She was still gazing upward when a man approached her and said the stage for Oak Creek Canyon would soon be ready to start, and he wanted to know if her baggage was ready.  Carley hurried back to her room to pack.

She had expected the stage would be a motor bus, or at least a large touring car, but it turned out to be a two-seated vehicle drawn by a team of ragged horses.  The driver was a little wizen-faced man of doubtful years, and he did not appear obviously susceptible to the importance of his passenger.  There was considerable freight to be hauled, besides Carley’s luggage, but evidently she was the only passenger.

“Reckon it’s goin’ to be a bad day,” said the driver.  “These April days high up on the desert are windy an’ cold.  Mebbe it’ll snow, too.  Them clouds hangin’ around the peaks ain’t very promisin’.  Now, miss, haven’t you a heavier coat or somethin’?”

“No, I have not,” replied Carley.  “I’ll have to stand it.  Did you say this was desert?”

“I shore did.  Wal, there’s a hoss blanket under the seat, an’ you can have that,” he replied, and, climbing to the seat in front of Carley, he took up the reins and started the horses off at a trot.

At the first turning Carley became specifically acquainted with the driver’s meaning of a bad day.  A gust of wind, raw and penetrating, laden with dust and stinging sand, swept full in her face.  It came so suddenly that she was scarcely quick enough to close her eyes.  It took considerable clumsy effort on her part with a handkerchief, aided by relieving tears, to clear her sight again.  Thus uncomfortably Carley found herself launched on the last lap of her journey.

All before her and alongside lay the squalid environs of the town.  Looked back at, with the peaks rising behind, it was not unpicturesque.  But the hard road with its sheets of flying dust, the bleak railroad yards, the round pens she took for cattle corrals, and the sordid debris littering the approach to a huge sawmill,—­these were offensive in Carley’s sight.  From a tall dome-like stack rose a yellowish smoke that spread overhead, adding to the lowering aspect of the sky.  Beyond the sawmill extended the open country sloping somewhat roughly, and evidently once a forest, but now a hideous bare slash, with ghastly burned stems of trees still standing, and myriads of stumps attesting to denudation.

The bleak road wound away to the southwest, and from this direction came the gusty wind.  It did not blow regularly so that Carley could be on her guard.  It lulled now and then, permitting her to look about, and then suddenly again whipping dust into her face.  The smell of the dust was as unpleasant as the sting.  It made her nostrils smart.  It was penetrating, and a little more of it would have been suffocating.  And as a leaden gray bank of broken clouds rolled up the wind grew stronger and the air colder.  Chilled before, Carley now became thoroughly cold.