The Call of the Canyon | Page 7

with a grin. "Shore this Arizonie
air is deceivin'."
"How strange," murmured Carley. "It's not that way in the
Adirondacks."
She was still gazing upward when a man approached her and said the
stage for Oak Creek Canyon would soon be ready to start, and he
wanted to know if her baggage was ready. Carley hurried back to her
room to pack.
She had expected the stage would be a motor bus, or at least a large

touring car, but it turned out to be a two-seated vehicle drawn by a team
of ragged horses. The driver was a little wizen-faced man of doubtful
years, and he did not appear obviously susceptible to the importance of
his passenger. There was considerable freight to be hauled, besides
Carley's luggage, but evidently she was the only passenger.
"Reckon it's goin' to be a bad day," said the driver. "These April days
high up on the desert are windy an' cold. Mebbe it'll snow, too. Them
clouds hangin' around the peaks ain't very promisin'. Now, miss,
haven't you a heavier coat or somethin'?"
"No, I have not," replied Carley. "I'll have to stand it. Did you say this
was desert?"
"I shore did. Wal, there's a hoss blanket under the seat, an' you can have
that," he replied, and, climbing to the seat in front of Carley, he took up
the reins and started the horses off at a trot.
At the first turning Carley became specifically acquainted with the
driver's meaning of a bad day. A gust of wind, raw and penetrating,
laden with dust and stinging sand, swept full in her face. It came so
suddenly that she was scarcely quick enough to close her eyes. It took
considerable clumsy effort on her part with a handkerchief, aided by
relieving tears, to clear her sight again. Thus uncomfortably Carley
found herself launched on the last lap of her journey.
All before her and alongside lay the squalid environs of the town.
Looked back at, with the peaks rising behind, it was not unpicturesque.
But the hard road with its sheets of flying dust, the bleak railroad yards,
the round pens she took for cattle corrals, and the sordid debris littering
the approach to a huge sawmill,--these were offensive in Carley's sight.
From a tall dome-like stack rose a yellowish smoke that spread
overhead, adding to the lowering aspect of the sky. Beyond the sawmill
extended the open country sloping somewhat roughly, and evidently
once a forest, but now a hideous bare slash, with ghastly burned stems
of trees still standing, and myriads of stumps attesting to denudation.
The bleak road wound away to the southwest, and from this direction

came the gusty wind. It did not blow regularly so that Carley could be
on her guard. It lulled now and then, permitting her to look about, and
then suddenly again whipping dust into her face. The smell of the dust
was as unpleasant as the sting. It made her nostrils smart. It was
penetrating, and a little more of it would have been suffocating. And as
a leaden gray bank of broken clouds rolled up the wind grew stronger
and the air colder. Chilled before, Carley now became thoroughly cold.
There appeared to be no end to the devastated forest land, and the
farther she rode the more barren and sordid grew the landscape. Carley
forgot about the impressive mountains behind her. And as the ride wore
into hours, such was her discomfort and disillusion that she forgot
about Glenn Kilbourne. She did not reach the point of regretting her
adventure, but she grew mightily unhappy. Now and then she espied
dilapidated log cabins and surroundings even more squalid than the
ruined forest. What wretched abodes! Could it be possible that people
had lived in them? She imagined men had but hardly women and
children. Somewhere she had forgotten an idea that women and
children were extremely scarce in the West.
Straggling bits of forest--yellow pines, the driver called the
trees--began to encroach upon the burned-over and arid barren land. To
Carley these groves, by reason of contrast and proof of what once was,
only rendered the landscape more forlorn and dreary. Why had these
miles and miles of forest been cut? By money grubbers, she supposed,
the same as were devastating the Adirondacks. Presently, when the
driver had to halt to repair or adjust something wrong with the harness,
Carley was grateful for a respite from cold inaction. She got out and
walked. Sleet began to fall, and when she resumed her seat in the
vehicle she asked the driver for the blanket to cover her. The smell of
this horse blanket was less endurable than the cold. Carley huddled
down into a state of apathetic misery. Already she had enough of