"I like this location," said Glenn. "If I had the money I'd buy this

section of land--six hundred and forty acres--and make a ranch of it.

Just under this bluff is a fine open flat bench for a cabin. You could

see away across the desert clear to Sunset Peak. There's a good spring

of granite water. I'd run water from the lake down into the lower flats,

and I'd sure raise some stock."

"What do you call this place?" asked Carley, curiously.

"Deep Lake. It's only a watering place for sheep and cattle. But there's

fine grazing, and it's a wonder to me no one has ever settled here."

Looking down, Carley appreciated his wish to own the place; and

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immediately there followed in her a desire to get possession of this

tract of land before anyone else discovered its advantages, and to

hold it for Glenn. But this would surely conflict with her intention

of persuading Glenn to go back East. As quickly as her impulse had been

born it died.

Suddenly the scene gripped Carley. She looked from near to far, trying

to grasp the illusive something. Wild lonely Arizona land! She saw

ragged dumpy cedars of gray and green, lines of red earth, and a round

space of water, gleaming pale under the lowering clouds; and in the

distance isolated hills, strangely curved, wandering away to a black

uplift of earth obscured in the sky.

These appeared to be mere steps leading her sight farther and higher to

the cloud-navigated sky, where rosy and golden effulgence betokened the

sun and the east. Carley held her breath. A transformation was going on

before her eyes.

"Carley, it's a stormy sunrise," said Glenn.

His words explained, but they did not convince. Was this sudden-bursting

glory only the sun rising behind storm clouds? She could see the clouds

moving while they were being colored. The universal gray surrendered

under some magic paint brush. The rifts widened, and the gloom of the

pale-gray world seemed to vanish. Beyond the billowy, rolling, creamy

edges of clouds, white and pink, shone the soft exquisite fresh blue

sky. And a blaze of fire, a burst of molten gold, sheered up from behind

the rim of cloud and suddenly poured a sea of sunlight from east to

west. It trans-figured the round foothills. They seemed bathed in

ethereal light, and the silver mists that overhung them faded while

Carley gazed, and a rosy flush crowned the symmetrical domes. Southward

along the horizon line, down-dropping veils of rain, just touched with

the sunrise tint, streamed in drifting slow movement from cloud to

earth. To the north the range of foothills lifted toward the majestic

dome of Sunset Peak, a volcanic upheaval of red and purple cinders, bare

as rock, round as the lower hills, and wonderful in its color. Full in

the blaze of the rising sun it flaunted an unchangeable front. Carley

understood now what had been told her about this peak. Volcanic fires

had thrown up a colossal mound of cinders burned forever to the hues

of the setting sun. In every light and shade of day it held true to its

name. Farther north rose the bold bulk of the San Francisco Peaks,

that, half lost in the clouds, still dominated the desert scene. Then as

Carley gazed the rifts began to close. Another transformation began, the

reverse of what she watched. The golden radiance of sunrise vanished,

and under a gray, lowering, coalescing pall of cloud the round hills

returned to their bleak somberness, and the green desert took again its

cold sheen.




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