yon boxed she
flushed a flock of wild turkeys. They ran like ostriches and flew like
great brown chickens. In a cavern Carley found the den of a bear, and in
another place the bleached bones of a steer.

She lingered here in the shaded depths with a feeling as if she were
indeed lost to the world. These big brown and seamy-barked pines with
their spreading gnarled arms and webs of green needles belonged to her,
as also the tiny brook, the blue bells smiling out of the ferns, the
single stalk of mescal on a rocky ledge.

Never had sun and earth, tree and rock, seemed a part of her being until
then. She would become a sun-worshiper and a lover of the earth. That
canyon had opened there to sky and light for millions of years; and
doubtless it had harbored sheep herders, Indians, cliff dwellers,
barbarians. She was a woman with white skin and a cultivated mind,
but the affinity for them existed in her. She felt it, and that an
understanding of it would be good for body and soul.

Another day she found a little grove of jack pines growing on a flat
mesa-like bluff, the highest point on her land. The trees were small
and close together, mingling their green needles overhead and their
discarded brown ones on the ground. From here Carley could see afar to
all points of the compass--the slow green descent to the south and the
climb to the black-timbered distance; the ridged and canyoned country to
the west, red vents choked with green and rimmed with gray; to the north
the grand upflung mountain kingdom crowned with snow; and to the east
the vastness of illimitable space, the openness and wildness, the chased
and beaten mosaic of colored sands and rocks.

Again and again she visited this lookout and came to love its isolation,
its command of wondrous prospects, its power of suggestion to her
thoughts. She became a creative being, in harmony with the live things
around her. The great life-dispensing sun poured its rays down upon her,
as if to ripen her; and the earth seemed warm, motherly, immense with
its all-embracing arms. She no longer plucked the bluebells to press
to her face, but leaned to them. Every blade of gramma grass, with its
shining bronze-tufted seed head, had significance for her. The scents
of the desert began to have meaning for her. She sensed within her the
working of a great leveling process through which supreme happiness
would come.

June! The rich, thick, amber light, like a transparent reflection fr