Cavanagh: Forest Ranger
I
THE DESERT CHARIOT
Lee Virginia Wetherford began her return journey into the mountain West with exultation. From the moment she opened her car-window that August morning in Nebraska the plain called to her, sustained her illusions. It was all quite as big, as tawny, as she remembered it—fit arena for the epic deeds in which her father had been a leader bold and free.
Her memories of Roaring Fork and its people were childish and romantic. She recalled, vividly, the stagecoach which used to amble sedately, not to say wheezily, from the railway to the Fork and from the Fork back to the railway, in the days when she had ridden away in it a tearful, despairing, long-limbed girl, and fully expected to find it waiting for her at Sulphur City, with old Tom Quentan still as its driver.
The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changed from child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of the Fork as anything other than the romantic town she had left—a list wherein spurred and steel-girt cow-men strode lamely over uneven sidewalks, or swooped, like the red nomads of the desert, in mad troops through the starlit night.
The first hint of “the new West” came to her by way of the pretentious Hotel Alma, which stood opposite the station at Sulphur, and to which she was led by a colored porter of most elaborate and kindly manners.
This house, which furnished an excellent dinner and an absorbing mixture of types both American and European, was vaguely disturbing to her. It was plainly not of the old-time West—the West her father had dominated in the days “before the invasion.” It was, indeed, distinctly built for the tourist trade, and was filled with all that might indicate the comfortable nearness of big game and good fishing.