Tomorrow's tangle

“THAT’S MY LIFE,—TO WORK IN WILD PLACES WITH MEN”
TOMORROW’S TANGLE
BY GERALDINE BONNER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR I. KELLER
INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1903 The Bobbs-Merrill Company October PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TOMORROW’S TANGLE
TOMORROW’S TANGLE
“To every man a damsel or two.”
—Judges.
The vast, gray expanse of the desert lay still as a picture in the heat of the early afternoon. The silence of waste places held it. It was gaunt and sterile, clad with a drab growth of sage, flat as a table, and with the white scurf of the alkali breaking through its parched skin. It was the earth, lean, sapless, and marked with disease. A chain of purple hills looked down on its dead level, over which a wagon road passed like a scar across a haggard face. From the brazen arch of the sky heat poured down and was thrown back from the scorched surface of the land. It was August in the Utah Desert in the early fifties.
In the silence and deadness of the scene there was one point of life. The canvas top of an emigrant wagon made a white spot on the monotone of gray. At noon there had been but one shadow in the desert and this was that beneath the wagon which was stationary in the road. Now the sun was declining from the zenith and the shadow was broadening; first a mere edge, then a substantial margin of shade.