CHAPTER I

The lonely station of Manzanita stood out, sharp and unsightly, in the keen February sunlight.  A mile away in a dip of the desert, lay the town, a sorry sprawl of frame buildings, patternless save for the one main street, which promptly lost itself at either end in a maze of cholla, prickly pear, and the lovely, golden-glowing roseo.  Far as the eye could see, the waste was spangled with vivid hues, for the rare rains had come, and all the cacti were in joyous bloom, from the scarlet stain of the ocatilla to the pale, dream-flower of the yucca.  Overhead the sky shone with a hard serenity, a blue, enameled dome through which the imperishable fires seemed magnified as they limned sharp shadows on the earth; but in the southwest clouds massed and lurked darkly for a sign that the storm had but called a truce.

East to west, along a ridge bounding the lower desert, ran the railroad, a line as harshly uncompromising as the cold mathematics of the engineers who had mapped it.  To the north spread unfathomably a forest of scrub pine and pinon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth.  It was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments of forest and desert, tree and cactus.  A single, straggling trail squirmed its way into the woodland.  One might have surmised that it was winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak shimmering in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away, but seeming in that lucent air to be brooding closely over all the varied loveliness below.

Though nine o’clock had struck on the brisk little station-clock, there was still a tang of night chill left.  The station-agent came out, carrying a chair which he set down in the sunniest corner of the platform.  He looked to be hardly more than a boy, but firm-knit and self-confident.  His features were regular, his fairish hair slightly wavy, and in his expression there was a curious and incongruous suggestion of settledness, of acceptance, of satisfaction with life as he met it, which an observer of men would have found difficult to reconcile with his youth and the obvious intelligence of the face.  His eyes were masked by deeply browned glasses, for he was bent upon literary pursuits, witness the corpulent, paper-covered volume under his arm.  Adjusting his chair to the angle of ease, he tipped back against the wall and made tentative entry into his book.

What a monumental work was that in the treasure-filled recesses of which the young explorer was straightway lost to the outer world!  No human need but might find its contentment therein.  Spread forth in its alluringly illustrated pages was the whole universe reduced to the purchasable.  It was a perfect and detailed microcosm of the world of trade, the cosmogony of commerce in petto.  The style was brief, pithy, pregnant; the illustrations—­oh,