The White Desert

The White Desert, by Courtney
Ryley Cooper,

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Title: The White Desert
Author: Courtney Ryley Cooper

Release Date: December 21, 2006 [eBook #20155]
Language: English
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THE WHITE DESERT
by
COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER
Author of The Cross-Cut, Etc.
Frontispiece by Anton Otto Fischer

[Frontispiece: It was easier to accept the more precipitous journey,
straight downward.]

Grosset & Dunlap Publishers ---------- New York Copyright, 1922, by
Little, Brown, And Company All Rights Reserved Published February,
1922 Reprinted March, 1922

To a Certain Little Gray Lady
who seems to like everything
I write, the main reason being
the fact that she is
MY MOTHER

THE WHITE DESERT

CHAPTER I
It was early afternoon. Near by, the smaller hills shimmered in the
radiant warmth of late spring, the brownness of their foliage and
boulders merging gradually upward to the green of the spruces and
pines of the higher mountains, which in turn gave way before the
somber blacks and whites of the main range, where yet the snow
lingered from the clutch of winter, where the streams ran brown with
the down-flow of the continental divide, where every cluster of
mountain foliage sheltered a mound of white, in jealous conflict with
the sun. The mountains are tenacious of their vicious traits; they cling
to the snow and cold and ice long after the seasons have denoted a time
of warmth and summer's splendor; the columbine often blooms beside a
ten-foot drift.
But down in the hollow which shielded the scrambling little town of
Dominion, the air was warm and lazy with the friendliness of May. Far
off, along the course of the tumbling stream, turbulently striving to care
for far more than its share of the melt-water of the hills, a jaybird called
raucously as though in an effort to drown the sweeter, softer notes of a
robin nesting in the new-green of a quaking aspen. At the hitching post
before the one tiny store, an old horse nodded and blinked,--as did the
sprawled figure beside the ramshackle motor-filling station, just opened
after the snow-bound months of winter. Then five minutes of absolute
peace ensued, except for the buzzing of an investigative bottle-fly
before the figure shuffled, stretched, and raising his head, looked down
the road. From the distance had come the whirring sound of a motor,
the forerunner of a possible customer. In the hills, an automobile
speaks before it is seen.
Long moments of throbbing echoes; then the car appeared, a mile or so
down the cañon, twisting along the rocky walls which rose sheer from
the road, threading the innumerable bridges which spanned the little
stream, at last to break forth into the open country and roar on toward
Dominion. The drowsy gasoline tender rose. A moment more and a
long, sleek, yellow racer had come to a stop beside the gas tank,
chortled with greater reverberation than ever as the throttle was thrown

open, then wheezed into silence with the cutting off of the ignition. A
young man rose from his almost flat position in the low-slung driver's
seat and crawling over the side, stretched himself, meanwhile staring
upward toward the glaring white of Mount Taluchen, the highest peak
of the continental backbone, frowning in the coldness of snows that
never departed. The villager moved closer.
"Gas?"
"Yep." The young man stretched again. "Fill up the tank--and better
give me half a gallon of oil."
Then he turned away once more, to stare again at the great, tumbled
stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in
the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern;
at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made
jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last
gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to
hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp as
a knife-thrust, between the region where trees may grow and snows
may hide beneath their protecting boughs and the desolate, barren,
rocky, forbidding waste of "timber line."
Young he was, almost boyish; yet counterbalancing this was a
seriousness of expression that almost approached somberness