Wildfire

Lucy was glowing and rapt with love for all she beheld from her lofty perch: the green-and-pinkblossoming hamlet beneath her, set between the beauty of the gray sage expanse and the ghastlinessof the barren heights; the swift Colorado sullenly thundering below in the abyss; the Indians in theirbright colors, riding up the river trail; the eagle poised like a feather on the air, and a beneath himthe grazing cattle making black dots on the sage; the deep velvet azure of the sky; the golden lightson the bare peaks and the lilac veils in the far ravines; the silky rustle of a canyon swallow as he shotdownward in the sweep of the wind; the fragrance of cedar, the flowers of the spear-pointed mescal;the brooding silence, the beckoning range, the purple distance.Whatever it was Lucy longed for, whatever was whispered by the wind and written in themystery of the waste of sage and stone, she wanted it to happen there at Bostil's Ford. She had nodesire for civilization, she flouted the idea of marrying the rich rancher of Durango. Bostil's sister, that stern but lovable woman who had brought her up and taught her, would never persuade her tomarry against her will. Lucy imagined herself like a wild horse-free, proud, untamed, meant for thedesert; and here she would live her life. The desert and her life seemed as one, yet in what did theyresemble each other-in what of this scene could she read the nature of her future