That hour was a
miserable one for him, yet he could not bring himself to leave the room.
He never saw Snap touch her; he never heard Mescal's voice; he believed
that she spoke very little. When the hour was over and Mescal rose to
pass to her room, then his doubt, his fear, his misery, were as though
they had never been, for as Mescal said good-night she would give him one
look, swift as a flash, and in it were womanliness and purity, and
something beyond his comprehension. Her Indian serenity and mysticism
veiled yet suggested some secret, some power by which she might yet
escape the iron band of this Mormon rule. Hare could not fathom it.
In that good-night glance was a meaning for him alone, if meaning ever
shone in woman's eyes, and it said: "I will be true to you and to myself!"
Once the idea struck him that as soon as spring returned it would be an
easy matter, and probably wise, for him to leave the oasis and go up into
Utah, far from the desert-canyon country. But the thought refused to
stay before his consciousness a moment. New life had flushed his veins
here. He loved the dreamy, sleepy oasis with its mellow sunshine always
at rest on the glistening walls; he loved the cedar-scented plateau where
hope had dawned, and the wind-swept sand-strips, where hard out-of-door
life and work had renewed his wasting youth; he loved the canyon winding
away toward Coconina, opening into wide abyss; and always, more than all,
he loved the Painted Desert, with its ever-changing pictures, printed in
sweeping dust and bare peaks and purple haze.
Pages:
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232