Free the Light Of Western Stars (1992) by Zane Grey

stars called strangely to her or haunted her .
    V - The Round-Up It was a crackling and roaring of fire that awakened Madeline next morning, and the first thing she saw was a huge stone fireplace in which lay a bundle of blazing sticks . Some one had kindled a fire while she slept . For a moment the curious sensation of being lost returned to her . She just dimly remembered reaching the ranch and being taken into a huge house and a huge, dimly lighted room . And it seemed to her that she had gone to sleep at once, and had awakened without remembering how she had gotten to bed .
    But she was wide awake in an instant . The bed stood near one end of an enormous chamber . The adobe walls resembled a hall in an ancient feudal castle, stone-floored, stone-walled, with great darkened rafters running across the ceiling . The few articles of furniture were worn out and sadly dilapidated . Light flooded into the room from two windows on the right of the fireplace and two on the left, and another large window near the bedstead . Looking out from where she lay, Madeline saw a dark, slow up-sweep of mountain . Her eyes returned to the cheery, snapping fire, and she watched it while gathering courage to get up . The room was cold . When she did slip her bare feet out upon the stone floor she very quickly put them back under the warm blankets . And she was still in bed trying to pluck up her courage when, with a knock on the door and a cheerful greeting, Florence entered, carrying steaming hot water .
    "Good mawnin', Miss Hammond . Hope you slept well . You sure were tired last night . I imagine you'll find this old rancno house as cold as a barn . It'll warm up directly . Al's gone with the boys and Bill . We're to ride down on the range after a while when your baggage comes . "
    Florence wore a woolen blouse with a scarf round her neck, a short corduroy divided skirt, and boots; and while she talked she energetically heaped up the burning wood in the fireplace, and laid Madeline's clothes at the foot of the bed, and heated a rug and put that on the floor by the bedside . And lastly, with a sweet, direct smile, she said:
    "Al told me-and I sure saw myself-that you weren't used to being without your maid . Will you let me help you?"
    "Thank you, I am going to be my own maid for a while . I expect I do appear a very helpless individual, but really I do not feel so . Perhaps I have had just a little too much waiting on . "
    "All right . Breakfast will be ready soon, and after that we'll look about the place . "
    Madeline was charmed with the old Spanish house, and the more she saw of it the more she thought what a delightful home it could be made . All the doors opened into a courtyard, or patio, as Florence called it . The house was low, in the shape of a rectangle, and so immense in size that Madeline wondered if it had been a Spanish barracks . Many of the rooms were dark, without windows, and they were empty . Others were full of ranchers' implements and sacks of grain and bales of hay . Florence called these last alfalfa . The house itself appeared strong and well preserved, and it was very picturesque . But in the living-rooms were only the barest necessities, and these were worn out and comfortless .
    However, when Madeline went outdoors she forgot the cheerless, bare interior . Florence led the way out on a porch and waved a hand at a vast, colored void . "That's what Bill likes," she said .
    At first Madeline could not tell what was sky and what was land . The immensity of the scene stunned her faculties of conception . She sat down in one of the old rocking-chairs and looked and looked, and knew that she was not grasping the reality of what stretched wondrously before her .
    "We're up at the edge of the foothills," Florence said . "You remember we rode around the northern end of the mountain range? Well, that's behind us now, and you look down across the line into Arizona and Mexico . That long slope of gray is the head of the San