from her surroundings.  She absorbed her environment.  She felt.  It was a delightful state.  But when her own consciousness caused it to elude her, then she both resented and regretted.  Anything that approached permanent attachment to this crude and untenanted West Carley would not tolerate for a moment.  Reluctantly she admitted it had bettered her health, quickened her blood, and quite relegated Florida and the Adirondacks, to little consideration.

“Well, as I told Glenn,” soliloquized Carley, “every time I’m almost won over a little to Arizona she gives me a hard jolt.  I’m getting near being mushy today.  Now let’s see what I’ll get.  I suppose that’s my pessimism or materialism.  Funny how Glenn keeps saying its the jolts, the hard knocks, the fights that are best to remember afterward.  I don’t get that at all.”

Five miles below West Fork a road branched off and climbed the left side of the canyon.  It was a rather steep road, long and zigzaging, and full of rocks and ruts.  Carley did not enjoy ascending it, but she preferred the going up to coming down.  It took half an hour to climb.

Once up on the flat cedar-dotted desert she was met, full in the face, by a hot dusty wind coming from the south.  Carley searched her pockets for her goggles, only to ascertain that she had forgotten them.  Nothing, except a freezing sleety wind, annoyed and punished Carley so much as a hard puffy wind, full of sand and dust.  Somewhere along the first few miles of this road she was to meet Glenn.  If she turned back for any cause he would be worried, and, what concerned her more vitally, he would think she had not the courage to face a little dust.  So Carley rode on.

The wind appeared to be gusty.  It would blow hard awhile, then lull for a few moments.  On the whole, however, it increased in volume and persistence until she was riding against a gale.  She had now come to a bare, flat, gravelly region, scant of cedars and brush, and far ahead she could see a dull yellow pall rising high into the sky.  It was a duststorm and it was sweeping down on the wings of that gale.  Carley remembered that somewhere along this flat there was a log cabin which had before provided shelter for her and Flo when they were caught in a rainstorm.  It seemed unlikely that she had passed by this cabin.

Resolutely she faced the gale and knew she had a task to find that refuge.  If there had been a big rock or bushy cedar to offer shelter she would have welcomed it.  But there was nothing.  When the hard dusty gusts hit her, she found it absolutely necessary to shut her eyes.  At intervals less windy she opened them, and rode on, peering through the yellow gloom for the cabin.  Thus she got her eyes full of dust—­an alkali dust that made them sting and smart.  The fiercer puffs of wind carried pebbles large enough to hurt severely.  Then the dust clogged her nose and sand got between her teeth.  Added to these annoyances was a heat like a blast from a furnace.  Carley perspired freely and that caked the dust on her face.  She rode on, gradually growing more uncomfortable and miserable.  Yet even then she did not utterly lose a sort of thrilling zest in being thrown upon her own responsibility.  She could hate an obstacle, yet feel something of pride in holding her own against it.