The young man gazed as if his thirst would never be appeased.The flavor of nights about the camp-fire and other nights spent in driving sleet,also days when the first flowers come and the wide beds of the desert rivers are swollen with overbrimming floods;the cruel exposure of winter,the thrilling balminess of early spring--all spoke to him again from that motionless figure.He recalled companions of his boyhood and youth,but they were not akin to this child of the desert mountains.Still more alien were those of the saloon stations,the haunts at the outskirts of civilization.It seemed to him that in this young girl,who bad the look and poise of a woman,he had found what hitherto he had vainly sought in the wilderness--the beauty and the charm of it,refined and separated from its sordidness and its uncouthness--in a word,from all that was base and ugly.It was for this that he had left his home in the East.Here was typified that loveliness of the unbroken wilderness without its profanity,its drunkenness,its obscenity,its terrible hardships.
第26章 A YOUNG MANS FANCY(1)（3 / 3）