“Genie, don’t you want to leave this desert?” he queried, bluntly.
“Oh no,” she replied, instantly. “I love it. And—and—please don’t make me think of towns, of lots of people. I want to run wild like a road runner. I’d be perfectly happy if I didn’t have to spend half the day mending these old clothes.... Wanny, if they get any worse they’ll fall off me—and then I’ll have to run around like you saw me yesterday!... Oh, but for the thorns, that’d be grand!”
Her light, rippling laugh rang out, sweet and gay.
Adam waited for her later, in the shade of Taquitch Canyon, where from the topmost of a jumble of bowlders he watched a distant waterfall, white and green as it flashed over a dark cliff.
He watched her coming. Her ragged boy’s garb with its patches and rents no longer hid her femininity and her charm from his eyes. He saw anew. The litheness of her, the round and graceful figure from flying feet to glinting hair, cried aloud to the loneliness of Adam’s heart the truth of her. An enchantment hung upon her very movements. She traveled from rock to rock, poising, balancing, leaping, and her curly hair danced on her head. Quick as those of a wildcat were her leaps. And her gay, sweet call or cry, birdlike and wild, echoed from the cliffs.
She was coming to Adam across the great jumble of rocks—a girl wonderful as a sprite. And her coming was suddenly realized as fulfillment of dreams. Adam faced the truth of some facts about his dreaming. Lonely hours on lonely slopes, of waiting and watching, had created the shadow of a woman or a girl gliding in the golden glow of the afternoon sunlight, coming to charm away forever the silence and solitude. So innumerable times he had dreamed, but never realized till now those dreams. She was coming, and the sleepy shade awoke to a gleam and a voice. The lacy waterfall shone white and its murmur seemed music of many streams. A canyon swallow twittered.
Adam thought how passing strange had been the tortures, the awakenings, and changings of his desert experience. And here was a vague dream fulfilled! This realization was unutterably sweet—so sweet because these years had been barren of youth, steeped in unconscious growing worship of beauty, spent alone with pains and toils. He watched her coming. Fresh as the foam of the waterfall, clean as the winds of the heights, wild as the wild young fawn—so she seemed! Youth and gayety—beauty and life!
But suddenly Adam seemed struck by an emotion, if not of terror, then of dread at some inconceivable and appalling nature of her presence. That emotion was of the distant past as was the vague peril of her approach. A girl—a woman creature—mystery of the ages—the giver of life as the sun gave heat—had come to him, out of the clouds or the desert sands, and the fatality of her coming was somewhat terrible.
Genie reached the huge bowlder upon which Adam sat, and like a squirrel she ran up its steep side, to plump herself breathless and panting down against his knees.
“Ah! Old Taquitch—here’s another—Indian maiden—for you to steal,” she said, roguishly. “But before you—carry me up to the clouds—duck me under the waterfall!”