Carley went out to the workmen. The house should be completed and she
would live in it. Always there was the stretching and illimitable desert
to look at, and the grand heave upward of the mountains. Hoyle was full
of zest for the practical details of the building. He saw nothing of
the havoc wrought in her. Nor did the other workmen glance more than
casually at her. In this Carley lost something of a shirking fear that
her loss and grief were patent to all eyes.
That afternoon she mounted the most spirited of the mustangs she had
purchased from the Indians. To govern him and stick on him required all
her energy. And she rode him hard and far, out across the desert, across
mile after mile of cedar forest, clear to the foothills. She rested
there, absorbed in gazing desertward, and upon turning back again, she
ran him over the level stretches. Wind and branch threshed her seemingly
to ribbons. Violence seemed good for her. A fall had no fear for her
now. She reached camp at dusk, hot as fire, breathless and strengthless.
But she had earned something. Such action required constant use of
muscle and mind. If need be she could drive both to the very furthermost
limit. She could ride and ride--until the future, like the immensity of
the desert there, might swallow her. She changed her clothes and
rested a while. The call to supper found her hungry. In this fact
she discovered mockery of her grief. Love was not the food of life.
Exhausted nature's need of rest and sleep was no respecter of a woman's
emotion.
Next day Carley rode northward, wildly and fearlessly, as if this
conscious activity was the initiative of an endless number of rides that
were to save her. As before the foothills called her, and she went on
until she came to a very high one.
Carley dismounted from her panting horse, answering the familiar impulse
to attain heights by her own effort.
"Am I only a weakling?" she asked herself. "Only a creature mined by
the fever of the soul!... Thrown from one emotion to another? Never the
same. Yearning, suffering, sacrificing, hoping, and changing--forever
the same! What is it that drives me? A great city with all its
attractions has failed to help me realize my life. So have friends
failed. So has the world. What can solitude and grandeur do?... All this
obsession of mine--all this strange feeling for simple elemental earthly
things likewise will fail me. Yet I am driven. They would call me a mad
woman."