CHAPTER SIX

"DARN SUCH A COUNTRY!"


Helen May stood on the knobby, brown rock pinnacle that formed the head
of Sunlight Basin and stared resentfully out over the baked desert and
the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched
away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope,
every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her
unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its
barrenness in a haze of tender violet. The sky was blue; deeply,
intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cotton
floating aimlessly here and there. In a big, wild, unearthly way it was
beautiful beyond any words which human beings have coined.

Helen May felt its bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, though
the beauties of the desert land do not always appeal to alien eyes. She
felt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped life
of the town resented both, because she had no previous experience by
which to measure any part of it. Also, she summed up all her resentment
and her complete sense of bafflement at its bigness in one vehement
sentence that lacked only one word of being a curse.

"Darn such a country!" is what she said, gritting the words between
her teeth.

"See anything of 'em?" bellowed Vic from the spring below, where he was