Lucy did not know what she yearned for, she
did not know why the desert called to her, she did not know in what it
resembled her spirit, but she did know that these three feelings were as one,
deep in her heart. For ten years, every day of her life, she had watched this
desert scene, and never had there been an hour that it was not different, yet
the same. Ten years--and she grew up watching, feeling--till from the desert's
thousand moods she assimilated its nature, loved her bonds, and could never
have been happy away from the open, the color, the freedom, the wildness. On
this birthday, when those who loved her said she had become her own mistress,
she acknowledged the claim of the desert forever. And she experienced a deep,
rich, strange happiness.
Hers always then the mutable and immutable desert, the leagues and leagues of
slope and sage and rolling ridge, the great canyons and the giant cliffs, the
dark river with its mystic thunder of waters, the pine-fringed plateaus, the
endless stretch of horizon, with its lofty, isolated, noble monuments, and the
bold ramparts with their beckoning beyond! Hers always the desert seasons: the
shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the
gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms;
the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the
sky, with the black tempests hanging here and there over the peaks, dark veils
floating down and rainbows everywhere, and the lacy waterfalls upon the
glistening cliffs and the thunder of the red floods; and the glorious golden
autumn when it was always afternoon and time stood still! Hers always the
rides in the open, with the sun at her back and the wind in her face! And hers
surely, sooner or later, the nameless adventure which had its inception in the
strange yearning of her heart and presaged its fulfilment somewhere down that
trailless sage-slope she loved so well!
Bostil's house was a crude but picturesque structure of red stone and white
clay and bleached cottonwoods, and it stood at the outskirts of the cluster of
green-inclosed cabins which composed the hamlet.
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