Zane Grey 
The Call of the Canyon [EPUB ebook] 

What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West? Carley Burch laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window.
It was a day typical of early April in New York, rather cold and gray, with steely sunlight. Spring breathed in the air, but the women passing along Fifty-seventh Street wore furs and wraps. She heard the distant clatter of an L train and then the hum of a motor car. A hurdy-gurdy jarred into the interval of quiet.
’Glenn has been gone over a year, ’ she mused, ’three months over a year– and of all his strange letters this seems the strangest yet.’