"I like this location," said Glenn. "If I had the money I'd buy this
section of land--six hundred and forty acres--and make a ranch of it.
Just under this bluff is a fine open flat bench for a cabin. You could
see away across the desert clear to Sunset Peak. There's a good spring
of granite water. I'd run water from the lake down into the lower flats,
and I'd sure raise some stock."
"What do you call this place?" asked Carley, curiously.
"Deep Lake. It's only a watering place for sheep and cattle. But there's
fine grazing, and it's a wonder to me no one has ever settled here."
Looking down, Carley appreciated his wish to own the place; and
immediately there followed in her a desire to get possession of this
tract of land before anyone else discovered its advantages, and to
hold it for Glenn. But this would surely conflict with her intention
of persuading Glenn to go back East. As quickly as her impulse had been
born it died.
Suddenly the scene gripped Carley. She looked from near to far, trying
to grasp the illusive something. Wild lonely Arizona land! She saw
ragged dumpy cedars of gray and green, lines of red earth, and a round
space of water, gleaming pale under the lowering clouds; and in the
distance isolated hills, strangely curved, wandering away to a black
uplift of earth obscured in the sky.
These appeared to be mere steps leading her sight farther and higher to
the cloud-navigated sky, where rosy and golden effulgence betokened the
sun and the east. Carley held her breath. A transformation was going on
before her eyes.
"Carley, it's a stormy sunrise," said Glenn.
His words explained, but they did not convince. Was this sudden-bursting
glory only the sun rising behind storm clouds? She could see the clouds
moving while they were being colored. The universal gray surrendered
under some magic paint brush. The rifts widened, and the gloom of the
pale-gray world seemed to vanish. Beyond the billowy, rolling, creamy
edges of clouds, white and pink, shone the soft exquisite fresh blue
sky. And a blaze of fire, a burst of molten gold, sheered up from behind
the rim of cloud and suddenly poured a sea of sunlight from east to
west. It trans-figured the round foothills. They seemed bathed in
ethereal light, and the silver mists that overhung them faded while
Carley gazed, and a rosy flush crowned the symmetrical domes. Southward
along the horizon line, down-dropping veils of rain, just touched with
the sunrise tint, streamed in drifting slow movement from cloud to
earth. To the north the range of foothills lifted toward the majestic
dome of Sunset Peak, a volcanic upheaval of red and purple cinders, bare
as rock, round as the lower hills, and wonderful in its color. Full in
the blaze of the rising sun it flaunted an unchangeable front. Carley
understood now what had been told her about this peak. Volcanic fires
had thrown up a colossal mound of cinders burned forever to the hues
of the setting sun. In every light and shade of day it held true to its
name. Farther north rose the bold bulk of the San Francisco Peaks,
that, half lost in the clouds, still dominated the desert scene. Then as
Carley gazed the rifts began to close. Another transformation began, the
reverse of what she watched. The golden radiance of sunrise vanished,
and under a gray, lowering, coalescing pall of cloud the round hills
returned to their bleak somberness, and the green desert took again its
cold sheen.