Solange awoke in the bustling, prosperous environment of Sulphur Falls, nestled in the flats below the cañon of the Serpentine, with a feeling of ease and comfort. She had expected to find some wild, frontier village, populated by Indians and cowboys, a desperate and lawless community, and, instead, encountered a small but luxurious hotel, paved streets, shops, people dressed much as they had been in New York. She knew nothing of the changes that had taken place with the building of the great irrigation dam and the coming of the war factories which belched smoke back at the foot of the cañon. She did not realize that, twenty years ago, there had been no town, nothing but limitless plains on which cattle and sheep grazed, a crude ferry and a road house. It was beyond her present comprehension that in a dozen years a city could have sprung up harboring twenty thousand souls and booming with prosperity. Nor did she reflect upon the possible consequences these unknown facts might have upon her search.
Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she was accustomed to. Comfort and 95 even luxury surrounded her, and the law stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman. That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had imagined it to be. Only De Launay’s careless gibe as he had left her at the hotel held promise of performance. “To-morrow we’ll start our private butchery,” he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted at a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.
De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared for the change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike him like a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking paved sidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. He had come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitless ranges of his youth and this was what he found.
He had turned and looked back at the frowning cañon through which the train had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forest clad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lava gulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it was changed.
Smoke hung above the cañon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the 96 timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the cañon held a vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down below.
Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the effulgence of limitless electricity.
Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls, stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.
The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in evening clothes.
Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches of farmland, 97 fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the settlers.
But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed and uncivilized.