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Page 3
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This Etext has been prepared by Bill Brewer, billbrewer@ttu.edu
THE CALL OF THE CANYON
By Zane Grey
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.
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