The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sky Line of Spruce, by Edison Marshall

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Title: The Sky Line of Spruce

Author: Edison Marshall

Release Date: March 2, 2004 [EBook #11402]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: He was leaning forward, aware of nothing in the
world but the forthcoming crisis.
FRONTISPIECE.]

THE SKY LINE
OF SPRUCE

By EDISON MARSHALL

AUTHOR OF

"The Voice of the Pack," "The Strength of the Pines,"
"The Snowshoe Trail," "Shepherds of the Wild," etc.

1922

CONTENTS

PART ONE
THE WAKENING

PART TWO
THE WOLF-MAN

PART THREE
THE TAMING

PART ONE

THE WAKENING

I

The convict gang had a pleasant place to work to-day. Their road
building had taken them some miles from the scattered outskirts of Walla
Walla, among fields green with growing barley. The air was fresh and
sweet; the Western meadow larks, newly come, seemed in imminent danger
of splitting their own throats through the exuberance of their song.
Even the steel rails of the Northern Pacific, running parallel to the
stretch of new road, gleamed pleasantly in the spring sun.

The convicts themselves were in a genial mood, easily moved to wide
grins; and with a single exception they looked much like any other road
gang at work anywhere in the land. An expert might have recognized
purely criminal types among them: to a layman they suggested merely the
lower grades of unskilled labor. Some of the faces were distinctly
brutal; there was the sullen visage of a powerful negro who, with
different environment, might have been a Congo prince; but the face of
"Plug" Spanos, a notorious gunman who was by far the worst character in
the gang, might have been that of an artless plow-boy in a distant land
under a warm sun. There remained, however, the "exception." Curiously
enough, whenever the warden's thought dwelt upon the inmates of his
prison, classifying them in