g strange
in her. The sun was burning hot, as she could tell when she put a hand
outside the window, and a strong wind blew sheets of dry dust at the
train. She gathered at once what tremendous factors in the Southwest
were the sun and the dust and the wind. And her realization made her
love them. It was there; the open, the wild, the beautiful, the lonely
land; and she felt the poignant call of blood in her--to seek, to
strive, to find, to live. One look down that yellow valley, endless
between its dark iron ramparts, had given her understanding of her
uncle. She must be like him in spirit, as it was claimed she resembled
him otherwise.

At length Bo grew tired of watching scenery that contained no life, and,
with her bright head on the faded cloak, she went to sleep. But Helen
kept steady, farseeing gaze out upon that land of rock and plain; and
during the long hours, as she watched through clouds of dust and veils
of heat, some strong and doubtful and restless sentiment seemed to
change and then to fix. It was her physical acceptance--her eyes and her
senses taking the West as she had already taken it in spirit.

A woman should love her home wherever fate placed her, Helen believed,
and not so much from duty as from delight and romance and living. How
could life ever be tedious or monotonous out here in this tremendous
vastness of bare earth and open sky, where the need to achieve made
thinking and pondering superficial?

It was with regret that she saw the last of the valley of the Rio
Grande, and then of its paralleled mountain ranges. But the miles
brought compensation in other valleys, other bold, black upheavals of
rock, and then again bare, boundless yellow plains, and sparsely cedared
ridges, and white dry washes, ghastly in the sunlight, and dazzling
beds of alkali, and then a desert space where golden and blue flowers
bloomed.

She noted, too, that the whites and yellows of earth and rock had
begun to shade to red--and this she knew meant an approach to
Arizona. Arizona, the wild, the lonely, the red desert, the green
plateau--Arizona with its thundering rivers, its unknown spaces, its
pasture-lands and timber-lands, its wild horses, cowboys, outlaws,
wolves and lions and savages! As to a boy, that name stirred and
thrilled and sang to her of nameless, sweet, intangible things,
mysterious and all of adventure. But she, being a girl of twenty, who
had accepted responsibilities, must conceal the depths of