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Page 69
Sprawled on the warm sweet pine needles, I breathe through them the breath
of the earth and am somehow no longer lonely. I cannot, of course, see the
sunset, but I watch for its coming on the eastern wall of the canyon. I see
the shadow slowly creep up, driving the gold before it, until at last the
canyon rim and pines are turned to golden fire. I watch the sailing eagles
as they streak across the gold, and swoop up into the blue, and pass out of
sight. I watch the golden flush fade to gray, and then, the canyon slowly
fills with purple shadows. This hour of twilight is the silent and
melancholy one. Seldom is there any sound save the soft rush of the water
over the stones, and that seems to die away. For a moment, perhaps, I am
Hiawatha alone in his forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the
great, silent pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness, like a beast of
the wild. But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state. Next
I am Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the
past. The great looming walls then become no longer blank. They are vast
pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and, alas! its
future. Everything time does is written on the stones. And my stream seems
to murmur the sad and ceaseless flow of human life, with its music and its
misery.
Then, descending from the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a
sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham. But
I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my
looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy characters the
beautiful and unforgettable face of Carley Burch!
I append what little news Oak Creek affords.
That blamed old bald eagle stole another of my pigs.
I am doing so well with my hog-raising that Hutter wants to come in with
me, giving me an interest in his sheep.
It is rumored some one has bought the Deep Lake section I wanted for a
ranch. I don't know who. Hutter was rather noncommittal.
Charley, the herder, had one of his queer spells the other day, and swore
to me he had a letter from you. He told the blamed lie with a sincere and
placid eye, and even a smile of pride. Queer guy, that Charley!
Flo and Lee Stanton had another quarrel--the worst yet, Lee tells me. Flo
asked a girl friend out from Flag and threw her in Lee's way, so to speak,
and when Lee retaliated by making love to the girl Flo got mad. Funny
creatures, you girls! Flo rode with me from High Falls to West Fork, and
never showed the slightest sign of trouble. In fact she was delightfully
gay. She rode Calico, and beat me bad in a race.
Adios, Carley. Won't you write me?
GLENN.
No sooner had Carley read the letter through to the end than she began it
all over again, and on this second perusal she lingered over passages--only
to reread them. That suggestion of her face sculptured by shadows on the
canyon walls seemed to thrill her very soul.
She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was unutterable.
All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury and strife and
pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if by the magic of a
letter made nothing but vain oblations.
"He loves me still!" she whispered, and pressed her breast with clenching
hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like a caged
lioness. It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance she was
beloved. That was the shibboleth--the cry by which she sounded the closed
depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman's insatiate
vanity.
Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly grasping
the import of Glenn's request, she hurried to the telephone to find the
number of the hospital in Bedford Park. A nurse informed her that visitors
were received at certain hours and that any attention to disabled soldiers
was most welcome.
Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story frame
structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided men of
the service. The chauffeur informed her that it had been used for that
purpose during the training period of the army, and later when injured
soldiers began to arrive from France.
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