A Voice in the Wilderness | Page 8

The silence which followed became almost oppressive before the Boy
finally turned and in his kindly tone began to question her about the
happenings which had stranded her in the desert alone at night.
So she came to tell him briefly and frankly about herself, as he
questioned--how she came to be in Arizona all alone.
"My father is a minister in a small town in New York State. When I
finished college I had to do something, and I had an offer of this
Ashland school through a friend of ours who had a brother out here.
Father and mother would rather have kept me nearer home, of course,
but everybody says the best opportunities are in the West, and this was
a good opening, so they finally consented. They would send post-haste
for me to come back if they knew what a mess I have made of things

right at the start--getting out of the train in the desert."
"But you're not discouraged?" said her companion, half wonderingly.
"Some nerve you have with you. I guess you'll manage to hit it off in
Ashland. It's the limit as far as discipline is concerned, I understand,
but I guess you'll put one over on them. I'll bank on you after to-night,
sure thing!"
She turned a laughing face toward him. "Thank you!" she said. "But I
don't see how you know all that. I'm sure I didn't do anything
particularly nervy. There wasn't anything else to do but what I did, if I'd
tried."
"Most girls would have fainted and screamed, and fainted again when
they were rescued," stated the Boy, out of a vast experience.
"I never fainted in my life," said Margaret Earle, with disdain. "I don't
think I should care to faint out in the vast universe like this. It would be
rather inopportune, I should think."
Then, because she suddenly realized that she was growing very
chummy with this stranger in the dark, she asked the first question that
came into her head.
"What was your college?"
That he had not been to college never entered her head. There was
something in his speech and manner that made it a foregone
conclusion.
It was as if she had struck him forcibly in his face, so sudden and sharp
a silence ensued for a second. Then he answered, gruffly, "Yale," and
plunged into an elaborate account of Arizona in its early ages,
including a detailed description of the cliff-dwellers and their homes,
which were still to be seen high in the rocks of the cañons not many
miles to the west of where they were riding.
Margaret was keen to hear it all, and asked many questions, declaring

her intention of visiting those cliff-caves at her earliest opportunity. It
was so wonderful to her to be actually out here where were all sorts of
queer things about which she had read and wondered. It did not occur
to her, until the next day, to realize that her companion had of intention
led her off the topic of himself and kept her from asking any more
personal questions.
He told her of the petrified forest just over some low hills off to the left;
acres and acres of agatized chips and trunks of great trees all turned to
eternal stone, called by the Indians "Yeitso's bones," after the great
giant of that name whom an ancient Indian hero killed. He described
the coloring of the brilliant days in Arizona, where you stand on the
edge of some flat-topped mesa and look off through the clear air to
mountains that seem quite near by, but are in reality more than two
hundred miles away. He pictured the strange colors and lights of the
place; ledges of rock, yellow, white and green, drab and maroon, and
tumbled piles of red boulders, shadowy buttes in the distance, serrated
cliffs against the horizon, not blue, but rosy pink in the heated haze of
the air, and perhaps a great, lonely eagle poised above the silent,
brilliant waste.
He told it not in book language, with turn of phrase and smoothly
flowing sentences, but in simple, frank words, as a boy might describe
a picture to one he knew would appreciate it--for her sake, and not
because he loved to put it into words; but in a new, stumbling way
letting out the beauty that had somehow crept into his heart in spite of
all the rough attempts to keep all gentle things out of his nature.
The girl, as she listened, marveled more and more what manner of
youth this might be who had come to her out of the desert night.
She forgot her weariness as she listened, in the thrill of wonder over the
new mysterious country to which she had