Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
She began a search for a larger specimen. It might mount nicely into a stickpin for Bill, she thought; a memento of the Klappan Range. And in this search she came upon a large, rusty pebble, snuggled on the downstream side of an over-hanging rock right at the water's edge. It attracted her first by its symmetrical form, a perfect oval; then, when she lifted it, by its astonishing weight.
"I don't fancy somebody else pawing my chestnuts out of the coals for me. It was sure a man's job to cross the Klappan in the dead of winter." The filing completed, there was ample work in the way of getting out and whipsawing timber to keep the five men busy till spring the five who were on the ground. Lewis sent word that thirty feet of snow lay in the gold-bearing branch.
How long you been here?" "Since last September." She smiled up at him. "Didn't Courvoiseur's man deliver a message from me to the mine? Didn't you come in answer to my note?" "Great Caesar's ghost since September alone! You poor little girl!" he murmured. "No, if you sent word to me through Courvoiseur I never got it. Maybe something happened his man. I left the Klappan with the first snow.
They were footsore, and their bodies ached with weariness that verged on pain when they gained the pass that cut the summit of the Klappan Range. "Well, we're over the hump," Bill remarked thankfully. "It's a downhill shoot to the Skeena. I don't think it's more than fifty or sixty miles to where we can take to the water."
"I suppose I'm a perfect fright, too. Long hair, whiskers, grimy, calloused hands, and all the rest of it. A shave and a hair cut, a bath and a new suit of clothes will remedy that. But I'll be the same personality in every essential quality that I was when I sweated over the Klappan with a hundred pounds on my back." "I hope so," she retorted.
And in default of such she stuck to the gray felt sombrero she had worn into the Klappan and out again which, in truth, became her very well, when tilted at the proper angle above her heavy black hair. Then she went back to the hotel, and sought a bathroom. Returning from this she found Bill, a Bill all shaved and shorn, unloading himself of sundry packages of new attire.
Even when the days marched past, mustering themselves in weekly and monthly platoons and Bill still remained in the Klappan, she experienced no dreary leadenness of soul. Her time passed pleasantly enough. Early in June came a brief wire from Station Six.
The offending flesh had fallen away on the strenuous paths of the Klappan. He radiated boundless vitality, strength, alertness, that perfect co-ordination of mind and body that is bred of faring resourcefully along rude ways. Few of his type trod the streets of Granville. It was a product solely of the outer places. And for the time being the old, vivid emotion surged strong within her.
And she wanted him, longed for him, if only so that she could make amends. She easily found Courvoiseur, a tall, spare Frenchman, past middle age. Yes, he could deliver a message to Bill Wagstaff; that is, he could send a man. Bill Wagstaff was in the Klappan Range. "But if he should have left there?" Hazel suggested uneasily.
The bleak peaks of the Klappan rose up before her mind's eye, the picture of five horses dead in the snow, the wolves that snapped and snarled over their bones. She shuddered. She was still pondering this when she and Bill dismounted at home. Granville took them to its bosom with a haste and earnestness that made Hazel catch her breath.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking