The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey (read along books txt) 📕

and wrapped it round her as they rocked side by side. Demonstrations of this nature were infrequent with Glenn. Despite losing one foot out of a stirrup and her seat in the saddle Carley rather encouraged it. He kissed her dusty face, and then set her back.

“By George! Carley, sometimes I think you've changed since you've been here,” he said, with warmth. “To go through that sandstorm without one kick—one knock at my West!”

“Glenn, I always think of what Flo says—the worst is yet to come,” replied Carley, trying to hide her unreasonable and tumultuous pleasure at words of praise from him.

“Carley Burch, you don't know yourself,” he declared, enigmatically.

“What woman knows herself? But do you know me?”

“Not I. Yet sometimes I see depths in you—wonderful possibilities—submerged under your poise—under your fixed, complacent idle attitude toward life.”

This seemed for Carley to be dangerously skating near thin ice, but she could not resist a retort:

“Depths in me? Why I am a shallow, transparent stream like your West Fork! ... And as for possibilities—may I ask what of them you imagine you see?”

“As a girl, before you were claimed by the world, you were earnest at heart. You had big hopes and dreams. And you had intellect, too. But you have wasted your talents, Carley. Having money, and spending it, living for pleasure, you have not realized your powers.... Now, don't look hurt. I'm not censuring you. It's just the way of modern life. And most of your friends have been more careless, thoughtless, useless than you. The aim of their existence is to be comfortable, free from work, worry, pain. They want pleasure, luxury. And what a pity it is! The best of you girls regard marriage as an escape, instead of responsibility. You don't marry to get your shoulders square against the old wheel of American progress—to help some man make good—to bring a troop of healthy American kids into the world. You bare your shoulders to the gaze of the multitude and like it best if you are strung with pearls.”

“Glenn, you distress me when you talk like this,” replied Carley, soberly. “You did not use to talk so. It seems to me you are bitter against women.”

“Oh no, Carley! I am only sad,” he said. “I only see where once I was blind. American women are the finest on earth, but as a race, if they don't change, they're doomed to extinction.”

“How can you say such things?” demanded Carley, with spirit.

“I say them because they are true. Carley, on the level now, tell me how many of your immediate friends have children.”

Put to a test, Carley rapidly went over in mind her circle of friends, with the result that she was somewhat shocked and amazed to realize how few of them were even married, and how the babies of her acquaintance were limited to three. It was not easy to admit this to Glenn.

“My dear,” replied he, “if that does not show you the handwriting on the wall, nothing ever will.”

“A girl has to find a husband, doesn't she?” asked Carley, roused to defense of her sex. “And if she's anybody she has to find one in her set. Well, husbands are not plentiful. Marriage certainly is not the end of existence these days. We have to get along somehow. The high cost of living is no inconsderable factor today. Do you know that most of the better-class apartment houses in New York will not take children? Women are not all to blame. Take the speed mania. Men must have automobiles. I know one girl who wanted a baby, but her husband wanted a car. They couldn't afford both.”

“Carley, I'm not blaming women more than men,” returned Glenn. “I don't know that I blame them as a class. But in my own mind I have worked it all out. Every man or woman who is genuinely American should read the signs of the times, realize the crisis, and meet it in an American way. Otherwise we are done as a race. Money is God in the older countries. But it should never become God in America. If it does we will make the fall of Rome pale into insignificance.”

“Glenn, let's put off the argument,” appealed Carley. “I'm not—just up to fighting you today. Oh—you needn't smile. I'm not showing a yellow streak, as Flo puts it. I'll fight you some other time.”

“You're right, Carley,” he assented. “Here we are loafing six or seven miles from home. Let's rustle along.”

Riding fast with Glenn was something Carley had only of late added to her achievements. She had greatest pride in it. So she urged her mustang to keep pace with Glenn's horse and gave herself up to the thrill of the motion and feel of wind and sense of flying along. At a good swinging lope Calico covered ground swiftly and did not tire. Carley rode the two miles to the rim of the canyon, keeping alongside of Glenn all the way. Indeed, for one long level stretch she and Glenn held hands. When they arrived at the descent, which necessitated slow and careful riding, she was hot and tingling and breathless, worked by the action into an exuberance of pleasure. Glenn complimented her riding as well as her rosy cheeks. There was indeed a sweetness in working at a task as she had worked to learn to ride in Western fashion. Every turn of her mind seemed to confront her with sobering antitheses of thought. Why had she come to love to ride down a lonely desert road, through ragged cedars where the wind whipped her face with fragrant wild breath, if at the same time she hated the West? Could she hate a country, however barren and rough, if it had saved the health and happiness of her future husband? Verily there were problems for Carley to solve.

Early twilight purple lay low in the hollows and clefts of the canyon. Over the western rim a pale ghost of the evening star seemed to smile at Carley, to bid her look and look. Like a strain of distant music, the dreamy hum of falling water, the murmur and melody of the stream, came again to Carley's sensitive ear.

“Do you love this?” asked Glenn, when they reached the green-forested canyon floor, with the yellow road winding away into the purple shadows.

“Yes, both the ride—and you,” flashed Carley, contrarily. She knew he had meant the deep-walled canyon with its brooding solitude.

“But I want you to love Arizona,” he said.

“Glenn, I'm a faithful creature. You should be glad of that. I love New York.”

“Very well, then. Arizona to New York,” he said, lightly brushing her cheek with his lips. And swerving back into his saddle, he spurred his horse and called back over his shoulder: “That mustang and Flo have beaten me many a time. Come on.”

It was not so much his words as his tone and look that roused Carley. Had he resented her loyalty to the city of her nativity? Always there was a little rift in the lute. Had his tone and look meant that Flo might catch him if Carley could not? Absurd as the idea was, it spurred her to recklessness. Her mustang did not need any more than to know she