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Page 61
With breaking heart she whirled away from him and hurried down the slope
toward the trail. The shade of the forest enveloped her. Peering back
through the trees, she saw Glenn standing where she had left him, as if
already stricken by the loneliness that must be his lot. A sob broke from
Carley's throat. She hated herself. She was in a terrible state of
conflict. Decision had been wrenched from her, but she sensed unending
strife. She dared not look back again. Stumbling and breathless, she
hurried on. How changed the atmosphere and sunlight and shadow of the
canyon! The looming walls had pitiless eyes for her flight. When she
crossed the mouth of West Fork an almost irresistible force breathed to her
from under the stately pines.
An hour later she had bidden farewell to the weeping Mrs. Hutter, and to
the white-faced Flo, and Lolomi Lodge, and the murmuring waterfall, and the
haunting loneliness of Oak Creek Canyon.
CHAPTER VIII
At Flagstaff, where Carley arrived a few minutes before train time, she was
too busily engaged with tickets and baggage to think of herself or of the
significance of leaving Arizona. But as she walked into the Pullman she
overheard a passenger remark, "Regular old Arizona sunset," and that shook
her heart. Suddenly she realized she had come to love the colorful sunsets,
to watch and wait for them. And bitterly she thought how that was her way
to learn the value of something when it was gone.
The jerk and start of the train affected her with singular depressing
shock. She had burned her last bridge behind her. Had she unconsciously
hoped for some incredible reversion of Glenn's mind or of her own? A sense
of irreparable loss flooded over her--the first check to shame and humiliation.
From her window she looked out to the southwest. Somewhere across the cedar
and pine-greened uplands lay Oak Creek Canyon, going to sleep in its purple
and gold shadows of sunset. Banks of broken clouds hung to the horizon,
like continents and islands and reefs set in a turquoise sea. Shafts of
sunlight streaked down through creamy-edged and purple-centered clouds.
Vast flare of gold dominated the sunset background.
When the train rounded a curve Carley's strained vision became filled with
the upheaved bulk of the San Francisco Mountains. Ragged gray grass slopes
and green forests on end, and black fringed sky lines, all pointed to the
sharp clear peaks spearing the sky. And as she watched, the peaks slowly
flushed with sunset hues, and the sky flared golden, and the strength of
the eternal mountains stood out in sculptured sublimity. Every day for two
months and more Carley had watched these peaks, at all hours, in every
mood; and they had unconsciously become a part of her thought. The train
was relentlessly whirling her eastward. Soon they must become a memory.
Tears blurred her sight. Poignant regret seemed added to the anguish she
was suffering. Why had she not learned sooner to see the glory of the
mountains, to appreciate the beauty and solitude? Why had she not
understood herself?
The next day through New Mexico she followed magnificent ranges and
valleys--so different from the country she had seen coming West--so
supremely beautiful that she wondered if she had only acquired the harvest
of a seeing eye.
But it was at sunset of the following clay, when the train was speeding
down the continental slope of prairie land beyond the Rockies, that the
West took its ruthless revenge.
Masses of strange cloud and singular light upon the green prairie, and a
luminosity in the sky, drew Carley to the platform of her car, which was
the last of the train. There she stood, gripping the iron gate, feeling the
wind whip her hair and the iron-tracked ground speed from under her,
spellbound and stricken at the sheer wonder and glory of the firmament, and
the mountain range that it canopied so exquisitely.
A rich and mellow light, singularly clear, seemed to flood out of some
unknown source. For the sun was hidden. The clouds just above Carley hung
low, and they were like thick, heavy smoke, mushrooming, coalescing,
forming and massing, of strange yellow cast of mative. It shaded westward
into heliotrope and this into a purple so royal, so matchless and rare that
Carley understood why the purple of the heavens could never be reproduced
in paint. Here the cloud mass thinned and paled, and a tint of rose began
to flush the billowy, flowery, creamy white. Then came the surpassing
splendor of this cloud pageant--a vast canopy of shell pink, a sun-fired
surface like an opal sea, rippled and webbed, with the exquisite texture of
an Oriental fabric, pure, delicate, lovely--as no work of human hands could
be. It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the
tropic nautilus. And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad
stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the
lambent depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream
took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its
horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-peaked range of the
Rockies. Far to the north, standing aloof from the range, loomed up the
grand black bulk and noble white dome of Pikes Peak.
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