The Call of the Canyon

CHAPTER I

What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley Burch laidthe letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window.

It was a day typical of early April in New York, rather cold and gray, withsteely sunlight. Spring breathed in the air, but the women passing alongFifty-seventh Street wore furs and wraps. She heard the distant clatter of an Ltrain and then the hum of a motor car. A hurdy-gurdy jarred into the intervalof quiet.

“Glenn has been gone over a year,” she mused, “three monthsover a year—and of all his strange letters this seems the strangestyet.”

She lived again, for the thousandth time, the last moments she had spent withhim. It had been on New-Year’s Eve, 1918. They had called upon friendswho were staying at the McAlpin, in a suite on the twenty-first flooroverlooking Broadway. And when the last quarter hour of that eventful andtragic year began slowly to pass with the low swell of whistles and bells,Carley’s friends had discreetly left her alone with her lover, at theopen window, to watch and hear the old year out, the new year in. GlennKilbourne had returned from France early that fall, shell-shocked and gassed,and otherwise incapacitated for service in the army—a wreck of his formersterling self and in many unaccountable ways a stranger to her. Cold, silent,haunted by something, he had made her miserable with his aloofness. But as thebells began to ring out the year that had been his ruin Glenn had drawn herclose, tenderly, passionately, and yet strangely, too.

“Carley, look and listen!” he had whispered.

Under them stretched the great long white flare of Broadway, with itssnow-covered length glittering under a myriad of electric lights. Sixth Avenueswerved away to the right, a less brilliant lane of blanched snow. The L trainscrept along like huge fire-eyed serpents. The hum of the ceaseless moving lineof motor cars drifted upward faintly, almost drowned in the rising clamor ofthe street. Broadway’s gay and thoughtless crowds surged to and fro, fromthat height merely a thick stream of black figures, like contending columns ofants on the march. And everywhere the monstrous electric signs flared up vividin white and red and green; and dimmed and paled, only to flash up again.

Ring out the Old! Ring in the New! Carley had poignantly felt the sadness ofthe one, the promise of the other. As one by one the siren factory whistles

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