CHAPTER I


The lonely station of Manzanita stood out, sharp and unsightly, in the
keen February sunlight. A mile away in a dip of the desert, lay the
town, a sorry sprawl of frame buildings, patternless save for the one
main street, which promptly lost itself at either end in a maze of
cholla, prickly pear, and the lovely, golden-glowing roseo. Far as the
eye could see, the waste was spangled with vivid hues, for the rare
rains had come, and all the cacti were in joyous bloom, from the scarlet
stain of the ocatilla to the pale, dream-flower of the yucca. Overhead
the sky shone with a hard serenity, a blue, enameled dome through which
the imperishable fires seemed magnified as they limned sharp shadows on
the earth; but in the southwest clouds massed and lurked darkly for a
sign that the storm had but called a truce.

East to west, along a ridge bounding the lower desert, ran the railroad,
a line as harshly uncompromising as the cold mathematics of the
engineers who had mapped it. To the north spread unfathomably a forest
of scrub pine and piñon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth. It
was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin
steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments
of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail
squirmed its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was
winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak shimmering
in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away, but seeming