East to west, along a ridge bounding the lower desert, ran the railroad,
a line as harshly uncompromising as the cold mathematics of the
engineers who had mapped it. To the north spread unfathomably a forest
of scrub pine and pinon, rising, here and there, into loftier growth. It
was as if man, with his imperious interventions, had set those thin
steel parallels as an irrefragable boundary to the mutual encroachments
of forest and desert, tree and cactus. A single, straggling trail
squirmed its way into the woodland. One might have surmised that it was
winding hopefully if blindly toward the noble mountain peak shimmering
in white splendor, mystic and wonderful, sixty miles away, but seeming
in that lucent air to be brooding closely over all the varied loveliness
below.
Though nine o'clock had struck on the brisk little station-clock, there
was still a tang of night chill left. The station-agent came out,
carrying a chair which he set down in the sunniest corner of the
platform. He looked to be hardly more than a boy, but firm-knit and
self-confident. His features were regular, his fairish hair slightly
wavy, and in his expression there was a curious and incongruous
suggestion of settledness, of acceptance, of satisfaction with life as
he met it, which an observer of men would have found difficult to
reconcile with his youth and the obvious intelligence of the face.
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