Mary.
“Oh, I must! I want to see his face when I tell him.”
“Well, I hope he won’t surprise _you_,” declared the old lady. “When
did you hear from him last?”
“In January. It seems ages—but—Aunt Mary, you don’t imagine Glenn—”
“I imagine nothing,” interposed her aunt. “It will turn out happily and
I’ll have some peace in my old age. But, Carley, what’s to become of
me?”
“Oh, I never thought!” replied Carley, blankly. “It will be lonely for
you. Auntie, I’ll come back in the fall for a few weeks. Glenn will let
me.”
“_Let_ you? Ye gods! So you’ve come to that? Imperious Carley Burch!...
Thank Heaven, you’ll now be satisfied to be let do things.”
“I’d—I’d crawl for him,” breathed Carley.
“Well, child, as you can’t be practical, I’ll have to be,” replied Aunt
Mary, seriously. “Fortunately for you I am a woman of quick decision.
Listen. I’ll go West with you. I want to see the Grand Canyon. Then
I’ll go on to California, where I have old friends I’ve not seen for
years. When you get your new home all fixed up I’ll spend awhile with
you. And if I want to come back to New York now and then I’ll go to a
hotel. It is settled. I think the change will benefit me.”
“Auntie, you make me very happy. I could ask no more,” said Carley.
Swiftly as endless tasks could make them the days passed. But those on
the train dragged interminably.
Carley sent her aunt through to the Canyon while she stopped off at
Flagstaff to store innumerable trunks and bags. The first news she
heard of Glenn and the Hutters was that they had gone to the Tonto
Basin to buy hogs and would be absent at least a month. This gave birth
to a new plan in Carley’s mind. She would doubly surprise Glenn.
Wherefore she took council with some Flagstaff business men and engaged
them to set a force of men at work on the Deep Lake property, making
the improvements she desired, and hauling lumber, cement, bricks,
machinery, supplies—all the necessaries for building construction. Also
she instructed them to throw up a tent house for her to live in during
the work, and to engage a reliable Mexican man with his wife for
servants. When she left for the Canyon she was happier than ever before
in her life.
It was near the coming of sunset when Carley first looked down into the
Grand Canyon. She had forgotten Glenn’s tribute to this place. In her
rapturous excitement of preparation and travel the Canyon had been
merely a name. But now she saw it and she was stunned.
What a stupendous chasm, gorgeous in sunset color on the heights,
purpling into mystic shadows in the depths! There was a wonderful
brightness of all the millions of red and yellow and gray surfaces
still exposed to the sun. Carley did not feel a thrill, because feeling
seemed inhibited. She looked and looked, yet was reluctant to keep on
looking. She possessed no image in mind with which to compare this
grand and mystic spectacle. A transformation of color and shade
appeared to be going on swiftly, as if gods were changing the scenes of
a Titanic stage. As she gazed the dark fringed line of the north rim
turned to burnished gold, and she watched that with fascinated eyes. It
turned rose, it lost its fire, it faded to quiet cold gray. The sun had
set.
Then the wind blew cool through the pinyons on the rim. There was a
sweet tang of cedar and sage on the air and that indefinable fragrance
peculiar to the canyon country of Arizona. How it brought back to
Carley remembrance of Oak Creek! In the west, across the purple notches
of the abyss, a dull gold flare showed where the sun had gone down.
In the morning at eight o’clock there were great irregular black
shadows under the domes and peaks and escarpments. Bright Angel Canyon
was all dark, showing dimly its ragged lines. At noon there were no
shadows and all the colossal gorge lay glaring under the sun. In the
evening Carley watched the Canyon as again the sun was setting.
Deep dark-blue shadows, like purple sails of immense ships, in
wonderful contrast with the bright sunlit slopes, grew and rose toward
the east, down the canyons and up the walls that faced the west. For a
long while there was no red color, and the first indication of it was a
dull bronze. Carley looked down into the void, at the sailing birds, at
the precipitous slopes, and the dwarf spruces and the weathered old
yellow cliffs. When she looked up again the shadows out there were no
longer dark. They were clear. The slopes and depths and ribs of rock
could be seen through them. Then the tips of the highest peaks and
domes turned bright red. Far to the east she discerned a strange
shadow, slowly turning purple. One instant it grew vivid, then began to
fade. Soon after that all the colors darkened and slowly the pale gray
stole over all.
At night Carley gazed over and into the black void. But for the awful
sense of depth she would not have known the Canyon to be there. A
soundless movement of wind passed under her. The chasm seemed a grave
of silence. It was as mysterious as the stars and as aloof and as
inevitable. It had held her senses of beauty and proportion in
abeyance.
At another sunrise the crown of the rim, a broad belt of bare rock,
turned pale gold under its fringed dark line of pines. The tips of the
peak gleamed opal. There was no sunrise red, no fire. The light in the
east was a pale gold under a steely green-blue sky. All the abyss of
the Canyon was soft, gray, transparent, and the belt of gold broadened
downward, making shadows on the west slopes of the mesas and
escarpments. Far down in the shadows she discerned the river, yellow,
turgid, palely gleaming. By straining her ears Carley heard a low dull
roar as of distant storm. She stood fearfully at the extreme edge of a
stupendous cliff, where it sheered dark and forbidding, down and down,
into what seemed red and boundless depths of Hades. She saw gold spots
of sunlight on the dark shadows, proving that somewhere, impossible to
discover, the sun was shining through wind-worn holes in the sharp
ridges. Every instant Carley grasped a different effect. Her studied
gaze absorbed an endless changing. And at last she realized that sun
and light and stars and moon and night and shade, all working
incessantly and mutably over shapes and lines and angles and surfaces
too numerous and too great for the sight of man to hold, made an
ever-changing spectacle of supreme beauty and colorful grandeur.
She talked very little while at the Canyon. It silenced her. She had
come to see it at the critical time of her life and in the right mood.
The superficialities of the world shrunk to their proper
insignificance. Once she asked her aunt: “Why did not Glenn bring me
here?” As if this Canyon proved the nature of all things!
But in the end Carley found that the rending strife of the
transformation of her attitude toward life had insensibly ceased. It
had ceased during the long watching of this cataclysm of nature, this
canyon of gold-banded black-fringed ramparts, and red-walled mountains
which sloped down to be lost in purple depths. That was final proof of
the strength of nature to soothe, to clarify, to stabilize the tried
and weary and upward-gazing soul. Stronger than the recorded deeds of
saints, stronger than the eloquence of the gifted uplifters of men,
stronger than any words ever written, was the grand, brooding,
sculptured aspect of nature. And it must have been so because thousands
of years before the age of saints or preachers—before the fret and
symbol and figure were cut in stone—man must have watched with
thought-developing sight the wonders of the earth, the monuments of
time, the glooming of the dark-blue sea, the handiwork of God.
In May, Carley returned to Flagstaff to take up with earnest
inspiration the labors of homebuilding in a primitive land.
It required two trucks to transport her baggage and purchases out to
Deep Lake. The road was good for eighteen miles of the distance, until
it branched off to reach her land, and from there it was desert rock
and sand. But eventually they made it; and Carley found herself and
belongings dumped out into the windy and sunny open. The moment was
singularly thrilling and full of transport. She was free. She had
shaken off the shackles. She faced lonely, wild, barren desert that
must be made habitable by the genius of her direction and the labor of
her hands. Always a thought of Glenn hovered tenderly, dreamily in the
back of her consciousness, but she welcomed the opportunity to have a
few weeks of work and activity and solitude before taking up her life
with him. She wanted to adapt herself to the metamorphosis that had
been wrought in her.
To her amazement and delight, a very considerable progress had been
made with her plans. Under a sheltered red cliff among the cedars had
been erected the tents where she expected to live until the house was
completed. These tents were large, with broad floors high off the
ground, and there were four of them. Her living tent had a porch under
a wide canvas awning. The bed was a boxlike affair, raised off the
floor two feet, and it contained a great, fragrant mass of cedar boughs
upon which the blankets were to be spread. At one end was a dresser
with large mirror, and a chiffonier. There were table and lamp, a low
rocking chair, a shelf for books, a row of hooks upon which to hang
things, a washstand with its necessary accessories, a little stove and
a neat stack of cedar chips and sticks. Navajo rugs on the floor lent
brightness and comfort.
Carley heard the rustling of cedar branches over her head, and saw
where they brushed against the tent roof. It appeared warm and fragrant
inside, and protected from the wind, and a subdued white light filtered
through the canvas. Almost she felt like reproving herself for the
comfort surrounding her. For she had come West to welcome the hard
knocks of primitive life.
It took less than an hour to have her trunks stored in one of the spare
tents, and to unpack clothes and necessaries for immediate use. Carley
donned the comfortable and somewhat shabby outdoor garb she had worn at
Oak Creek the year before; and it seemed to be the last thing needed to
make her fully realize the glorious truth of the present.
“I’m here,” she said to her pale, yet happy face in the mirror. “The
impossible has happened. I have accepted Glenn’s life. I have answered
that strange call out of the West.”
She wanted to throw herself on the sunlit woolly blankets of her bed
and hug them, to think and think of the bewildering present happiness,
to dream of the future, but she could not lie or sit still, nor keep
her mind from grasping at actualities and possibilities of this place,
nor her hands from itching to do things.
It developed, presently, that she could not have idled away the time
even if she had wanted to, for the Mexican woman came for her, with
smiling gesticulation and jabber that manifestly meant dinner. Carley
could not understand many Mexican words, and herein she saw another
task. This swarthy woman and her sloe-eyed husband favorably impressed
Carley.
Next to claim her was Hoyle, the superintendent. “Miss Burch,” he said,
“in the early days we could run up a log cabin in a jiffy. Axes,
horses, strong arms, and a few pegs—that was all we needed. But this
house you’ve planned is different. It’s good you’ve come to take the
responsibility.”
Carley had chosen the site for her home on top of the knoll where Glenn
had taken her to show her the magnificent view of mountains and desert.
Carley climbed it now with beating heart and mingled emotions. A
thousand times already that day, it seemed, she had turned to gaze up
at the noble white-clad peaks. They were closer now, apparently looming
over her, and she felt a great sense of peace and protection in the
thought that they would always be there. But she had not yet seen the
desert that had haunted her for a year. When she reached the summit of
the knoll and gazed out across the open space it seemed that she must
stand spellbound. How green the cedared foreground—how gray and barren
the downward slope—how wonderful the painted steppes! The vision that
had lived in her memory shrank to nothingness. The reality was immense,
more than beautiful, appalling in its isolation, beyond comprehension
with its lure and strength to uplift.
But the superintendent drew her attention to the business at hand.
Carley had planned an L-shaped house of one story. Some of her ideas
appeared to be impractical, and these she abandoned. The framework was
up and half a dozen carpenters were lustily at work with saw and
hammer.
“We’d made better progress if this house was in an ordinary place,”
explained Hoyle. “But you see the wind blows here, so the framework had
to be made as solid and strong as possible. In fact, it’s bolted to the
sills.”
Both living room and sleeping room were arranged so that the Painted
Desert could be seen from one window, and on the other side the whole
of the San Francisco Mountains. Both rooms were to have open
fireplaces. Carley’s idea was for service and durability. She thought
of comfort in the severe winters of that high latitude, but elegance
and luxury had no more significance in her life.
Hoyle made his suggestions as to changes and adaptations, and,
receiving her approval, he went on to show her what had been already
accomplished. Back on higher ground a reservoir of concrete was being
constructed near an ever-flowing spring of snow water from the peaks.
This water was being piped by gravity to the house, and was a matter of
greatest satisfaction to Hoyle, for he claimed that it would never
freeze in winter, and would be cold and abundant during the hottest and
driest of summers. This assurance solved the most difficult and serious
problem of ranch life in the desert.
Next Hoyle led Carley down off the knoll to the wide cedar valley
adjacent to the lake. He was enthusiastic over its possibilities. Two
small corrals and a large one had been erected, the latter having a low
flat barn connected with it. Ground was already being cleared along the
lake where alfalfa and hay were to be raised. Carley saw the blue and
yellow smoke from burning brush, and the fragrant odor thrilled her.
Mexicans were chopping the cleared cedars into firewood for winter use.
The day was spent before she realized it. At sunset the carpenters and
mechanics left in two old Ford cars for town. The Mexicans had a camp
in the cedars, and the Hoyles had theirs at the spring under the knoll
where Carley had camped with Glenn and the Hutters. Carley watched the
golden rosy sunset, and as the day ended she breathed deeply as if in
unutterable relief. Supper found her with appetite she had long since
lost. Twilight brought cold wind, the staccato bark of coyotes, the
flicker of camp fires through the cedars. She tried to embrace all her
sensations, but they were so rapid and many that she failed.
The cold, clear, silent night brought back the charm of the desert. How
flaming white the stars! The great spire-pointed peaks lifted cold
pale-gray outlines up into the deep star-studded sky. Carley walked a
little to and fro, loath to go to her tent, though tired. She wanted
calm. But instead of achieving calmness she grew more and more towards
a strange state of exultation.
Westward, only a matter of twenty or thirty miles, lay the deep rent in
the level desert—Oak Creek Canyon. If Glenn had been there this night
would have been perfect, yet almost unendurable. She was again grateful
for his absence. What a surprise she had in store for him! And she
imagined his face in its change of expression when she met him. If only
he never learned of her presence in Arizona until she made it known in
person! That she most longed for. Chances were against it, but then her
luck had changed. She looked to the eastward where a pale luminosity of
afterglow shone in the heavens. Far distant seemed the home of her
childhood, the friends she had scorned and forsaken, the city of
complaining and striving millions. If only some miracle might illumine
the minds of her friends, as she felt that hers was to be illumined
here in the solitude. But she well realized that not all problems could
be solved by a call out of the West. Any open and lonely land that
might have saved Glenn Kilbourne would have sufficed for her. It was
the spirit of the thing and not the letter. It was work of any kind and
not only that of ranch life. Not only the raising of hogs!
Carley directed stumbling steps toward the light of her tent. Her eyes
had not been used to such black shadow along the ground. She had, too,
squeamish feminine fears of hydrophobia skunks, and nameless animals or
reptiles that were imagined denizens of the darkness. She gained her
tent and entered. The Mexican, Gino, as he called himself, had lighted
her lamp and fire. Carley was chilled through, and the tent felt so
warm and cozy that she could scarcely believe it. She fastened the
screen door, laced the flaps across it, except at the top, and then
gave herself up to the lulling and comforting heat.
There were plans to perfect; innumerable things to remember; a car and
accessories, horses, saddles, outfits to buy. Carley knew she should
sit down at her table and write and figure, but she could not do it
then.
For a long time she sat over the little stove, toasting her knees and
hands, adding some chips now and then to the red coals. And her mind
seemed a kaleidoscope of changing visions, thoughts, feelings. At last
she undressed and blew out the lamp and went to bed.
Instantly a thick blackness seemed to enfold her and silence as of a
dead world settled down upon her. Drowsy as she was, she could not
close her eyes nor refrain from listening. Darkness and silence were
tangible things. She felt them. And they seemed suddenly potent with
magic charm to still the tumult of her, to soothe and rest, to create
thoughts she had never thought before. Rest was more than selfish
indulgence. Loneliness was necessary to gain consciousness of the soul.
Already far back in the past seemed Carley’s other life.
By and by the dead stillness awoke to faint sounds not before
perceptible to her—a low, mournful sough of the wind in the cedars,
then the faint far-distant note of a coyote, sad as the night and
infinitely wild.
Days passed. Carley worked in the mornings with her hands and her
brains. In the afternoons she rode and walked and climbed with a double
object, to work herself into fit physical condition and to explore
every nook and corner of her six hundred and forty acres.
Then what she had expected and deliberately induced by her efforts
quickly came to pass. Just as the year before she had suffered
excruciating pain from aching muscles, and saddle blisters, and walking
blisters, and a very rending of her bones, so now she fell victim to
them again. In sunshine and rain she faced the desert. Sunburn and
sting of sleet were equally to be endured. And that abomination, the
hateful blinding sandstorm, did not daunt her. But the weary hours of
abnegation to this physical torture at least held one consoling
recompense as compared with her experience of last year, and it was
that there was no one interested to watch for her weaknesses and
failures and blunders. She could fight it out alone.
Three weeks of this self-imposed strenuous training wore by before
Carley was free enough from weariness and pain to experience other
sensations. Her general health, evidently, had not been so good as when
she had first visited Arizona. She caught cold and suffered other ills
attendant upon an abrupt change of climate and condition. But doggedly
she kept at her task. She rode when she should have been in bed; she
walked when she should have ridden; she climbed when she should have
kept to level ground. And finally by degrees so gradual as not to be
noticed except in the sum of them she began to mend.
Meanwhile the construction of her house went on with uninterrupted
rapidity. When the low, slanting, wide-eaved roof was completed Carley
lost further concern about rainstorms. Let them come. When the plumbing
was all in and Carley saw verification of Hoyle’s assurance that it
would mean a gravity supply of water ample and continual, she lost her
last concern as to the practicability of the work. That, and the
earning of her endurance, seemed to bring closer a wonderful reward,
still nameless and spiritual, that had been unattainable, but now
breathed to her on the fragrant desert wind and in the brooding
silence.
The time came when each afternoon’s ride or climb called to Carley with
increasing delight. But the fact that she must soon reveal to Glenn her
presence and transformation did not seem to be all the cause. She could
ride without pain, walk without losing her breath, work without
blistering her hands; and in this there was compensation. The building
of the house that was to become a home, the development of water
resources and land that meant the making of a ranch—these did not
altogether constitute the anticipation of content. To be active, to
accomplish things, to recall to mind her knowledge of manual training,
of domestic science, of designing and painting, to learn to cook—these
were indeed measures full of reward, but they were not all. In her
wondering, pondering meditation she arrived at the point where she
tried to assign to her love the growing fullness of her life. This,
too, splendid and all-pervading as it was, she had to reject. Some
exceedingly illusive and vital significance of life had insidiously
come to Carley.
One afternoon, with the sky full of white and black rolling clouds and
a cold wind sweeping through the cedars, she halted to rest and escape
the chilling gale for a while. In a sunny place, under the lee of a
gravel bank, she sought refuge. It was warm here because of the
reflected sunlight and the absence of wind. The sand at the bottom of
the bank held a heat that felt good to her cold hands. All about her
and over her swept the keen wind, rustling the sage, seeping the sand,
swishing the cedars, but she was out of it, protected and insulated.
The sky above showed blue between the threatening clouds. There were no
birds or living creatures in sight. Certainly the place had little of
color or beauty or grace, nor could she see beyond a few rods. Lying
there, without any particular reason that she was conscious of, she
suddenly felt shot through and through with exhilaration.
Another day, the warmest of the spring so far, she rode a Navajo
mustang she had recently bought from a passing trader; and at the
farthest end of her section, in rough wooded and ridged ground she had
not explored, she found a canyon with red walls and pine trees and
gleaming streamlet and glades of grass and jumbles of rock. It was a
miniature canyon, to be sure, only a quarter of a mile long, and as
deep as the height of a lofty pine, and so narrow that it seemed only
the width of a lane, but it had all the features of Oak Creek Canyon,
and so sufficed for the exultant joy of possession. She explored it.
The willow brakes and oak thickets harbored rabbits and birds. She saw
the white flags of deer running away down the open. Up at the head
where the canyon boxed she flushed a flock of wild turkeys. They ran
like ostriches and flew like great brown chickens. In a cavern Carley
found the den of a bear, and in another place the bleached bones of a
steer.
She lingered here in the shaded depths with a feeling as if she were
indeed lost to the world. These big brown and seamy-barked pines with
their spreading gnarled arms and webs of green needles belonged to her,
as also the tiny brook, the blue bells smiling out of the ferns, the
single stalk of mescal on a rocky ledge.
Never had sun and earth, tree and rock, seemed a part of her being
until then. She would become a sun-worshiper and a lover of the earth.
That canyon had opened there to sky and light for millions of years;
and doubtless it had harbored sheep herders, Indians, cliff dwellers,
barbarians. She was a woman with white skin and a cultivated mind, but
the affinity for them existed in her. She felt it, and that an
understanding of it would be good for body and soul.
Another day she found a little grove of jack pines growing on a flat
mesa-like bluff, the highest point on her land. The trees were small
and close together, mingling their green needles overhead and their
discarded brown ones on the ground. From here Carley could see afar to
all points of the compass—the slow green descent to the south and the
climb to the black-timbered distance; the ridged and canyoned country
to the west, red vents choked with green and rimmed with gray; to the
north the grand upflung mountain kingdom crowned with snow; and to the
east the vastness of illimitable space, the openness and wildness, the
chased and beaten mosaic of colored sands and rocks.
Again and again she visited this lookout and came to love its
isolation, its command of wondrous prospects, its power of suggestion
to her thoughts. She became a creative being, in harmony with the live
things around her. The great life-dispensing sun poured its rays down
upon her, as if to ripen her; and the earth seemed warm, motherly,
immense with its all-embracing arms. She no longer plucked the
bluebells to press to her face, but leaned to them. Every blade of
gramma grass, with its shining bronze-tufted seed head, had
significance for her. The scents of the desert began to have meaning
for her. She sensed within her the working of a great leveling process
through which supreme happiness would come.
June! The rich, thick, amber light, like a transparent reflection from
some intense golden medium, seemed to float in the warm air. The sky
became an azure blue. In the still noontides, when the bees hummed
drowsily and the flies buzzed, vast creamy-white columnar clouds rolled
up from the horizon, like colossal ships with bulging sails. And summer
with its rush of growing things was at hand.
Carley rode afar, seeking in strange places the secret that eluded her.
Only a few days now until she would ride down to Oak Creek Canyon!
There was a low, singing melody of wind in the cedars. The earth became
too beautiful in her magnified sight. A great truth was dawning upon
her—that the sacrifice of what she had held as necessary to the
enjoyment of life—that the strain of conflict, the labor of hands, the
forcing of weary body, the enduring of pain, the contact with the
earth—had served somehow to rejuvenate her blood, quicken her pulse,
intensify her sensorial faculties, thrill her very soul, lead her into
the realm of enchantment.
One afternoon a dull, lead-black-colored cinder knoll tempted her to
explore its bare heights. She rode up until her mustang sank to his
knees and could climb no farther. From there she essayed the ascent on
foot. It took labor. But at last she gained the summit, burning,
sweating, panting.
The cinder hill was an extinct crater of a volcano. In the center of it
lay a deep bowl, wondrously symmetrical, and of a dark lusterless hue.
Not a blade of grass was there, nor a plant. Carley conceived a desire
to go to the bottom of this pit. She tried the cinders of the edge of
the slope. They had the same consistency as those of the ascent she had
overcome. But here there was a steeper incline. A tingling rush of
daring seemed to drive her over the rounded rim, and, once started
down, it was as if she wore seven-league boots. Fear left her. Only an
exhilarating emotion consumed her. If there were danger, it mattered
not. She strode down with giant steps, she plunged, she started
avalanches to ride them until they stopped, she leaped, and lastly she
fell, to roll over the soft cinders to the pit.
There she lay. It seemed a comfortable resting place. The pit was
scarcely six feet across. She gazed upward and was astounded. How steep
was the rounded slope on all sides! There were no sides; it was a
circle. She looked up at a round lake of deep translucent sky. Such
depth of blue, such exquisite rare color! Carley imagined she could
gaze through it to the infinite beyond.
She closed her eyes and rested. Soon the laboring of heart and breath
calmed to normal, so that she could not hear them. Then she lay
perfectly motionless. With eyes shut she seemed still to look, and what
she saw was the sunlight through the blood and flesh of her eyelids. It
was red, as rare a hue as the blue of sky. So piercing did it grow that
she had to shade her eyes with her arm.
Again the strange, rapt glow suffused her body. Never in all her life
had she been so absolutely alone. She might as well have been in her
grave. She might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in
spirit in the glory of the physical that had escaped her in life. And
she abandoned herself to this influence.
She loved these dry, dusty cinders; she loved the crater here hidden
from all save birds; she loved the desert, the earth—above all, the
sun. She was a product of the earth—a creation of the sun. She had been
an infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life
under the blazing magic of the sun. Soon her spirit would abandon her
body and go on, while her flesh and bone returned to dust. This frame
of hers, that carried the divine spark, belonged to the earth. She had
only been ignorant, mindless, feelingless, absorbed in the seeking of
gain, blind to the truth. She had to give. She had been created a
woman; she belonged to nature; she was nothing save a mother of the
future. She had loved neither Glenn Kilbourne nor life itself. False
education, false standards, false environment had developed her into a
woman who imagined she must feed her body on the milk and honey of
indulgence.
She was abased now—woman as animal, though saved and uplifted by her
power of immortality. Transcendental was her female power to link life
with the future. The power of the plant seed, the power of the earth,
the heat of the sun, the inscrutable creation-spirit of nature, almost
the divinity of God—these were all hers because she was a woman. That
was the great secret, aloof so long. That was what had been wrong with
life—the woman blind to her meaning, her power, her mastery.
So she abandoned herself to the woman within her. She held out her arms
to the blue abyss of heaven as if to embrace the universe. She was
Nature. She kissed the dusty cinders and pressed her breast against the
warm slope. Her heart swelled to bursting with a glorious and
unutterable happiness.
That afternoon as the sun was setting under a gold-white scroll of
cloud Carley got back to Deep Lake.
A familiar lounging figure crossed her sight. It approached to where
she had dismounted. Charley, the sheep herder of Oak Creek!
“Howdy!” he drawled, with his queer smile. “So it was you-all who had
this Deep Lake section?”
“Yes. And how are you, Charley?” she replied, shaking hands with him.
“Me? Aw, I’m tip-top. I’m shore glad you got this ranch. Reckon I’ll
hit you for a job.”
“I’d give it to you. But aren’t you working for the Hutters?”
“Nope. Not any more. Me an’ Stanton had a row with them.”
How droll and dry he was! His lean, olive-brown face, with its
guileless clear eyes and his lanky figure in blue jeans vividly
recalled Oak Creek to Carley.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” returned she haltingly, somehow checked in her warm
rush of thought. “Stanton?... Did he quit too?”
“Yep. He sure did.”
“What was the trouble?”
“Reckon because Flo made up to Kilbourne,” replied Charley, with a
grin.
“Ah! I—I see,” murmured Carley. A blankness seemed to wave over her. It
extended to the air without, to the sense of the golden sunset. It
passed. What should she ask—what out of a thousand sudden flashing
queries? “Are—are the Hutters back?”
“Sure. Been back several days. I reckoned Hoyle told you. Mebbe he
didn’t know, though. For nobody’s been to town.”
“How is—how are they all?” faltered Carley. There was a strange wall
here between her thought and her utterance.
“Everybody satisfied, I reckon,” replied Charley.
“Flo—how is she?” burst out Carley.
“Aw, Flo’s loony over her husband,” drawled Charley, his clear eyes on
Carley’s.
“Husband!” she gasped.
“Sure. Flo’s gone an’ went an’ done what I swore on.”
“_Who?_” whispered Carley, and the query was a terrible blade piercing
her heart.
“Now who’d you reckon on?” asked Charley, with his slow grin.
Carley’s lips were mute.
“Wal, it was your old beau thet you wouldn’t have,” returned Charley,
as he gathered up his long frame, evidently to leave. “Kilbourne! He
an’ Flo came back from the Tonto all hitched up.”