I think the change will benefit me."
"Auntie, you make me very happy. I could ask no more," said Carley.
Swiftly as endless tasks could make them the days passed. But those on
the train dragged interminably.
Carley sent her aunt through to the Canyon while she stopped off at
Flagstaff to store innumerable trunks and bags. The first news she heard
of Glenn and the Hutters was that they had gone to the Tonto Basin to
buy hogs and would be absent at least a month. This gave birth to a new
plan in Carley's mind. She would doubly surprise Glenn. Wherefore she
took council with some Flagstaff business men and engaged them to set a
force of men at work on the Deep Lake property, making the improvements
she desired, and hauling lumber, cement, bricks, machinery,
supplies--all the necessaries for building construction. Also she
instructed them to throw up a tent house for her to live in during the
work, and to engage a reliable Mexican man with his wife for servants.
When she left for the Canyon she was happier than ever before in her
life.
It was near the coming of sunset when Carley first looked down into the
Grand Canyon. She had forgotten Glenn's tribute to this place. In her
rapturous excitement of preparation and travel the Canyon had been
merely a name. But now she saw it and she was stunned.
What a stupendous chasm, gorgeous in sunset color on the heights,
purpling into mystic shadows in the depths! There was a wonderful
brightness of all the millions of red and yellow and gray surfaces still
exposed to the sun. Carley did not feel a thrill, because feeling seemed
inhibited. She looked and looked, yet was reluctant to keep on looking.
She possessed no image in mind with which to compare this grand and
mystic spectacle. A transformation of color and shade appeared to be
going on swiftly, as if gods were changing the scenes of a Titanic
stage. As she gazed the dark fringed line of the north rim turned to
burnished gold, and she watched that with fascinated eyes. It turned
rose, it lost its fire, it faded to quiet cold gray. The sun had set.
Then the wind blew cool through the pinyons on the rim. There was a
sweet tang of cedar and sage on the air and that indefinable fragrance
peculiar to the canyon country of Arizona. How it brought back to Carley
remembrance of Oak Creek! In the west, across the purple notches of the
abyss, a dull gold flare showed where the sun had gone down.
In the morning at eight o'cl
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