Harold Titus
Bruce of the Circle A
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664608703
Table of Contents
Ann had taken to Arizona whole-heartedly and dressed suitably for the new life she was leading.
Down the main street of Yavapai
CHAPTER I
THE WOMAN
Daylight and the Prescott-Ph[oe]nix train were going from Yavapai. Fifty paces from the box of a station a woman stood alone beside the track, bag in hand, watching the three red lights of the observation platform dwindle to a ruby unit far down the clicking ribbons of steel. As she watched, she felt herself becoming lost in the spaciousness, the silence of an Arizona evening.
Ann Lytton was a stranger in that strange land. Impressions pelted in upon her—the silhouetted range against the cerise flush of western sky; the valley sweeping outward in all other directions to lose itself in the creeping blue-grays of night; droning voices of men from the station; a sense of her own physical inconsequence; her loneliness ... and, as a background, the insistent vastness of the place.
Then, out of the silence from somewhere not far off, came a flat, dead crash, the report of a firearm. The woman was acutely conscious that the voices in the station had broken short with an abruptness which alarmed her. The other sound—the shot—had touched fear in her, too, and the knowledge that it had nipped the attention of the talking men sent a cool thrill down her limbs.
A man emerged from the depot and his voice broke in,
"Wonder where that—"
He stopped short and the woman divined the reason. She strained to catch the thrum of running hoofs, knowing intuitively that the man, also, had ceased speaking to listen. She was conscious that she trembled.
Another man stepped into the