“Dear girl, you don’t want money—you don’t want life, as most folks speak of life. You were born for the outdoors, for the freedom that it offers. You have never tasted the artificialities of life in the cities, and therefore you think you want to. But if you go you’ll come back as straight as the crow flies—back to the mountains and the deserts and the places where quiet reigns. It’s born in you, and you can’t escape it. You’ll come back to Spyglass Mountain!”
“How do you know that, Joshua?”
“It’s easily explained: Never have I heard from you a murmur of discontent over the solitude of these vast mountains. Like myself, you are one who can be alone for days at a time, with the bleak peaks about you or the mocking sandy wastes of the desert, and be content with only them and your thoughts for company. We are rare, Madge. Such an unanswering solitude as would drive many people insane, we thrive on. I say we are rare. I mean that a man and a woman who both possess that quality rarely meet each other and—and fall in love. That is—I mean, of course— Well, I love you; I’ve told you so. And you should forget everything else and let yourself love me. You can’t afford to take chances by letting yourself love another man, who might take you to the cities, where you imagine you want to go. For as sure as spring follows winter Spyglass Mountain will call you back. And then—if he doesn’t want to come?
“What if a night on the desert, with the moaning of the wind in the greasewood bushes and the half-mournful, half-mocking laugh of the coyote, strikes terror to his heart? What if the constant roar of a waterfall gets on his nerves instead of soothing him to sleep, as it would soothe you and me? And you must have these things. So one of you must sacrifice to the very core of your being—and that means a life of suffering and discontent for the one who is biggest of heart and gives in to the other. And that one, Shanty Madge, will be you.”
“And how do you know that, O sage?”
“Listen: Because those who are born to the open spaces, those who love the unanswering solitudes and are at peace with God and Mother Earth—they are always the ones who make the sacrifice. Because their souls are big like the mountains—their vision is wide like the desert—their courage is like the rocks—their hearts are kind and sheltering like the trees. Yes—like the trees! The great-hearted trees that shelter men for ages, and then go down before man’s ax with one long groan of anguish, surrendering everything!”
With her bare head bowed, and the winter wind whipping her crinkly bronze-gold hair, the little gypo queen stood listening. And in her eyes, as she lifted them to his, a miragelike moisture gleamed. She took his hand.
“Let’s go down, my poet-astronomer,” she said. “We must get a good sleep to-night and be up early. It will be a long, hard job to sled the lumber for our observatory to the top of Spyglass Mountain.”
CHAPTER XXIX
WINTER IN THE SAN ANTONES
THE observatory was completed and the telescope sledded to the top of Spyglass Mountain and installed early in the month of January. Winter had set in in earnest, and there was six feet of snow on the gentle slopes about Stirrup Lake. But the homesteaders’ new cabins were snug and tight; they had an abundance of fuel and provisions; so the mountain storms that danced up in fury from the lake and shook the structures to their scant foundations had few terrors for them.