On the other side of the
road a dark ravine, tangled with briers and haunted at night by owls and
wild cats, struggled wearily on, until blundering at last upon the edge
of the Great Canyon, it slipped and lost itself forever in a single
furrow of those mighty flanks. When Bradley had once asked Sharpe why he
had not built his house in the ravine, the blacksmith had replied: "That
until the Lord had appointed his time, he reckoned to keep his head
above ground and the foundations thereof." Howbeit, the ravine, or the
"run," as it was locally known, was Minty's only Saturday afternoon
resort for recreation or berries. "It was," she had explained, "pow'ful
soothin', and solitary."
She entered the house--a rude, square building of unpainted
boards--containing a sitting-room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. A glance
at these rooms, which were plainly furnished, and whose canvas-colored
walls were adorned with gorgeous agricultural implement
circulars, patent medicine calendars, with polytinted chromos and
cheaply-illuminated Scriptural texts, showed her that a certain neatness
and order had been preserved during her absence; and, finding the house
empty, she crossed the barren and blackened intervening space between
the back door and her father's forge, and entered the open shed.
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