CHAPTER XIII
THE AWAKENING
She understood now why the old prospectors had never talked to her of her parents or told her how she happened to be their partnership daughter.
MARTA began that day with such buoyant happiness that even her fathers, accustomed as they were to her habitually joyous nature, commented on it.
The air was tingling with the fresh and vigorous sweetness of the early morning. From the kitchen door, as she prepared breakfast, she saw the mountain tops, golden in the first waves of the sunshine flood that a few hours later would fill the sky from rim to rim and cover the earth from horizon to horizon with its dazzling beauty. From some shelf on the cañon wall, a cañon wren loosed a flood of joyous silvery music, gracing his song with runs and flourishes, rich and vibrant, as if the very spirit of the hour was in his melody, and while the cañon echoed and reëchoed to the wondrous, ringing music of the tiny minstrel and the girl, with happy eyes and smiling lips, listened, she saw a thin column of smoke rise from that neighboring cabin and knew that her neighbor, too, was beginning his day.
Like the puff of air that stirred the yellow blossom of the whispering bells beside the creek, the thought came: Was he enjoying with her the beauty and the sweetness of the morning? Was he sharing her happiness in the new day? Then, as she watched, Hugh appeared in the cabin doorway with a bucket in his hand. He was going for water to make his coffee. She saw him pause and look toward her, and her face was radiant with gladness as her voice rang out in merry greeting.
All that forenoon she went about her household work with a singing heart. When the midday meal was over, her fathers saddled Nugget and, as soon as she had washed the dishes, she set out for Oracle to purchase some needed supplies.
When the girl stopped at his cabin, as she always did, to ask if she could bring anything for him from the store, Edwards thought she had never looked so radiantly beautiful. Glowing with the color of her superb health and rich vitality—animated and eager with the fervor of her joyous spirit—she was so alluring that the man was sorely tempted to say to her those things that he had sternly forbidden himself even to think. Lest his eyes betray the feeling he had sentenced himself to suppress, he made pretext of giving some small attention to her horse’s bridle, so that from the saddle she could not see his face.
As she rode on up the trail, he stood there watching her. When she had passed from sight around a sharp angle of the cañon wall, he went slowly to the place where through the long days he labored in his search for the grains of yellow metal that had come to mean so much more to him than mere daily bread.
Where the trail to the little white house on the hill branches off from the main road to Oracle, Marta checked her horse. She wanted to go to Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton. She wanted them to know and share her happiness. She wanted to tell them how grateful she was for their love—for all that they had done to save her from the ignorant, undisciplined and dangerously impulsive creature she would have been but for their patient teaching. In the fullness of her heart she told herself that without Saint Jimmy and his mother she could never have known the joy and gladness that had come to her. Without conscious reasoning, she realized that it was their teaching, their love, their understanding of her needs, that had fitted her for that time of her awakening to the glad call of those deeper emotions that now moved her young womanhood. But above Mount Lemmon and back of Rice Peak, huge cumulus clouds were rolling up, and the girl knew that she must continue on the more direct way if she would finish her errand at the store and return before the storm that might come later in the day. On her way back, she could stop at the Burtons, for then, if the storm came, it would not so much matter.
Through narrow, rocky ravines and tree-shaded draws and sandy washes, up the steep sides of mountain spurs and along the ridges, Nugget carried her, out of the Cañon of Gold to the higher levels. And everywhere about her as she rode, the mountain sides were bright with the blossoms of the “Little Spring.” Sego lilies and sulphur flowers, wild buckwheat, thistle poppies and bee plant, and, most exquisitely beautiful of all, perhaps, the violet-tinted blue larkspur—Espuela del caballero—Cavalier’s spur—the early Spaniards called it.