The cinder hill was an extinct crater of a volcano. In the center of it lay a deep bowl, wondrously symmetrical, and of a dark l.u.s.terless hue.
Not a blade of gra.s.s was there, nor a plant. Carley conceived a desire to go to the bottom of this pit. She tried the cinders of the edge of the slope. They had the same consistency as those of the ascent she had overcome. But here there was a steeper incline. A tingling rush of daring seemed to drive her over the rounded rim, and, once started down, it was as if she wore seven-league boots. Fear left her. Only an exhilarating emotion consumed her. If there were danger, it mattered not. She strode down with giant steps, she plunged, she started avalanches to ride them until they stopped, she leaped, and lastly she fell, to roll over the soft cinders to the pit.
There she lay. It seemed a comfortable resting place. The pit was scarcely six feet across. She gazed upward and was astounded. How steep was the rounded slope on all sides! There were no sides; it was a circle. She looked up at a round lake of deep translucent sky. Such depth of blue, such exquisite rare color! Carley imagined she could gaze through it to the infinite beyond.
She closed her eyes and rested. Soon the laboring of heart and breath calmed to normal, so that she could not hear them. Then she lay perfectly motionless. With eyes shut she seemed still to look, and what she saw was the sunlight through the blood and flesh of her eyelids. It was red, as rare a hue as the blue of sky. So piercing did it grow that she had to shade her eyes with her arm.
Again the strange, rapt glow suffused her body. Never in all her life had she been so absolutely alone. She might as well have been in her grave. She might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in spirit in the glory of the physical that had escaped her in life. And she abandoned herself to this influence.
She loved these dry, dusty cinders; she loved the crater here hidden from all save birds; she loved the desert, the earth--above all, the sun. She was a product of the earth--a creation of the sun. She had been an infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life under the blazing magic of the sun. Soon her spirit would abandon her body and go on, while her flesh and bone returned to dust. This frame of hers, that carried the divine spark, belonged to the earth. She had only been ignorant, mindless, feelingless, absorbed in the seeking of gain, blind to the truth. She had to give. She had been created a woman; she belonged to nature; she was nothing save a mother of the future. She had loved neither Glenn Kilbourne nor life itself. False education, false standards, false environment had developed her into a woman who imagined she must feed her body on the milk and honey of indulgence.
She was abased now--woman as animal, though saved and uplifted by her power of immortality. Transcendental was her female power to link life with the future. The power of the plant seed, the power of the earth, the heat of the sun, the inscrutable creation-spirit of nature, almost the divinity of G.o.d--these were all hers because she was a woman. That was the great secret, aloof so long. That was what had been wrong with life--the woman blind to her meaning, her power, her mastery.
So she abandoned herself to the woman within her. She held out her arms to the blue abyss of heaven as if to embrace the universe. She was Nature. She kissed the dusty cinders and pressed her breast against the warm slope. Her heart swelled to bursting with a glorious and unutterable happiness.
That afternoon as the sun was setting under a gold-white scroll of cloud Carley got back to Deep Lake.
A familiar lounging figure crossed her sight. It approached to where she had dismounted. Charley, the sheep herder of Oak Creek!
"Howdy!" he drawled, with his queer smile. "So it was you-all who had this Deep Lake section?"
"Yes. And how are you, Charley?" she replied, shaking hands with him.
"Me? Aw, I"m tip-top. I"m sh.o.r.e glad you got this ranch. Reckon I"ll hit you for a job."
"I"d give it to you. But aren"t you working for the Hutters?"
"Nope. Not any more. Me an" Stanton had a row with them."
How droll and dry he was! His lean, olive-brown face, with its guileless clear eyes and his lanky figure in blue jeans vividly recalled Oak Creek to Carley.
"Oh, I"m sorry," returned she haltingly, somehow checked in her warm rush of thought. "Stanton?... Did he quit too?"
"Yep. He sure did."
"What was the trouble?"
"Reckon because Flo made up to Kilbourne," replied Charley, with a grin.
"Ah! I--I see," murmured Carley. A blankness seemed to wave over her.
It extended to the air without, to the sense of the golden sunset. It pa.s.sed. What should she ask--what out of a thousand sudden flashing queries? "Are--are the Hutters back?"
"Sure. Been back several days. I reckoned Hoyle told you. Mebbe he didn"t know, though. For n.o.body"s been to town."
"How is--how are they all?" faltered Carley. There was a strange wall here between her thought and her utterance.
"Everybody satisfied, I reckon," replied Charley.
"Flo--how is she?" burst out Carley.
"Aw, Flo"s loony over her husband," drawled Charley, his clear eyes on Carley"s.
"Husband!" she gasped.
"Sure. Flo"s gone an" went an" done what I swore on."
"Who?" whispered Carley, and the query was a terrible blade piercing her heart.
"Now who"d you reckon on?" asked Charley, with his slow grin.
Carley"s lips were mute.
"Wal, it was your old beau thet you wouldn"t have," returned Charley, as he gathered up his long frame, evidently to leave. "Kilbourne! He an"
Flo came back from the Tonto all hitched up."
CHAPTER XII
Vague sense of movement, of darkness, and of cold attended Carley"s consciousness for what seemed endless time.
A fall over rocks and a severe thrust from a sharp branch brought an acute appreciation of her position, if not of her mental state. Night had fallen. The stars were out. She had stumbled over a low ledge.
Evidently she had wandered around, dazedly and aimlessly, until brought to her senses by pain. But for a gleam of campfires through the cedars she would have been lost. It did not matter. She was lost, anyhow. What was it that had happened?
Charley, the sheep herder! Then the thunderbolt of his words burst upon her, and she collapsed to the cold stones. She lay quivering from head to toe. She dug her fingers into the moss and lichen. "Oh, G.o.d, to think--after all--it happened!" she moaned. There had been a rending within her breast, as of physical violence, from which she now suffered anguish. There were a thousand stinging nerves. There was a mortal sickness of horror, of insupportable heartbreaking loss. She could not endure it. She could not live under it.
She lay there until energy supplanted shock. Then she rose to rush into the darkest shadows of the cedars, to grope here and there, hanging her head, wringing her hands, beating her breast. "It can"t be true," she cried. "Not after my struggle--my victory--not now!" But there had been no victory. And now it was too late. She was betrayed, ruined, lost.
That wonderful love had wrought transformation in her--and now havoc.
Once she fell against the branches of a thick cedar that upheld her. The fragrance which had been sweet was now bitter. Life that had been bliss was now hateful! She could not keep still for a single moment.
Black night, cedars, brush, rocks, washes, seemed not to obstruct her.
In a frenzy she rushed on, tearing her dress, her hands, her hair.
Violence of some kind was imperative. All at once a pale gleaming open s.p.a.ce, shimmering under the stars, lay before her. It was water. Deep Lake! And instantly a hideous terrible longing to destroy herself obsessed her. She had no fear. She could have welcomed the cold, slimy depths that meant oblivion. But could they really bring oblivion? A year ago she would have believed so, and would no longer have endured such agony. She had changed. A cursed strength had come to her, and it was this strength that now augmented her torture. She flung wide her arms to the pitiless white stars and looked up at them. "My hope, my faith, my love have failed me," she whispered. "They have been a lie. I went through h.e.l.l for them. And now I"ve nothing to live for.... Oh, let me end it all!"
If she prayed to the stars for mercy, it was denied her. Pa.s.sionlessly they blazed on. But she could not kill herself. In that hour death would have been the only relief and peace left to her. Stricken by the cruelty of her fate, she fell back against the stones and gave up to grief.
Nothing was left but fierce pain. The youth and vitality and intensity of her then locked arms with anguish and torment and a cheated, unsatisfied love. Strength of mind and body involuntarily resisted the ravages of this catastrophe. Will power seemed nothing, but the flesh of her, that medium of exquisite sensation, so full of life, so p.r.o.ne to joy, refused to surrender. The part of her that felt fought terribly for its heritage.
All night long Carley lay there. The crescent moon went down, the stars moved on their course, the coyotes ceased to wail, the wind died away, the lapping of the waves along the lake sh.o.r.e wore to gentle splash, the whispering of the insects stopped as the cold of dawn approached. The darkest hour fell--hour of silence, solitude, and melancholy, when the desert lay tranced, cold, waiting, mournful without light of moon or stars or sun.
In the gray dawn Carley dragged her bruised and aching body back to her tent, and, fastening the door, she threw off wet clothes and boots and fell upon her bed. Slumber of exhaustion came to her.
When she awoke the tent was light and the moving shadows of cedar boughs on the white canvas told that the sun was straight above. Carley ached as never before. A deep pang seemed invested in every bone. Her heart felt swollen out of proportion to its s.p.a.ce in her breast. Her breathing came slow and it hurt. Her blood was sluggish. Suddenly she shut her eyes. She loathed the light of day. What was it that had happened?
Then the brutal truth flashed over her again, in aspect new, with all the old bitterness. For an instant she experienced a suffocating sensation as if the canvas had sagged under the burden of heavy air and was crushing her breast and heart. Then wave after wave of emotion swept over her. The storm winds of grief and pa.s.sion were loosened again. And she writhed in her misery.
Some one knocked on her door. The Mexican woman called anxiously. Carley awoke to the fact that her presence was not solitary on the physical earth, even if her soul seemed stricken to eternal loneliness. Even in the desert there was a world to consider. Vanity that had bled to death, pride that had been crushed, availed her not here. But something else came to her support. The lesson of the West had been to endure, not to shirk--to face an issue, not to hide. Carley got up, bathed, dressed, brushed and arranged her dishevelled hair. The face she saw in the mirror excited her amaze and pity. Then she went out in answer to the call for dinner. But she could not eat. The ordinary functions of life appeared to be deadened.
The day happened to be Sunday, and therefore the workmen were absent.