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

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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."




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