30,000 On the Hoof. Zane Grey

pitched me into the brush.”

      Logan leaped off to approach her with earnest solicitude. “You poor kid! I was afraid something had happened. I shouldn’t have left you so far ahead. But are you hurt, dear?”

      “No. Only a scratch or two.”

      “Thank God for that!” He shook his head in wonderment. “I can’t get over how my luck holds.” He ran to the wagon, then examined wheels and tongue and the oxen. Evidently no damage had been done, for he mounted the seat and with yells drove the oxen out of the brush.

      “All right. Come on, honey. Get up while I tie the horses behind . . . It won’t be long now, Luce. Sycamore Canyon! My range! Our home!”

      Lucinda had lost her hopes and what little curiosity she might have had. Logan drove into the woods, along what appeared to have once been a road. Oxen and wagon jarred heavily over saplings. After about a mile or less Lucinda saw a light space through the woods. The green failed, and far beyond and above appeared again, only dimmer. There was an opening and a valley—a canyon Logan had said—just ahead. On the left side of the road a rocky ledge rose. Logan drove through a gap between the ledge and a brushy bank, halted and dismounted to carry poles and small logs with which to improvise a gate closing the opening. How energetic he was and tireless! There seemed a growing passion within him. Lastly he hauled a log that two men might well have found burdensome, which he placed across the gap.

      “Luce girl,” he said, intensely, as he mounted beside her. “Our stock is down in the canyon. Fenced in, all save a few holes in the rock rim they’ll never find before I close them. Aha! . . . I’ll show you pronto.” A great weight seemed lifted from his shoulders.

      Lucinda could not look just yet. She watched Logan jump off the wagon, untie the horses at the back and drive them past the wagon, down what appeared a narrow overgrown road. She saw him take an axe and chop down a small pine as thick at the base as his thigh. The whole bushy tree, by prodigious effort, he dragged behind the wagon and secured with a chain.

      “What’s that for?” she asked him as he returned.

      “Just a drag to hold us back. Pretty steep. Hold on now and look. You’ll see the greatest valley in all the West!”

      In spite of herself Lucinda was compelled to gaze. A long, winding, apparently bottomless gorge yawned beneath them. As the wagon lurched down the grade this thing Logan called a canyon gradually became visible. It struck Lucinda with appalling force: a gray granite-walled abyss widening to the south, yawning up at her as if to swallow her. It appeared narrow just below, but it was not narrow. As all this deceitful West it was not what it appeared. A ribbon of water and waste of white sand wound through the center of it, to disappear round a bend; beyond the canyon widened out into a great basin inclosed by yellow slopes and pine-fringed rims.

      Lucinda had to hold on tightly to keep from being thrown off the seat. As the wagon rolled deeper into the declivity, brush on one side and bluff on the other obscured Lucinda’s view. The grade steepened. Screeching brakes and crunching wheels increased their clamor. Despite the oxen holding back and the drag of the pine tree behind, the wagon rolled and bumped too fast for safety. Lucinda held on to her seat although she wondered bitterly why she clung to it so dearly. Then suddenly the pine tree behind broke or pulled loose; the wagon rolled down upon the oxen, forcing them into a dead run, and swaying dangerously one side to the other. Barely in time for safety it rattled out upon the level open of the canyon floor and came to a jarring stop. Manifestly unable to control his elation, Logan drove across a flat of seared, bleached grass, across a shallow brook and bar of sand, up a considerable grade to a flat where big pines stood far apart and a white-barked tree shone among them.

      “Whoa!” he yelled, in stentorian voice of finality, that echoed from the black looming slope above. He threw away his whip and giving Lucinda a grimy, sweat-laden embrace, leaped to the ground, and held out his arms to help her down.

      “Sycamore Canyon, sweetheart!” he said, with husky emotion. “Here’s where we homestead.”

      But Lucinda did not move nor respond on the moment. She gazed about spellbound, aghast. The drab, silent rocks, the lonely pines shouted doom at her. The brook babbled in mockery. There was no view, no outlook except down the gray monotonous canyon with its terrible, forbidding walls. Savage wilderness encompassed her on all sides. Solitude reigned there. No sound, no brightness, no life! She would be shut in always. A pioneer wife chained irrevocably to her toil and her cabin! A low strange murmuring, the mysterious voice of the wild, breathed out of the forest. The wind in the pines! It seemed foreboding, inevitable, awful, whispering death to girlish hopes and dreams.