downward in the sweep of the wind; the fragrance of cedar, the flowers of the
spear-pointed mescal; the brooding silence, the beckoning range, the purple
distance.

Whatever it was Lucy longed for, whatever was whispered by the wind and
written in the mystery of the waste of sage and stone, she wanted it to happen
there at Bostil's Ford. She had no desire for civilization, she flouted the
idea of marrying the rich rancher of Durango. Bostil's sister, that stern but
lovable woman who had brought her up and taught her, would never persuade her
to marry against her will. Lucy imagined herself like a wild horse--free,
proud, untamed, meant for the desert; and here she would live her life. The
desert and her life seemed as one, yet in what did they resemble each
other--in what of this scene could she read the nature of her future?

Shudderingly she rejected the red, sullen, thundering river, with its swift,
changeful, endless, contending strife--for that was tragic. And she rejected
the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split and canyoned, so grim
and aloof--for that was barren. But she accepted the vast sloping valley of
sage, rolling gray and soft and beautiful, down to the dim mountains and
purple ramparts of the horizon. Lucy did not know what she yearned for, she
did not know why the desert called to her, she did not know in what it
resembled her spirit, but she did know that these three feelings were as one,
deep in her heart. For ten years, every day of her life, she had watched this
desert scene, and never had there been an hour that it was not different, yet
the same. Ten years--and she grew up watching, feeling--till from the desert's
thousand moods she assimilated its nature, loved her bonds, and could never
have been happy away from the open, the color, the freedom, the wildness. On
this birthday, when those who loved her said she had become her own mistress,
she acknowledged the claim of the desert forever. And she experienced a deep,
rich, strange happiness.