THE CALL OF THE CANYON

By Zane Grey


CHAPTER I

What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley Burch
laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window.

It was a day typical of early April in New York, rather cold and gray, with
steely sunlight. Spring breathed in the air, but the women passing along
Fifty-seventh Street wore furs and wraps. She heard the distant clatter of
an L train and then the hum of a motor car. A hurdy-gurdy jarred into the
interval of quiet.

"Glenn has been gone over a year," she mused, "three months over a year--
and of all his strange letters this seems the strangest yet."

She lived again, for the thousandth time, the last moments she had spent
with him. It had been on New-Year's Eve, 1918. They had called upon friends
who were staying at the McAlpin, in a suite on the twenty-first floor
overlooking Broadway. And when the last quarter hour of that eventful and
tragic year began slowly to pass with the low swell of whistles and bells,
Carley's friends had discreetly left her alone with her lover, at the open
window, to watch and hear the old year out, the new year in. Glenn
Kilbourne had returned from France early that fall, shell-shocked and
gassed, and otherwise incapacitated for service in the army--a wreck of his
former sterling self and in many unaccountable ways a stranger to her.
Cold, silent, haunted by something, he had made her miserable with his