But the purest gold on Arizona's literary field, that was found by
the genius of a lonesome valley's queen, the song-lark of our "Great
Southwest."
From the sheltering tree of her ancestral hall shyly she fluttered
forth.
Among stony crags of the sierra, on fearsome dizzy trails, in the
somber shadows of virgin forests, in the rustling of wind-blown
leaves (the seductive swish of elfin skirts) she heard the voices of
Juno's sylvan train. Enchanted she listened to the syren's call, and
ere the echo died within her ear she had devoted her talent to
literature, a priestess self-ordained in Arizona's temple of the
muses.
In the flight of her poetic mind she met his majesty, king of the
hills, the mountain-lion at the threshold of his lair and toyed with
his cubs, princes and heirs to freedom.
She heard the were-wolf scourge of herds, fierce lobos snarl in
silent groves of timber and shivered at the coyote's piercing yelps
from grave yards in the valleys.
At nighttime, in her lonely camp the dread tarantela disturbed her
rest and in day's early gloam a warning rattle of creepy serpents
sounded her reveille:
"Fair maid, awake, arise in haste! When darkness vanishes with dawn,
heed our alarm-clock in the morn!"
She spoke not to the sullen bear, in cautious silence passed him by
and shunned the fetid breath of monster lizards and venom stings of
centipedes and scorpions; but woman-like she feared the
hydrophobia-skunk more for its scent than for its deadly poison.
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