Success, a novel ([1921])

 Author: Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 1871-1958
Publisher: Boston, Houghton
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English

 

SUCCESS
•
PART I
ENCHANTMENT
Chapter I
The lonely station of Manzanita stood out, sharp and unsightly,
in the keen February sunlight. A mile away in a dip of the
desert, lay the town, a sorry sprawl of frame buildings, patternless
save for the one main street, which promptly lost itself at
either end in a maze of cholla, prickly pear, and the lovely,
golden-glowing roseo. Far as the eye could see, the waste was
spangled with vivid hues, for the rare rains had come, and all the
cacti were in joyous bloom, from the scarlet stain of the ocatilla
to the pale, dream-flower of the yucca. Overhead the sky shone
with a hard serenity, a blue, enameled dome through which the
imperishable fires seemed magnified as they limned sharp shadows
on the earth ; but in the southwest clouds massed and lurked
darkly for a sign that the storm had but called a truce.
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 piaon, 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....Read more