The Call of the Canyon

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.
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