The Call of the Canyon

The day happened to be Sunday, and therefore the workmen were absent.

Carley had the place to herself. How the half-completed house mocked

her! She could not bear to look at it. What use could she make of it

now? Flo Hutter had become the working comrade of Glenn Kilbourne, the

mistress of his cabin. She was his wife and she would be the mother of

his children.

That thought gave birth to the darkest hour of Carley Burch's life. She

became possessed as by a thousand devils. She became merely a female

robbed of her mate. Reason was not in her, nor charity, nor justice.

All that was abnormal in human nature seemed coalesced in her, dominant,

passionate, savage, terrible. She hated with an incredible and insane

ferocity. In the seclusion of her tent, crouched on her bed, silent,

locked, motionless, she yet was the embodiment of all terrible strife

and storm in nature. Her heart was a maelstrom and would have whirled

and sucked down to hell all the beings that were men. Her soul was

a bottomless gulf, filled with the gales and the fires of jealousy,

superhuman to destroy.

That fury consumed all her remaining strength, and from the relapse she

sank to sleep.

Morning brought the inevitable reaction. However long her other

struggles, this monumental and final one would be brief. She realized

that, yet was unable to understand how it could be possible, unless

shock or death or mental aberration ended the fight. An eternity of

emotion lay back between this awakening of intelligence and the hour of

her fall into the clutches of primitive passion.

That morning she faced herself in the mirror and asked, "Now--what do I

owe you?" It was not her voice that answered. It was beyond her. But

it said: "Go on! You are cut adrift. You are alone. You owe none but

yourself!... Go on! Not backward--not to the depths--but up--upward!"

She shuddered at such a decree. How impossible for her! All animal, all

woman, all emotion, how could she live on the cold, pure heights? Yet

she owed something intangible and inscrutable to herself. Was it the

thing that woman lacked physically, yet contained hidden in her soul?

An element of eternal spirit to rise! Because of heartbreak and ruin

and irreparable loss must she fall? Was loss of love and husband and

children only a test? The present hour would be swallowed in the sum of

life's trials. She could not go back. She would not go down. There was

wrenched from her tried and sore heart an unalterable and unquenchable

decision--to make her own soul prove the evolution of woman. Vessel of

blood and flesh she might be, doomed by nature to the reproduction of

her kind, but she had in her the supreme spirit and power to carry on

the progress of the ages--the climb of woman out of the darkness.