Carley's edifice of hopes, dreams, aspirations, and struggles fell in ruins about her.It had been built upon false sands.It had no ideal for foundation.It had to fall.
Something inevitable had forced her confession to Rust.Dissimulation had been a habit of her mind; it was more a habit of her class than sincerity.
But she had reached a point in her mental strife where she could not stand before Rust and let him believe she was noble and faithful when she knew she was neither.Would not the next step in this painful metamorphosis of her character be a fierce and passionate repudiation of herself and all she represented?
She went home and locked herself in her room, deaf to telephone and servants.There she gave up to her shame.Scorned--despised--dismissed by that poor crippled flame-spirited Virgil Rust! He had reverenced her, and the truth had earned his hate.Would she ever forget his look--incredulous--shocked--bitter--and blazing with unutterable contempt? Carley Burch was only another Nell--a jilt--a mocker of the manhood of soldiers! Would she ever cease to shudder at memory of Rust's slight movement of hand? Go! Get out of my sight! Leave me to my agony as you left Glenn Kilbourne alone to fight his! Men such as I am do not want the smile of your face, the touch of your hand! We gave for womanhood! Pass on to lesser men who loved the fleshpots and who would buy your charms! So Carley interpreted that slight gesture, and writhed in her abasement.
Rust threw a white, illuminating light upon her desertion of Glenn.She had betrayed him.She had left him alone.Dwarfed and stunted was her narrow soul! To a man who had given all for her she had returned nothing.Stone for bread! Betrayal for love! Cowardice for courage!
The hours of contending passions gave birth to vague, slow-forming revolt.
She became haunted by memory pictures and sounds and smells of Oak Creek Canyon.As from afar she saw the great sculptured rent in the earth, green and red and brown, with its shining, flashing ribbons of waterfalls and streams.The mighty pines stood up magnificent and stately.The walls loomed high, shadowed under the shelves, gleaming in the sunlight, and they seemed dreaming, waiting, watching.For what? For her return to their serene fastnesses--to the little gray log cabin.The thought stormed Carley's soul.
Vivid and intense shone the images before her shut eyes.She saw the winding forest floor, green with grass and fern, colorful with flower and rock.A thousand aisles, glades, nooks, and caverns called her to come.
Nature was every woman's mother.The populated city was a delusion.Disease and death and corruption stalked in the shadows of the streets.But her canyon promised hard work, playful hours, dreaming idleness, beauty, health, fragrance, loneliness, peace, wisdom, love, children, and long life.In the hateful shut-in isolation of her room Carley stretched forth her arms as if to embrace the vision.Pale close walls, gleaming placid stretches of brook, churning amber and white rapids, mossy banks and pine-matted ledges, the towers and turrets and ramparts where the eagles wheeled--she saw them all as beloved images lost to her save in anguished memory.
She heard the murmur of flowing water, soft, low, now loud, and again lulling, hollow and eager, tinkling over rocks, bellowing into the deep pools, washing with silky seep of wind-swept waves the hanging willows.
Shrill and piercing and far-aloft pealed the scream of the eagle.And she seemed to listen to a mocking bird while he mocked her with his melody of many birds.The bees hummed, the wind moaned, the leaves rustled, the waterfall murmured.Then came the sharp rare note of a canyon swift, most mysterious of birds, significant of the heights.
A breath of fragrance seemed to blow with her shifting senses.The dry, sweet, tangy canyon smells returned to her--of fresh-cut timber, of wood smoke, of the cabin fire with its steaming pots, of flowers and earth, and of the wet stones, of the redolent pines and the pungent cedars.
And suddenly, clearly, amazingly, Carley beheld in her mind's sight the hard features, the bold eyes, the slight smile, the coarse face of Haze Ruff.She had forgotten him.But he now returned.And with memory of him flashed a revelation as to his meaning in her life.He had appeared merely a clout, a ruffian, an animal with man's shape and intelligence.But he was the embodiment of the raw, crude violence of the West.He was the eyes of the natural primitive man, believing what he saw.He had seen in Carley Burch the paraded charm, the unashamed and serene front, the woman seeking man.Haze Ruff had been neither vile nor base nor unnatural.It had been her subjection to the decadence of feminine dress that had been unnatural.
