It was Sunday afternoon and a hazy, golden, late September sun was swimming lazily in the blue arc of sky, flooding the lower gallery of the Circle Bar ranchhouse, but not reaching a secluded nook in which sat Hollis and Nellie Hazelton. Mrs. Norton was somewhere in the house and Norton had gone down to the bunkhouse for a talk with the men--Hollis and Nellie could see him, sitting on a bench in the shade of the eaves, the other men gathered about him.
Below the broad level that stretched away from the ranchhouse sank the big basin, sweeping away to the mountains. Miles into the distance the Circle Bar cattle could be seen--moving dots in the center of a great, green bowl. To the right Razor-Back ridge loomed its bald crest upward with no verdure saving the fringe of shrubbery at its base; to the left stretched a vast plain that met the distant horizon that stretched an interminable distance behind the cottonwood. Except for the moving dots there was a total absence of life and movement in the big basin. It spread in its wide, gradual, downward slope, bathed in the yellow sunshine of the new, mellow season, peacefully slumberous, infinitely beautiful.
Many times had Hollis sat in the gallery watching it, his eyes glistening, his soul stirred to awe. Long since had he ceased regretting the glittering tinsel of the cities of his recollection; they seemed artificial, unreal. When he had first gazed out over the basin he had been oppressed with a sensation of uneasiness. Its vastness had appalled him, its silence had aroused in him that vague disquiet which is akin to fear. But these emotions had passed. He still felt awed--he would always feel it, for it seemed that here he was looking upon a section of the world in its primitive state; that in forming this world the creator had been in his noblest mood--so far did the lofty mountains, the wide, sweeping valleys, the towering buttes, and the mighty canyons dwarf the flat hills and the puny shallows of the land he had known. But he was no longer appalled; disquietude had been superseded by love.
It all seemed to hold some mystery for him--an alluring, soul-stirring mystery. The tawny mountains, immutable guardians of the basin, whose peaks rose somberly in the twilight glow--did they hold it? Or was it hidden in the basin, in the great, green sweep that basked in the eternal sunlight?