The Call of the Canyon - Page 148/157

If she prayed to the stars for mercy, it was denied her. Passionlessly

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 prone 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 shore 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 space 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 passion 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.