se
peaks, at all hours, in every mood; and they had unconsciously become a
part of her thought. The train was relentlessly whirling her eastward.
Soon they must become a memory. Tears blurred her sight. Poignant regret
seemed added to the anguish she was suffering. Why had she not learned
sooner to see the glory of the mountains, to appreciate the beauty and
solitude? Why had she not understood herself?

The next day through New Mexico she followed magnificent ranges and
valleys--so different from the country she had seen coming West--so
supremely beautiful that she wondered if she had only acquired the
harvest of a seeing eye.

But it was at sunset of the following clay, when the train was speeding
down the continental slope of prairie land beyond the Rockies, that the
West took its ruthless revenge.

Masses of strange cloud and singular light upon the green prairie, and a
luminosity in the sky, drew Carley to the platform of her car, which was
the last of the train. There she stood, gripping the iron gate, feeling
the wind whip her hair and the iron-tracked ground speed from under her,
spellbound and stricken at the sheer wonder and glory of the firmament,
and the mountain range that it canopied so exquisitely.

A rich and mellow light, singularly clear, seemed to flood out of some
unknown source. For the sun was hidden. The clouds just above
Carley hung low, and they were like thick, heavy smoke, mushrooming,
coalescing, forming and massing, of strange yellow cast of nature. It
shaded westward into heliotrope and this into a purple so royal, so
matchless and rare that Carley understood why the purple of the heavens
could never be reproduced in paint. Here the cloud mass thinned and
paled, and a tint of rose began to flush the billowy, flowery, creamy
white. Then came the surpassing splendor of this cloud pageant--a vast
canopy of shell pink, a sun-fired surface like an opal sea, rippled
and webbed, with the exquisite texture of an Oriental fabric, pure,
delicate, lovely--as no work of human hands could be. It mirrored all
the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus. And
it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear
sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent
depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream
took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its
horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-p